Monday, September 28, 2009

It's a very long flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, 12 hours in a cramped cattle class seat, in a row shared with two obese tourists. The video system had to be rebooted twice, and 500 people got to watch the boot messages. It's an old 2002 RedHat Linux on the world's slowest processor, a Geode, heavily customized by an Ogre with a broadax - tons of errors and debugging output. If that's an indication of Boeing's engineering and quality control, it's a miracle that the plane managed to take off without losing its wings.