I recently returned from my honeymoon in Margarita Island, South America. On flying to my destination, I noticed the in flight entertainment booting up and took an interest into reading the boot process to learn what sort of system was being used to run this system. To my surprise I noted that it was a Linux based system tailored for large passenger planes. Passengers had the ability to select a movie from a wide selection and pause, rewind, play and stop the movie at any point. Passengers could also play eachother in interactive games. I was very impressed and spent many of my 9 hours playing with the system.
This did however, get me thinking……On a 9 hour flight, should the in-flight entertainment fail, there would be a lot of bored and unhappy passengers, therefore, there would need to be a fail safe system that ran ensuring that such an incident would not occur. Furthermore, I began to think, planes are built upon a computer system that monitors and maintains most of the crucial elements of an aeroplane. I know from Hollywood films that planes have at least 3 computers, should one or two go down. Therefore, the system that runs and maintains the plane must be ultra-reliable as it is effectively responsible for the lives of hundreds of people.
Surely, if a company employ a non-Microsoft platform to manage their in-flight entertainment, they would not dream of any Microsoft platform to run and maintain the flight of their aeroplane!
This got me thinking further, my personal computer contains a lot of information that is crucial to my day to day and I need to maintain that it is secure and safe. Now don’t get me wrong, I know it is not as precious as our own lives, but we put a lot of trust into the security and fail-safe of our computers. If a vessel that is carrying us thousands of feet above the surface of the earth, thinks it best to use a non-Microsoft platform to keep us in flight, surely we should think twice about what platform we invest all our personal information into?