And, in the realm of the not-really-related-to-anything-Apple-hardly-at-all, faithful viewer Edward Liu points us to an interesting GCN article about a Navy Smart Ship which, in his own words, leaves him unsure of whether to laugh or to cry. The Smart Ship may not be so smart after all, it turns out; last year, a total system failure occurred following a divide-by-zero error, which left the USS Yorktown dead in the water for almost three hours. The ship eventually had to be towed back to the naval base.

Now, everybody knows that computer systems fail. But Anthony DiGiorgio, an engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, says that in this case, the operating system is at fault; according to him, had the ship's computers been running something as robust as Unix instead of the still-unproven Windows NT, we wouldn't have seen something as tragicomical as a U.S. warship completely disabled by someone accidentally entering a zero into a database field. Unfortunately, NT is in heavy use due to "political pressure."

Yeesh. We hope the weapons subsystems aren't controlled by NT, too, or we're running for cover. There's little doubt at this point that NT is simply not fault-tolerant enough to be trusted in mission-critical scenarios; if it absolutely positively has to happen, don't rely on Windows. Heck, even Bill Gates himself knows about the perils of relying on NT for such purposes; he recently wrote about his own NT-controlled house, including a retractable TV in his bedroom-- which he discovered he could not retract or turn off, so he threw a blanket over the set in order to get some sleep. So the real question is, will the next Windows NT fixpack include a heavy blanket? And a pair of oars?