It doesn’t, that’s just a very common reaction to these types of articles. I recall having some very intense discussions around stuff like iPads in cockpits. I’m on the “not a fan” side, but I’m also not making avionics software anymore either.
Certification is expensive. But updated dbs are pretty huge and seem to only get bigger over time. Stuff like radio firmware tends to be in the hundreds of KBs though, so for that it really wouldn’t be a big deal either way.
These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.
You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.
The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.
I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.
We no longer have humor, it’s been beaten out of us by code reviews and merge conflicts.
I caught a junior trying to reimplement an existing feature, poorly, in a way that would have affected every other consumer of the software I’m a code owner on a week or two ago. There’s good reason to keep them around.
PRs suck to do, but having a rotating team of owners helps, and linting + auto formatting helps with a lot of the ticky tacky stuff.
Honestly, the worst part is “newGuy has requested your review on a PR you requested changes on but he hasn’t addressed” that’ll get you in the ignored pile real quick.
With enough grit and time, yes :D
Edit: ok not mainline, but Linux in some form or another anyway.
You can run a “soft” (semi-hard?) Processor on a Spartan, you could run Linux on that at least.
I’m moving to a few acres this weekend, assuming everything goes well. We got plans for a giant garden, a duck run, and fruit trees. This meme is all truth.
Being fully remote is a great gig if you can swing it.
It’s not the iPads themselves, it’s the addition of Bluetooth and/or wifi to support them. I agree that they can alleviate a lot in terms of paperwork reduction etc. My issue is the additional exposed surface.