Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the water [video]

Re:Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the wate... by pjc50 on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @06:45AM (#21513352)

As others have mentioned, there's a big gulf between "works well enough that you don't notice the problems very often" and "never fails". Screens work OK in the happy normal path, but as soon as you look into things like DisplayPort chaining and HDMI-CEC you find all sorts of incompatibilities.

> Transistors don't misfire, CPUs don't miss an operation

This relies on a lot of testing. We throw the misfiring ones away at the factory. This may be over half the chips: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/zen-2-ryzen-3000-cpu-yield-70-p... (AMD are doing well at 70% pass rate but Intel are throwing away more than half their dies!)

In aerospace or high-alpha-radiation environments, people can use "lockstep" processors (e.g. TI Hercules) that can cope with misfires.

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Re:Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the wate... by e_proxus on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @07:17AM (#21513470)

I'm pretty sure that e.g. on such a big ship we saw in the video above there are plenty of "misfirings" on a lower level of abstraction: pipes need to be replaced, computers or electronics not working correctly, out of date life saving equipment that needs to be replaced etc.

In the end, I feel it's quite comparable to software running on layers of layers of abstraction being maintained by the respective experts in their fields (testing, CPU designers, driver implementers, OS maintainers, etc.).

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Re:Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the wate... by Iv on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @08:30AM (#21513880)

I never said the work on every layer is easy! Quite the contrary! I know how painful it is to write realtime software so I am in awe that firmware can be written well enough so that you can rely on them as much as we do!

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