Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

Re:Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks by crispyporkbites on Monday August 10, 2020 @04:38PM (#24113714)

not really - how many software and hardware engineers do you think you need for this? probably minimum 10, maybe 20-30 realistically. At SV salaries (you need the best engineers, right?) that's $9m USD/annum.

You need to ship at least 50 of these devices to break even. To get a proper margin and cover all the other costs (manufacturing, sales, marketing, compliance, accounting, yada), you're probably going to need to create and sell a couple hundred, every year.

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Re:Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks by sheepybloke on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:06AM (#24119870)

One other thing is that launchers and other boxes that control weapons are DAL-A equivalent, so you have to be rigorous about your requirements and testing to ensure that a missile never accidentally fires. This drives up development costs as well, since you have to do a lot more work to verify and validate the system.

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Re:Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks by pc86 on Monday August 10, 2020 @05:53PM (#24114448)

It depends what you mean by "SV salaries" but defense contractor developers can make a lot of money, especially compared to other software jobs in the NOVA/Maryland area (which are not paid nearly as well as SV).

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Re:Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks by snypher on Monday August 10, 2020 @05:54PM (#24114462)

They produced approx 40,000 between '59 and '94, so around 1,000 a year. So I would assume they broke even.

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Re:Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks by ChrisLomont on Monday August 10, 2020 @06:32PM (#24114862)

That's not the device in question.

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