I do remember that…

” 4 / 2 = 1.999999999876 [for extremely large values of 2]”

Stephen,

I’ve spent a good portion of my career dealing with similar issues (not with ICBM’s to my knowledge, as if I’d ever be granted the clearance to be told such things!) The entire defense industry basically takes long enough to design in a new product that by the time you have it ready for mass production, it’s obsolete by commercial standards. The issue is that they spend ***SO*** much time designing the system and qualifying everything, that any change means they pretty much have to retest much of all of what they’ve done so far. Managing this is a major issue. They don’t care if it’s DOS, because they tested the *shit* out of it when they built the system, so they would rather keep an “obsolete” system running than try to re-test a whole new OS.

Anyone remember the Pentium division debacle?

I remember that one generated a joke using an even-older Star Trek reference:
“I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.”

Calculations are not dependent on the OS, they’re dependent on the mortgage software running on that OS. This is where stability is good, because introducing new software generally introduces new bugs that need to be found and removed.

This comment made me think of this fascinating article I read in the March 2011 issue of Popular Mechanics entitled “Down in the Hole” (I tried to find the online verson of the article but no dice) about the maintainence of America’s nuclear ICBMs. One of the things mentioned in the article is that these facilities complete with the hardware and software have been in operation since JFK was president (ex: they are still using 9″ floppy discs). Much of the hardware is quite antiquated yet durable. Over time they have been upgrading but when they mix the new technology with the old, that’s when they tend to have problems.

Well done :-)

I can’t quite tell if you’re joking or not… So if you’re *not* joking, the answer is no. Calculations are not dependent on the OS, they’re dependent on the mortgage software running on that OS. This is where stability is good, because introducing new software generally introduces new bugs that need to be found and removed.

Just wondering…