Windows NT sinks Navy ship

Thanks to Noam Rathaus for the tip: The U.S. Navy's Yorktown "Smart Ship,"an Aegis missile cruiser that's being used as a pilot program for computercontrolled naval vessels, was left adrift at sea for over two hours earlierthis month because of problems with its Windows NT-based software. Theship had to be towed back to harbor for the third time because of databaseerrors.

Officials confirmed that the Yorktown experienced an "engineering local area network casualty,” though they stopped short of blaming Windows NT onthe problem. Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic FleetTechnical Support Center in Norfolk says that "using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor.” DiGiorgio, who is a self-described whistle-blower, says these kinds of problems would be deadly in a combatsituation