Airlines starting to fly with Linux (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge looks at Linux adoption in the airline industry. "Don't expect Linux to take over the aviation industry in the next few weeks or months. It's a conservative, highly-regulated business that does extensive evaluations before making even small changes. Interest and test installations today may not mean full-scale Linux use for at least another year or two by even the most receptive airlines and military aviation administrators. And, according to Berghammer, most of the early "Linux in aviation" adoptors are likely to be in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, not the United States."

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Process Well Along

Posted Jun 25, 2003 6:34 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Many people already know that Orbitz.com runs several hundred Linux servers to do its fare and schedule searches. It's less widely known that Continental's web site runs its searches on a Linux farm, too. (Of course while their IIS web site was down their Linux farm sat idle.) Both are using ITA Software's hybrid Lisp/C++ product. Every query involves a validation and XSLT transformation using Daniel Veillard's GNOME project libxml/libxslt libraries.

The embarrassing secret of the airline industry is that the rule system for the fares and schedules posted by airlines is (more or less accidentally) Turing-complete, which means it's possible to post a set of rules and fares such that no one can tell whether the cheapest flight can be determined. No fare search system can guarantee to find the best fare, because that may involve (literally) an infinite amount of computation.

ITA's web site, incidentally, has some of the best puzzles on the web.