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Space Science

Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity 126

Posted by Hemos from the alliteration-is-amazing dept.
code_rage writes "IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article by James Oberg which enumerates some of the problems which have cropped up and will crop up during assembly of Space Station Alpha (or whatever it is called this week). The article lists many software problems, including safety related issues. Also a problem which was news to me: the U.S.-supplied Solar Arrays operate at a high voltage, which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA. The workarounds include some Catch-22's."
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Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity More

Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity

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  • First, MirFungus. Now you can get electrocuted just by going EVA.

    Sheesh, I wish for a return to the old days, when things would just blow up.

  • Have you ever had one of those days where you just feel bad? Well, thanks to our new, innovative technology that has been in the works for years, you can now toss those feelings out the door! Thanks to our Unique Random Plasma Discharge System (URPDS), your mind can now float outside your head, and make all your worries disappear! Just grab a straw, sit back, and inhale. After thousands of years in existance, you'd think we could actually make something work.
  • I never would of guessed that flying thousands of miles and high-speeds outside of the earth's atmosphere carried with it the possibility of injury. I mean, come on.

  • Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity

    Don't practice your alliteration on me!

  • wow, how would you like to have your fate determined by a math equation which could result in "deadly plasma discharge?" don't mess up your metrics this time, NASA....
  • Someone should really tell the Red Cross about this... they're always spouting off about a lack of donors...

    Oh... wait - we're talkin' 'bout that ion stuff...

    ...thought it'd seem odd to have blood just spewing out into space.

  • Why are they using 386SX-based chips?

    --

  • As do I, but since you can't smoke it in Space, you've got to do something for kicks, right?
  • let me guess, he wrote this article for his secret race of giant robots with which he plans to take over the world? (starting with the ISS).
  • ...its neat that the first crew, all guys, are called the Alpha Males.

    ...chuckle...

  • News Flash: New complex design has problems! (Score:3)

    by Golias ( 176380 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @11:32AM (#608848)
    Let's get realistic here. Of course the software is buggy, and of course there are design flaws all over the hardware. It's a feakin' space station! They are hard to make, hard to launch, and hard to maintain. Why do you think the US and Russia tried to squeeze every last usable minute out of Mir?

    I see no reason to panic based on what was in that article.

  • Come on, anybody who saw the movie "Outland"... (Score:3)

    by human bean ( 222811 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @11:32AM (#608849)
    ...would know this. Sean Connery almost died from it, and we couldn't have that. As it was, the evil traitor in the red spacesuit bit it, sparks flying off the solar panels as he slowly fell, his pressure suit breached.

    We are catching up to science fiction, and I for one am glad to see it. Now bring me my flying car.

  • I'd be more than willing to go into space, but i have two conditions.
    1. I would never have to hear or see any mention of microsoft, or bill gates and their shitty products
    2. I require my space ship and future home on another planet or space station to be made entirely out of lego's.

    that is all. other than that you have yourself a guine pig.

    (i'm negotiable with the legos, but firm on #1!)

  • Star Trek sparks (Score:5)

    by Private Essayist ( 230922 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @11:33AM (#608851)
    Why should this be a surprise that there might be electrical problems? Haven't we learned from Star Trek that future space craft, when under any kind of stress, immediately give off massive sparks through the consoles?
    ________________
  • Older chips are more of a known factor. They've had more time to determine the necessary power and radiation shielding levels. Plus, if you write your software right, there's not a whole lot of things you really need a high speed processor for. Not like they're going to be doing some Q3 deathmatches up there.

  • "Because of the ... presence of the fully functioning Russian modules, the actual threat of vehicle or crew loss due to hardware and software problems is lower than for any previous U.S. manned space mission."

    Yup, it certainly is nice to have that reliable Mir technology to depend on in case the new stuff has problems.

  • Re:Question. (Score:3)

    by bmongar ( 230600 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @11:34AM (#608854)

    I remember asking the same question when I worked at Rockwell Collins, why were they using 186's in the Boing 777. They don't need more. Plus that chip has been around long enough for them to have a damn good idea of what could go wrong with it. The more complex the chip, the higher the chances of something going wrong.

  • Ask Slashdot? (Score:3)

    by jafac ( 1449 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @11:35AM (#608855) Homepage
    by the way, how does one pronounce "Zvezda"?
  • Holy Christ! They make it sound like the whole thing is about to fall apart! I really do hope that the (astro|cosmo)nauts are getting danger pay for this!

    Maybe they should use Alpha as the location for the next "Survivor" show. The person who can live the longest without getting electrocuted, explosively decompressed, or killed by buggy software (Dr. Chandra taught me a song today, would you like to hear it?) wins $1,000,000 and gets to come home. I don't think I'd even apply for a place in that show.
  • Alas, poor HAL-9000! I knew him, Arthur.

    Well, at least it won't run Windows.

  • I blame this squarely on West Palm Beach voters, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA. They seem to be the cause of all evil, around here at least.

  • True, but the consoles can be repaired inside of 10 minutes with some power couplers and a Dilithium Linear Accelerator. And don't let your chief engineer tell you it's going to take longer than 10 minutes, either. He's just sandbagging it down there.

  • For the purpose of redundancy... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... NASA should use several poorly-trained astronaut teams, instead of one well-trained team. This way, they could afford to lose one or more astronaut teams, but the mission could still continue because of the hot spares available.

    A similar concept is used with the clustering features of Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter, as multiple, relatively cheap servers behave as one unit.

    Thank you.

    -- Patrick Bateman, Esq.
  • With the success of unmanned space devices, I am having a lot of problems with the ISS. I am all for humankind reaching for the stars, etc. etc., but this is a giant program to keep Russian Aerospace engineers employed. "The Russian-built, U.S.-financed FGB (Funktsioniy-Gruzovoy Blok in Russian, or Functional Cargo Block), code-named Zarya, was launched in November 1998" The Russian engineers have it tough, I know of one space program that was threatened by engineers leaving to be cabbies because they hadn't been paid in months, but risking lives over a space station that will provide us with not much more that warm fuzzies seems wrong.
  • Really ??? Wouldn't running Windoze drive ANY self-respecting A.I. insane ???

    Grinning, ducking, and running like hell. . . .

  • Zvez'*da*, methinks.
    --
  • Well, at least it won't run Windows

    Not necessarily. You could run Win3.x. Can't leave the astronauts 100 miles up in orbit without Solitaire.

  • pretty much as it's spelt, I imagine. Zvezda is already transcribed from cyrillic to how it would be pronounced using the roman alphabet. Just sound it out (yes, it's a little awkward, but then you didn't grow up putting v's right after your z's:) I guess zz-vezda would be close enough (somebody that actually speaks russian please correct me if I'm wrong)

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • actually, you're talking about entropy, which is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. trillions of trillions of years from now, the free energy of the universe will be decreased severely. yeah 5.12! (for any MIT people out there)

  • How many chips made it to market that couldn't divide correctly? And this is a situation where it actually matter, as a mostly closed air lock just doesn't cut it.

    How much oxygen do we have left?

    About two hours.

    Two hours?

    Actually about 5 minutes, the computer rounded up.

  • Ya know, allthough it would be dangerous, it would sure look pretty cool with arcs traveling across the space station. Sorta like something just that time traveled from the future! *grin*
  • Microarcing on the skin of the ISS is bad. The Andromeda Strain feeds on energy.

  • Re:Reliable Mir (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That would be a funny joke if it wasn't so shallow. The fact is, the Mir has been up there for about 14 years. Not too shabby when you consider it was designed for a seven year lifespan..

  • plasma risk (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA.

    this is always a risk. the van allen belts for example will kill you. the altitudes for satellite and especially human missions is chosen based on this. coronal discharge affects the shape of the terrestrial plasma/magnetosphere/etc. this is why we watch solar activity so closely. i don't know if any humans have actually been killed by this but many satellites have been.
  • Wait until you see the new ISS Space Suit, with its twenty lightning rods sticking out in all directions. You could put someone's eye out with those things.
  • For chips to perform in space, they have to be able to perform under much more extreme conditions than those which are found in a comfortable, enormous multi-fan gargantuan heat-sinked p4 case. To this end, the silicon technology, I'm guessing the voltage swings of transistors and base voltages, etc, must be re-designed. This takes time, not only for design, but to get permission from the chip's manufacturer (Intel) to do this. For instance, a prof of mine is working at Sandia Labs on a pentium, a six year old chip, to perform in space.

    Mike
  • he stole that from william safire, whom i used to think cool until he started writing about dr. wen ho lee.
  • Taken from somewhere on the net:

    "Always avoid annoying alliteration"

  • Zv-yez-da

    accent on the da (which sounds like the russian 'da' or yes.

    It means 'star'.

  • "I would never have to hear or see any mention of microsoft, or bill gates and their shitty products"

    Which O.S. is running on all those computers which the article says have fragile software?

  • This sounds like the same set of pressures for meeting external deadlines (the media, the public, Reagan) rather than making sure everything works. It's a little bit more difficult to "Service Pack" the space station than the public might think.

    Kurdt

    Kurdt
  • Just? Just going EVA?!?!? Crap, doing EVA is already one of the most hazardous things I can imagine! The chance you'll brush into a high-voltage portion of the solar array through your own negligence and have it harm something conductive on your suit have got to be so small as to not increase the danger level more than a few thousandths of a percent! There are already micrometeorites, systems failure, and a billion other things that can happen to you!!

    Personally, I'm more worried about the Russian Mind Control Lasers installed on the last module.
  • The software problems all all seem to be down to stupid middle management forcing deadlines too soon. In the name of what?, I ask.. competition?? .. with whom??. Better to do it carefully and correctly than to rush things.. jeez. You'd have thought (hoped?) that the same problems that plague commercial software projects wouldn't affect the space station efforts.

    At the moment it sounds really shitty and dangerous.

    That and the brain-deadness of the 'fixes' for the power system that should have been thought out more to start with just make me groan while reading that article.

    Can't wait for Space Station Beta.

    Maybe when we get to Space Station 1.0, it'll run smoothly.

    --
  • thanks. would have helped if whoever did the transcription remembered the bloody y :)

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Yes, the solar arrays on the ISS are supposed to be around 160 volts, which is a lot higher than most satellites. They've designed around it, though. The ISS is connected to the solar array via a positive ground rather than a negative one, which should keep the station itself safe for astronauts. (They still should avoid the array if possible, though.) And the plasma contactor mentioned in the article is a pretty useful item that's worked on scientific satellites for years. With the PCU working, they shouldn't have many problems.

    If the PCU goes out, though, plasma charging is a problem. You have the possibility of electrical arcs...which are equally dangerous to astronauts and to the electrical equipment on the station. The torques on the station change when the ground is disturbed, possibly changing its orbit or spin. Ion sputtering (erosion of the spacecraft hull) increases...although that's probably the least of your concerns. There may be periods in the orbit when the astronauts, if they work quickly, can get out and fix things safely. That'd be tough, though, as they hit the aurorae belts every orbit and the South Atlantic Anomaly at least once every seven. You don't want to be EVA over south america next to an ungrounded high voltage space station.

    But the folks who build the ISS know what they're doing, and I think they'll have the plasma environment under control. Some of the other problems mentioned in that article I did not know about and do look like a worry, but I'm sure things aren't as dire as the article writer is predicting.

    (Full disclosure: I work (subcontract) for NASA on a satellite program unrelated to the ISS. Whether that makes me knowledgeable or just biased is your decision. :) )
  • Bordom. Growing egglpants in space sure is exciting.

  • is that noise is a major consideration of space station design. I saw something like that on Discovery Channel once and they put a mic in on of the noisier modules in Mir and it sounded like a small NOC with too much equipment in it.

    They said that the tolerable noise level in any module (according to NASA spec) was somewhere around 30 dB but a lot of the modules being made by other countries (notably Russia) exceeded those specs by as much a 40dB. Compund that with the fact that the sound has nowhere to go but in.

    In space no one can hear your server crash! :-)
    "Me Ted"
  • Actually, it was stolen from Monty Python. Specifically, the Church Missile sketch (not sure of the exact name of the sketch, but if you've heard it, you know what I mean).

  • Re:Star Trek sparks (Score:3)

    by Private Essayist ( 230922 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:03PM (#608886)
    Good point. Actually, the tech in Star Trek I am most impressed with is how those console buttons work:

    Captain: "Target their sensor arrays with a medium-burst photonic beam."
    Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 random buttons on the console.
    Captain: "Set up a medium-level force field around decks 3, 4, and 17 aft."
    Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 other random buttons.
    Captain: "Create a weapon out of technology none of us have ever thought of before this very moment but the lieutenant over there just suggested."
    Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 4 or 5 buttons.

    NASA can brag all they want, but until they get this magic console button technology, they ain't got squat!
    ________________

  • What I find truly amazing is how few casualties the US space program has had. We lost three astronaughts to a fire on Apollo 1. The fire was electrical in nature and the Saturn V rocet was assembled for a sort of practice. And we lost 6 astronauts and 1 civilian in the challenger disaster. 10 individuals have lost their lives in the history of the space program in this country out of the many who have participated in the programs.

    OTOH, I think that five of our presidents have been assasinated. Shows that politics is even more dangerous than science.

    -------------
    BSD or BSOD, your choice...

  • Or wait, that was supposed to happen in 1999. It's funny how science fiction (particularily late 1960's sci-fi) had us on such tight timelines. So far we've had no A.I. superconputers (HAL 9000), no permenant moonbases / space stations, no eugenics wars (Star Trek) and most important of all: no robot butlers!

    Ah well, who's counting...

    Anyone else remember this show [cybrary1999.com]?

    Capt. Ron

  • Science is already feeling the burn... (Score:5)

    by TOTKChief ( 210168 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:16PM (#608889) Homepage

    The payload I've been working on--and from the best I can tell, most of the other payloads on UF-1, the first of the many Utilization Flights--was bumped from its flight. Technically, we weren't on schedule, but the schedule is unrealistic to begin with.

    The manifest is full of lies, damned lies, and statistics, but that's no different than any other NASA program. It's the typical NASA FUD: make the schedules unreasonable, and when the contractors fail to meet specs, blame the contractors, slip the schedule, and ask Congress for more money.

    It makes one wish for the days of carte blanche, when the schedules were unreasonable, but you could at least throw enough money and brainpower at a situation to get the thing solved. People worked long hours, slept at their desks, had recreation at work, and took simple pleasure at their jobs being finally completed--then moved to another job.

    You see, the geek culture today has a lot of roots in the geek culture of the '60s--but instead of Apollo and Saturn, we work on Linux and Gnome. Rather than the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, which hid all their secrets behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain, we now fight the Evil Empire of Redmond, which hides all their secrets behind the impentrable Closed-Source Curtain.

    All of which begs to ask: where's the deals with Life, and when does Tom Wolfe write a book on the open-source movement?


    --
  • Also, at one time, at least, Intel provided MIL-spec and rad-hardened 386SX chips.

  • Re:nattering nabobs of negativity (Score:5)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:19PM (#608891) Homepage Journal
    Coining the phrase "Nattering Nabobs of Negativity" is one of the two memorable things that Spiro Agnew accomplished while he was Vice President. The other was managing to get forced to resign his office during the middle of the Watergate scandal for something totally unrelated to Watergate.
  • Noise-cancelling headphones, and a *lot* of that wonderful "egg-crate" anechoic foam.

    Problem solved.

    And the foam could be shipped up as packing material for other equipment, saving space and mass.

    Just make sure that the foam won't off-gas as time goes on - chemical pollution of the life-support system is a real issue, and certain cements, glues, plastics, and other synthetics really put out a *lot* of gaseous pollution as they age.
  • From what I've read, it's mostly qualifying the things for zero-g. Hot air doesn't move around like it does here on earth, so they need to come up with innovative cooling solutions. I think they also adjust the power supplies to run off the power system of the spacecraft (24VDC I think). Bunch of other stuff, too. By the time they address all these issues, the machines are several years old.

  • The chance you'll brush into a high-voltage portion of the solar array through your own negligence and have it harm something conductive on your suit have got to be so small as to not increase the danger level more than a few thousandths of a percent!

    Read the article again, Chester. The whole damn station's skin is going to get charged up, so that even getting close to something as "unlikely" to be necessary to a spacewalk as, say, the airlock, will expose you to an arc. And those arcs aren't just wussy little things that are going to harm something conductive in the suit, they are at near lethal levels.

    I don't know about you, but I don't like the thought that anytime I contact the skin of the station during a space walk, I could very easily be killed.

    You first.

  • Re:Solar array plasma potential dangers are low. (Score:3)

    by MrScience ( 126570 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:27PM (#608895) Homepage
    Wow, hadn't heard of the South Atlantic Anomaly [google.com] before... Here's a great link about it: http://www.ll.mit.edu/ST/sbv/saa.html [mit.edu]

    Hope it survive's Slashdot's mungling.

  • Complex == Fragile (Score:4)

    by volsung ( 378 ) <stan@mtrr.org> on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:27PM (#608896)
    I asked a similar question while I was working on the software team at our university's satellite design lab. The electronics guru explained that, among other things (many of which have been mentioned), one of the reasons we can't slap a Celeron into orbit (or even a Crusoe if you want real power savings) is that the manufacturing process uses such small gates that it doesn't take much stray radiation to start flipping bits in your CPU registers. DRAM is already suceptible to this and needs error-correcting bits to be reliable.

    The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.

  • Seems like NASA has relaxed its software standards. [slashdot.org]
  • I'm still wondering why they have to make the thing so complex. The article frequently says that the backup is the Russian components. Perhaps we should take a lesson in simplicity and worry less about having an IP number for each component. What's wrong with using the tried-and-true methods and saving the fancy stuff for the non-critical systems?


  • You also have to factor in deaths from the Russian space program (Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev) and the countless animal deaths in the early days. Even when they were not directly involved in NASA's programs, it's not as though NASA didn't take heed of the mistakes learned by their deaths as well.

    And modern Space exploration has only been going on for fifty years now. Presidents have been getting assasinated for the last couple hundred years. Since the space program started, only one president (JFK) has been assasinated, though their have been other attempts (Reagan, etc.) By your logic, space exploration remains ten times as fatal as the office of president.

  • In one error discovered earlier this year, the corruption of two adjacent flags (bits in a status word) would command an air valve to open while locking out the "valve close" command; only a power cycle could reset the system and prevent all the air from leaking out.

    What is the point of making things like this computerized with no manual workaround? That sounds poorly thought out. Surely a valve could be made so you could also close it by hand?? This reminds me of the models of BMW where you can't unlock the doors by hand, so if the power locks fail, you're locked in your own car (this actually happened to someone I know). Madness...


  • I thought it was: "Nine nude nymphs nibling on Nat's nails and nicotine"

  • Dude, read the article. The problem is that the solar arrays raise the potential of the entire space station relative to the thin plasma bath that's around it. In other words, the space station is like a live wire at ~120V and space is the ground. It doesn't matter where you're at, if you're doing EVA, you're the lightning rod.

    That's BAD.

    --Joe
    --
    Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
  • mm, question. What the hell is a 186? Do you mean an 8088, an 8086, or an 80286? Because I've never heard of a 186.

    There is a 186 or more properly a 80186. it was never used in a PC. It was never intended to be used in a PC. It wasn't a prediessor to the 286. They were actually sybling similar architectures, one targeting the desktop and the other targeting embeded devices

  • By the way, wrong spelling in the article. It's "Funktsional'no-gruzovoy blok" ("Ôóíêöèîíàëüíî-ãðóçîâîé áëîê" - set your browsers to Windows-1251).
  • ...while the flight control team flails [NASA jargon for struggle ineffectively]

    Cool, you mean I've been using NASA jargon all this time?

  • It's commonly left out, because Russian doesn't normally allow hard "e" sounds in the middle of words (unless they're of foreign origin) -- since "e" is a common vowel, all the "y"s would be redundant. The "y" sound is indicated by the vowel, but it's really a softening of the previous consonant more than its own independent sound. I'd have transcribed it "zv'ezda", but that still doesn't help you unless you know what to make of the apostrophe.
  • What is the point of making things like this computerized with no manual workaround? That sounds poorly thought out.

    the article doesn't say that there are no manual workarounds, it just says that they are expecting troubles with the automated ones.

    in fact, it talks in several places about the fact that there are workarounds for everything, and that NASA is going to go ahead and plunge in, knowing that they can get around problems with the automated systems.
  • I used to work at a satellite tracking station in the South Atlantic ocean. We sometimes saw strange propagation disturbances with satellites that used VHF frequencies. The usual explanation was that the South Atlantic Anomaly was doing weird things to the ionosphere. Nobody seemed to know why it existed.
  • The reason they have 386SX chips is because of an array of things that come together.

    A) They need to design new cooling systems since radiant heat dissipation does not exist in zero gravity (heat cannot rise in zero g).

    B) They need to harden some of the shielding on the systems so that stray radiation does not have a negative effect on bits.

    C) They need to have special chips made for stray radiation.

    D) They need to be flight tested and sturdy.

    E) They don't necessarily NEED blazingly fast computers to do the tasks required.

    F) Development cycles for the software are much slower (There is not Fix/Release type thing, its Fix/Test/Test/Test/Test/Test/Fix/Test.../Release)

    G) This is what is proven to work through time.

    Is that clear enough?

    Jay

  • Re:Dude: (Score:3)

    by Erbo ( 384 ) <amygalert.gmail@com> on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:46PM (#608910) Homepage Journal
    They do think of things like this...for example, see this document [thesmokinggun.com], which was a speech prepared for President Nixon (by William Safire) to make to the nation in the event of a disaster on Apollo 11 (presumably one that would have left Armstrong and Aldrin marooned, to die when their oxygen ran out). I can't imagine that they don't have contingency plans tucked away in case something bad happens to one of the guys on the ISS (or on the Shuttle, for that matter). And imagine what could happen on a future Mars mission...

    Eric
    --

  • I have noticed that English natives speakers often have a hard time pronouncing the soft consonants that are abundant in Russian.

    6 out of 10 Russian vovels cause the consonant in front of them sound soft, and there is also a "soft sign" that has the same effect on consonants.
  • Why is it so hard for some people on this site to believe that a female can post intelligently without first pointing the finger at her as being an poseur?
  • Aforementioned "soft sign" is found in the cyrillic transcription of my sig where the apostrophe is ;-)

  • Re:For the purpose of redundancy... (Score:3)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2000 @12:52PM (#608914)
    ... NASA should use several poorly-trained astronaut teams, instead of one well-trained team. This way, they could afford to lose one or more astronaut teams, but the mission could still continue because of the hot spares available.

    Would this be a RAID system (Redundent Array of Inexperienced Dudes?)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If I recall, 70dB is about the same as a typical conversation. If the NASA spec is 30dB, then that is almost silent (for humans anyway). I can't see it being that low. I was under the impression that typical noise levels were in the mid to high 70's, which is more like a crowded room. Tough to sleep in, but I learned to sleep next to a diesel engine on a rocking boat in the middle of the atlantic. The commander is a SEAL so he should be able to hold out without sleep for the few months he's up there ;-)


  • This is a "person of great wealth or prominence" from arabic derived through Urdu. This is how a provincial governer in the Mogul Empire in India was called.

    BTW, there is a site www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Online.
  • are u talking about the great country that just redefined the meaning of 'democratic process' in order to entertain us all through x-mas or about canada?
  • Maybe they should. What with the random plasma discharges, it could be a literal frag-fest

  • ... but noise is one of the problems in pretty much every "habitat" made or built in the Soviet Union.

    For example, commercial jetliners or houses had not had enough sound isolation.
  • Others are less upbeat. For example, even optimists admit the development of space station software has been difficult.

    And it will continue to be so, across the entire software industry, until software developers force the chip manufacturers to provide hard MMU encapsulation for fine-grain objects like they do for processes now.

    Programs are unreliable to a very significant extent because their internal objects all live in the same address space and can merrily tramp all over anything they like under fault conditions. And fault conditions always arise in any non-trivial program, yet recovery is impossible in the general case because there is no internal protection against fault propagation.

    Today's software developers are still using a 30-year old hardware model. Is it any surprise that software is still as flakey as ever?
  • Actually it's quite probable that NASA didn't know much at all about how those cosmonauts died. Or even that they _had_ died. The USSR was extremely secretive about its space program, and much of what we now know has only been fleshed out fairly recently. It's hard to learn much from other people's mistakes under those cirumstances, unfortunately.

    -Bryan

  • They must use the command line.
  • FYI...Foam such as that may be a fire hazard problem.
  • The 80186 is basically an 8086 with a bunch of chipset and I/O features integrated on a single chip. It was popular for controller applications, like smart disk and serial I/O adapters. Tandy used it in a PC, but it had software compatibility problems with PC software due to the fact that the original IBM PC BIOS used interrupt vectors that Intel had reserved for their own use.
  • ...its neat that the first crew, all guys, are called the Alpha Males.

    Talking about cute names for things, did you notice one of the modules is called the Zenith Integrated Truss Structure [ieee.org]? They're having so much trouble getting all the blemishes out, because the space station has ZITS!

  • Do you go up in flames every time you touch the door handle of your car? How about when you touch the case of your PC?

    No?? Thought so. So long as there is one a functional PCU or the solar arrays are off, everything's fine. PCU fails with astronaut outside? PCU fails period? Shut off the fucking array until you can get the other PCU online. Duh. I don't honestly think they'd let the software keep the array mains on. That would be fucking dumb, like allowing the inner airlock door to be unlatched at the same time as the outer. So what if the other PCU takes a while to get up? There's still the 28V system on the Russian module, so they're not going to lose life support or anything.
  • Some good years ago there was an accident with an Airbus where the pilot felt that the airplane was flying too low. So he maneuvered to try to get some additional airlift. However the computer considered that the angle the airplane was going pushed its stability. So it nullified all pilot commands and returned everything in place.

    The result - KABUUM!!!
  • I know; I've been arguing that for years. Unfortunately, every hardware product to go in that direction has been a flop. The Intel 432 and the whole Symbolics line come to mind.

    Interestingly, late-model SPARC CPUs do have some hardware support for inter-object calls across protection boundaries. It was put in for Sun's Spring operating system, which never came out but provided some of the basis for Java.

    Question for Morgiane: If CORBA calls from object to object on the same machine were fast enough, would that accomplish what you want? Get in touch with me directly, please.

  • Well, we know why the anomaly exists. The earth's magnetic axis is not only tilted from the geographic axis, it's also separated from the center of the earth by about 700 km, in the direction of the sea of Japan. That's on the opposite side of the earth from the south atlantic. So effectively over the south atlantic anomaly the trapped radiation in the earth's magnetic field can fall 700 km lower than elsewhere...right into the orbital altitude of polar orbit satellites like the International Space Station.

    Now, the real mystery is why the earth's magnetic axis is so far off-kilter. :) That I'm pretty sure hasn't been explained.
  • Any time you are attempting that you have never done before - you will encounter problems that you have never seen before.

    If you have ever written custom code for anything you recognize that truth. The code for the space station is essentially 'alpha' code. How could they get it to the 'beta' stage? Where would they get any 'users' to test it? Can any of you write millions of lines of alpha code with no errors?

    The reason that nobody can write alpha code error free is the same reason that nobody can go out and shoot '18' for a round of golf; the job is too difficult for anyone to accomplish. That is why software requires several versions to get it right.

    The computing section of the space station is far more extensive than any previous space flight. It was done that way because of the advantages that computer control brings. Because of Yin and Yang there is always a down side to anything which has an upside. The down side is that computer controlling everything necessarily increases the complexity of the computer code. With that complexity comes increased error problems. Sorry, that is the way that reality works.

    There is one more truth - NASA has never managed a software project this complex for space use. As a result the management process has problems also.

    Here is a management truth: nobody ever has enough time to spend doing the job right in the first place, but somehow they always find enough time to do the job over when their work breaks. In other words there always is enough time to do the job right . Doing it wrong and trying to fix the screw ups with kluges later always takes longer. That ought to be software management 101 - but it is something which most managers never understand.

    The only way to solve the complexity issues that computer control brings is to do away with the computer controllers. That costs a lot more money and weighs a lot more. Either live with the problems that computers bring or live with the problems that not having computers bring.

    I have to agree with the NASA veteran on the preparedness issue: it costs far less to be prepared at the start than to find out later that you weren't prepared.

  • Do you go up in flames every time you touch the door handle of your car? How about when you touch the case of your PC?

    I'm no electrical engineer, so please enlighten me. The article says that you could get a full ampere going through you if you come anywhere near the skin. Is one amp enough to be dangerous, or is it on the same order as the examples you give?

    Shut off the fucking array until you can get the other PCU online.

    The article also said that because the PCUs were designed in such a hurry, there is no mechanism to tell anybody when a PCU goes offline. So how do you shut down the array if you don't know that the PCUs are dead? Also, how quickly does the residual charge bleed off? Quickly enough that the arcing danger can be waited out if somebody is outside when it happens?

  • Actually, about how it looks like it would be pronounced. Start with a z-like buzz, make a "veh" sounds, go back to the buzz, then say, "Duh." That's how the 'stronauts are saying it apparently--when they're not saying something like, "Piece of shit Russian hardware. Russian spacecraft, American spacecraft--all the parts are made in Taiwan!"
    --
  • I guess you didn't get the point I was making.

    Objects should not be able to touch the private parts of other objects, not even if they are of the same class, and that is a trivial thing to guarantee given fine-grain hardware assist from the MMU.

    In a fully object-oriented system, the trap will happen at the very first transgression, not after you have already blown through a ton of safety nets. And if one's system libraries aren't yet fully OO (ie. the case today just about everywhere) it won't matter much, because it's virtually always the application code that blows up, not system libraries.

    Reliability would soar, and so would ease of debugging because of the hard separation between objects. I just cannot understand why software developers haven't been calling for it.
  • Hehe, I liked the 432 -- I guess this dates us!. Nothing quite as revolutionary as that emerged until the transputer, and recently Crusoe. Apart from RISC and superscalability, the integrated CPU scene has been rather dead for years. I agree, everyone seems to be happy with minor variations on 20 year old architectures.

    Efficient local CORBA calls would be useful, but they won't help here. In a CORBA-based system, the user can still define local non-CORBA objects, and so he will, so systems will continue to be unreliable through lack of hard boundaries between objects. And anyway, CORBA protection is soft. It's good in many respects, but it's not the solution to this general problem in software engineering.
  • Oh, I know all about the Mir problems. Some of them were equipment problems, but I can't blame Mir for the problems due to that freighter banging into it (well, other than whether it should have been more repairable -- at least Mir let the crew survive that).
  • Oh, well, that explains that nicely (and helps with me learning russian, which I work at every now and then). bolshoya spaceba :)

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

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