Slashdot Mirror
2001: A Space Laptop
Phrogman writes: "SpaceRef has posted an exclusive and detailed article concerning NASA's use of laptops in space including information on the LAN configuration aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis (with full-color diagrams); lists of software run on the Shuttle laptop computers (with screenshots like this); laptop specs; descriptions of the LAN to be installed on the Space Station; and a lot of other related official NASA materials and links." It's a neat primer on Taking Your Computer to Space, too -- it addresses things like the available power sources, the need for velcro, and quirks of operating in zero G.
I wonder what sort of ping times you get from there...
"Dammit, I just got fragged by another Earth-bound runt again..."
I wonder if a Napster server in space could get sued?
Expect a storm of "OH my ghod they are running WINDOWS?" comments.
I wonder if the hard drive would perform better in zero gravity.... stupid thought maybe...
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Does NASA trust there computers with Windows? I don't even trust my mother's Windows 98 box.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Quoting from the article:
The PGSC, and everything else inside the Shuttle, needs to be able to be attached to a stable surface to keep it from floating away. Next to duct tape (also known as "gray tape" at NASA), one of the standard means of attaching one thing to another in space is the use of Velcro.
Heh. Duct tape and velcro are holding our space program together? Seems somehow appropriate. Maybe they can swing over to MIR and patch up some of THEIR problems. Apparently, those stupid russians have been using ordinary masking tape.
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Now let's cross our fingers and hope that the astronomers don't really rely on the laptop, 'cause if it GPFs, or BSODs...
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dd if=/dev/random of=~/.ssh/authorized_keys bs=1 count=1024
The diagrams and pictures mentionned don't seem to be available... Maybe discovery.com is doing a little preemptive correction for the slashdot effect. :-P
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
That would be a lot of fun to trace the data - how much pr0n a day they download, or even better, imagine NASA cuts their line cuz they sucked up all the bandwidth with Gnutella and Napster. hmm..
http://dtum.livejournal.com
This may be slightly off-topic here, but why are they telling 'us normal people' this?
Personally, I'd be much more interested in hearing when we would be able to visit space (as normal people) rather than 'how to use our laptop'.
Here's hoping they actually do build a space elevator before I'm gone. Instead of another vacation to Colorado, I could take a vacation to the ISS and actually do something 'new and exciting'.
Bite my yammer.
Everyone brace yourselves for the standard barrage of really dorky BSOD-in-space jokes moderated up as funny.
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IBM ThinkPad series PGSCs are not the only laptops that have flown - or will fly in space. Computers using Mac OS and Linux have also flown as part of various payloads and are likely to continue to do so in the future. Meanwhile, the Russians will be using a Weiner Power laptop in their portion of the ISS. Other participating partners will likely bring their own laptops.
All I can envision is wrapping wire around your penis and sticking it in and out of a magnet.
... they run Windows 95...
Why dont they just do what most Top Secret military facilities do and have seperate "public" and "private" network terminals? No access to the public internet for mission critical systems, but have a few public terminals that can be used for communications both ways
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
i want them to take my laptop to space so i can tell everyone "hey see this laptop, it was in space!"
Mess Stuff Up
I suppose that means that they won't be sending up any overclocked laptops anytime soon.
managers...why god invented purgatory
I've put a lot of thought into this. Please don't dismiss me right away.
e -hell-they-are-this-month. The company has literally gobs of liquid cash to burn. Thanks to the contributions of unpaid open source developers everywhere, expenses are low. Thanks to banner ad hits, hardware sales, and software distribution (or distrobution if you're a regular here), revenue is high.
/. logo on the vertical stabilizer. We could even paint "This spacecraft Copyright 1997-2000 OSDN" on the side. We could replace all the computers inside the Shuttle with overclocked VALinux boxes. We could supply the crews with /. coffee mugs and Penquin Mints. Missions could be completed in half the time!
We all recognize the phenomenal success of Slashdot/Andover/VALinux/OSDN/Plymouth/Whoever-th
I think the time has come for Slashdot to think big. I mean bigger than the Slashdot Cruiser. With that in mind, I would like to make a modest proposal:
Paint the Slashdot logo on the Space Shuttle
It could work: Thanks to 8 years of post-Cold War Democratic cutbacks, NASA is hard up for money. Heck, it's a wonder the Shuttle doesn't already look like something out of the NASCAR Winston Cup series.
Why not corporate sponsorship of the Space Shuttle? And who better to provide that sponsorship than the site bringing us "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters?"
Picture it: The Space Shuttle -- painted Slashdot-Green with the
We could even go a step further. We could the entire Shuttle fleet! Instead of "Enterprise", "Endeavor", "Columbia", we could have "CmdrTaco", "JonKatz", and "Hemos".
Imagine hearing a newscaster saying, "The Space Shuttle JonKatz lifted off this morning. It will remain in orbit for three weeks." Doesn't that make you feel a little funny inside?
Is the idea of an open-source space program just a dream? Won't you share the dream with me?
Got a full tank of hot grits and a penis bird in the glove box.
Y'all might be interested in the Fast Company article that's somewhat related, entitled "They Write the Right Stuff." I believe that there was mention of this on /. some months back. It's about the computers that actually control the shuttle and the process of writing that software. Pretty hard-core.
-Waldo
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/08/133024 6&mode=thread
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
This is cool to see... I've often seen them using rather archane things, and now I really do know a little bit more of what seperates me from an astronaut.
Anyone think they could do better tho? heheh
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We know then that the P-IV will never see use in space, unless they integrate it into the climate control system instead of using conventional heating coils... hell, the mass of the chip and required heatsink (my god!) is probably too heavy to meet payload launch standards anyway...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
In space, no one can hear you scream.
I could just see my orbital apartment.. cables *everywhere*.. yay.... :-)
Well, like I said earlier, unless the heat sinks are properly configured, you could very easily burn out the processor by overcloaking it. Part of the problem with heat dissipation in space (and part of the problem with breathing...) is the lack of gravity. With no natural breeze, you get the same air trapped around the processor.
Now, yes, you can use fans to move air about. But how do the fans work in 0 G? (Well, microgravity, but pretty much the same thing...) I imagine that the fans have to be reconfigured as well.
I also imagine that the boards have to be reinforced to withstand the forces during takeoff, as well as the screen... the mouse is simple; use the same little pad you normally do with laptops.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It'd sure be a bitch to use a mouse; gotta keep a grip on it at all times....
:D) might be a better solution for Zero G pointer manipulation. Anybody care to point out how wrong I am?
I'm not sure what, if anything, would forbid you from using a trackball, but it seems like a trackball (with a "velcro-modified" base
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
I want it for my garage ! the coolness factor of this would be awesome.
;););)
Not to mention that if a neighbour has it, and if it works via any type of hackable radio communication, one would be able to reprogram their torque/speed settings on the fly.
Watch those bolts fly
-- the cake is a lie
Face it, when in variable G land (e.g. space), it's a really good idea to have too much velcro. And have suits with velcro-ended cables.
Plus, the lack of air motion is very critical - you want a laptop with good heat dissipation and good fans, plus you need to be sure the fan motors can take varying G forces. Overclocking is a big no-no. Extra RAM is highly recommended.
Then there's the CD. Remember, no gravity pulling down makes these very difficult to use. Best to have it in firmware or cartridge form. Spin effects can be very hard to clock right in low or zero-G, and it needs to survive the boost.
Now, when will we see a smart company like Transmeta donate some laptops with low power consumption to NASA, both to sell the chip and to make them hot geek items? Heck, I can see the ads now "As Used By NASA In Zero-G", "The Laptop That Went To Space".
What happens if you get the Blue Screen of Death - do you die?
Will in Seattle
How much would you be able to overclock a 366 Celeron system if you put it outside the ship, and of course, in the shade?
[...]you could very easily burn out the processor by overcloaking[...]
;)
Burn out? Naw, it'd just shimmer a bit and then disappear...
--K
(Sorry, had to.
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Got Rhinos?
What, no Solitaire?
One good thing comes of using windows... If their GPS box dies, they can replace it with a Word document with a tracking pixel.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Working in graphics I have endless problems with conversions of rotations between Euler angles and quaternions. It's funny to see that NASA must share these problems and actually have a stand alone tool to do the conversion. Can you imagine the situations where you actually have to type in those number by hand into a GIO like that!
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-- SIGFPE
There have been articles published in the past about Linux being used to operate experiments on the Space Shuttle. Some of the experiments have self contained computer systems for managment and data collection. Linux was ideal here.
Now, I'd like to see a Linux/Apache web server in orbit. Even if it feeds nothing but text telemetry data, it would be impressive. Hmm, is there a TLD for LEO yet?
World Beach List, my latest project.
I'm not the mod, but I would have mod'd you down too.
Mir is a masterpiece of budget engineering, it has outlived it's expected lifespan by years. Could any other nation produce anything so successful? Not on current evidence.
Your comment was uninformed, unfunny and - to some - flamebait.
Consider yourself lucky to still be at 2.
- Only the laptops are running Windows. They're not trusting their flight-control systems to it.
- Would Linux be able better for what they need? They're not serving web-pages, or handling multiple users. They're not worried about the cost of the software. Windows is an acceptable solution in this case. The end-users were probably already familiar with it, which is always a benefit
...
So, honestly, does it really matter?Take a look at how stable netscape is or how long it takes staroffice to load before your criticize windows.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
-- The Theorem Theorem: "If if, then then."
That said, there have been a number of portables flown in space. In particular, does anyone remember a time when a GRiD was the machine to have in space. Now that was a laptop. It seemed to be space-worthy right out of the box. Too bad it went away before I had the money to acquire one.
Imagine how good sysadmin on the Space Shuttle would look on your resume.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
We all had a good laugh when the 16lb. beast became the first truly weightless laptop.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Anyway, it was just a thought...
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
They seem to be doing so to provide legacy support to specialized DOS applications.
I do not have a signature
... by the looks of those buttons.
Ew.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That's what comes of previewing for spelling and not content!
As to quoting, I use "geek" (ahem) quoting almost exclusively, so to me the "interesting" is a semantic element in its own right and I would put the comma after it, as if it were a word that is spelt with quotation marks.
I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
So I appreciate your comment, and sympathise with your stand against linguistic degradation, It just doesn't really bother me. :-) (Does punctuation go before or after the smiley?)
One thing that does bother me, and I have only recently started to notice this, is the american way of saying
"How Good Of A Unix is Mac OS X?", and not "How Good A Unix is Mac OS X?". Why is this? Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
But certainly, the printer pictured in the Nominal LAN Topology (see link in the /. story) would have trouble keeping its paper in the tray (open, gravity-dependent tray like on the cheaper inkjet models). Either NASA did another $million modification job on that, or they used a higher-end printer with an enclosed, internal tray (perhaps further modified, if necessary, to keep the paper from floating around inside the tray).
How could they last without DOOM?
I remember reading awhile ago that NASA paid $600 for a toilet seat. According to several sites, one can get a normal toilet seat for $10.
:)
That's a 60:1 ratio.
I think the average laptop cost is $2500, using the same ratio, NASA would be paying $150,000 for each of these laptops.
Though they probably paid more
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
Back in my school days, part of my work study job was to model the temperature behavior of a balloon borne neutron detector. It consisted of a lot of plastic and a hand built computer contained in a 3ft x 1ft aluminum cylindrical pressure vessel.
The maximum altitude was about 120Kft. Even at that altitude the combination of solar input plus the heat generated by the computer it was hard to dump enough heat to keep the computer from overheating. At night of course we had the opposite problem of keeping the computer warm enough.
The software I used was written in Fortran (by someone else) on cards, ran on a Univac and modeled the detector as a set of concentric spheres! We did pretty well modeling the overall temperature but of course the local hot spots in the computer were a pain.
Conduction and convection weren't too efficient at 120Kft and we were left with radiative transfer as the major means to dump the heat. I never knew there were so many differences between kinds of white paint! The shuttle uses the same approach by using the cargo bay doors as radiators (which is why the doors are always open at orbit).
In case you are interested, the detector was EOSCOR (Extended Observation of Solar and COsmic Rays) built at CWRU in the late '70s and flown in Texas and Australia. The principle investigator was Glen Frye with Steve Schinder and Rocky Koga as associates. They were looking for neutrons emitted by Solar flares, but I don't think they ever found any.
My how times have changed. ;)
Subject: Clique Theory
From: (Dr Drew)
Newsgroups: uk.local.yorkshire
THE DR. BREW LECTURE
Good morning, students. Today I am going to outline an exciting new
aspect of theoretical physics. It concerns the behaviour of particles
when interacting with Neusgroupinos: also called TANTRUM MECHANICS.
This is CLIQUE theory.
The particle in question is officially called the T+ particle, but is
known colloquially as the Troll. Trolls often come in bonded pairs, the
troll and the antitroll. These pairs behave oddly: sometimes
reinforcing one another, sometimes cancelling each other out.
Occasionally a troll loses its antitroll partner and can then behave
quite unpredictably, according to the rules of chaos: firing off random
quarks (known as "posts") in an attempt to bond with a new antitroll.
The existence of trolls was first proved by Hans Akrosstheocean in his
famous "double-prat experiment", or the "experiment with two morons".
Trolls, whether bonded to antitrolls or not, also interact with
neusgroupinos. Neusgroupinos are stable hadrons with a tendency to
resist interaction with trolls. As far as the troll is concerned, this
resistance comes about through the neusgroupino's outer shell, or
CLIQUE (I will explain the etymology of this term later). CLIQUEs are
generally impervious to trolls, unless the troll has a particular
"spin" that conforms to the already-existing structure of the
neusgroupino. Most trolls possess either "top" or "bottom" spin as well
as other "strange" or "charmed" characteristics. For instance, a given
neusgroupino may interact with "charmed, bottom" trolls, but not
"strange, top" ones.
If a CLIQUE resists interaction with the troll, this can again cause
unpredictable activity. The troll may fire off quark/posts in an
attempt to break down the integrity of the neusgropino. These bursts of
activity do not last long. Eventually, the troll decays, although many
are more persistent than others.
However, I have not yet touched upon the most interesting part of this
theory at all, the element that reveals the central mystery of Tantrum
Mechanics. It is this: _the CLIQUE only exists from the "perspective"
of the troll_. From within the neusgroupino, particles are free to come
and go. Indeed, the "outer shell", the perceived CLIQUE, is not a
unified, integral and impervious entity at all. Many particles are
quite free to interact with the neusgroupino, regardless of spin, as
long as they do not take on the specific characteristics of the troll.
It is impossible to state with certainty whether or not a given
particle internal to the neusgroupino is in this outer shell at any
given time or not. This is known as _Wilkinson's Uncertainty
Principle_.
Hence the derivation of the term CLIQUE: an acronym for CLearly
Imaginary QUantum Entity.
Thank you.
Bulwer-Lytton's by (David Pacheco)'
It seemed so long ago, and yet at the same time not so long ago, but
only from the perspective of a twin traveling at close to light speed
away from the original observer.
"I'm yours!" she exclaimed lustily, as he tried desperately to contain
the nosebleed.
"Onomatopaeia," he thought to himself against the drip-drip backdrop of
the rain as he petted his meowing cat, while the tick-tock of the
hallway grandfather clock synchronized with the thump-thump of his
heart, "is really fucking annoying."
As he fell backwards into the Time Distortion Loop, Lt. Michaels had
less than a second to pull the trigger on his Gravitational Field
Modifier, which would pull him out in the nick of time and allow him to
save the Earth from assured destruction, but unfortunately he had left
the safety on.
Melinda Gates cursed her husband's tardiness, as her pregnancy entered
its thirty-sixth month.
"Don't do it!" I yelled as I woke up from the dream in which I relived
the moment when she died, for the tenth time in as many days... and as
the sobs racked my body, I tried to push out of my head the image of her
with the gun to her head, the trigger being pulled in slow motion, and
my surprise at the amount of blood inside a cocker spaniel.
"Anthropomorphism," grumbled Peter Cottontail as he rubbed the calluses
on his feet caused by human-shaped shoes on feet that were never meant
to wear them, "is a bitch."
I surveyed the carnage once more, trying to remain clinically detached
as my razor-like mind took in the detail of the blood everywhere, on the
walls, on the floor... the corpses, the lifeless eyes of the victims, as
I wondered "Who the hell eats this much chicken?"
Space travel has its drawbacks, and the crew of the Enterprise was about
to discover one of them: authors with no imagination for inventing names
for spaceships, and authors with a particular distaste for redshirts.
"We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" yelled the roadie as the tour bus
passed the "Welcome to Omaha" sign.
Pablo's hemorrhoids had been causing him discomfort for weeks, so the
nail clippers seemed appropriate.
"It's a good day to be alive!" cried the zombie.
The Time Vector Server screen shot has a very interesting IP address: 132.123.5.17 and seems to be assigned to the Army National Guard Bureau. Are they developing/testing the software or was it just a random IP with a interesting owner?
A 10/100 LAN on a 10 year old space shuttle, that's a riot. Considering the laptop probably runs about 16 times faster than the five computers aboard the shuttle. Is it just me or does NASA seem extremely behind the times? (well, at least they aren't junking the entire rocket in space like they did in the sixties; I think we already have a space trash asteroid belt)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
My Pa always has a saying,
'A good laboratory runs on three things: Mars Bars, Blutack and Araldite.'
Although I prefer 'A good scientist/techie/engineer (delete as appropriate) amways has the following three things to hand: Dr Pepper, Duct tape and wherever possible, pizza.'
Elgon
Well... I guess it coulda been worse.
They could have called it "DeOrbit Wizard"...
Oy!
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Some slashbot probably took exception to explaining that the Russians use duct tape because they are stupid, rather than making some lame, dated joke about the long lines expreienced during the communist era and saying that they didn't pack any because the wait was four weeks.
--
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
yet I'm sure there will be a million message saying "What? The NASA runs windows software on the shuttle ?"
Well, like I said earlier, unless the heat sinks are properly configured, you could very easily burn out the processor by overcloaking it. Part of the problem with heat dissipation in space (and part of the problem with breathing...) is the lack of gravity. With no natural breeze, you get the same air trapped around the processor.
The configuration of the heat sink has nothing to do with it. Assuming that the computer in question at least has a fan, the lack of gravity shouldn't affect its cooling in any way. In an actual vacuum, however, there will be very little heat dissipation, since radiating heat off takes quite a while, as opposed to heat transfer through another substance.
Now, yes, you can use fans to move air about. But how do the fans work in 0 G? (Well, microgravity, but pretty much the same thing...) I imagine that the fans have to be reconfigured as well.
Fans work just as well in microgravity, assuming that they're attached to something to keep them from moving. All a fan does is push air away from it. (relatively speaking, of course) Since your standard heatsink is attached to the processor or motherboard in some way, that's not a problem. The only problem would be the exhaust of the air from the case, which would produce a force enough to move the laptop around, probably. But that's why they velcro the things down.
I also imagine that the boards have to be reinforced to withstand the forces during takeoff, as well as the screen... the mouse is simple; use the same little pad you normally do with laptops.
I wouldn't see why. The forces aren't more than 20 g's I'm sure, and most hard drives, when off, are rated for anywhere from 30 to 60G's. The LCD screen, however, I don't know enough about to know whether the G forces would affect it, but I wouldn't have any reason to believe that it wouldn't work. The actual circuit boards also tend to be fairly well attached to the case, and therefore wouldn't have much capacity for shifting, so wouldn't be damaged by the G's either. In short, one's standard computer would probably work fairly well in microgravity. Even most CD-ROM drives would probably work, given that they usually have those little tabs to keep the disc from doing weird things when you mount the drive sideways.
-Nathan
Care about freedom?
Care about freedom?
Become a card carrying member of the GOA.
Sigh... Figures we'd get a reaction like that from the six-digit-account-number crowd. Slashdot isn't what it used to be.
I might expect such a comment from a five-digit-account-number poster like yourself. Slashdot isn't what it used to be. Far Side pics? On Slashdot? How frivolous! I remember back when the only acceptable allusions on Slashdot were to man pages, Linus quotes, and kernel source. What a soft lot we've become...
Besides, any real geek would have thought up a Monty Python reference.
--Lenny, who owns a dachshund
Destination Mir
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
I wonder what "quirks" the astronauts have run into while surfing the big porn sites... I imagine zero-g could present some major problems in that department.
I have to agree with my other anonymous poster regarding your grammar skills. The sentence beginning "As to quoting" is a run-on.
;)
The sentence beginning "So I appreciate your comment" has a comma splice: the comma before "and sympathise [sic]" is incorrect. Additionally, The following comma should be a period.
I'm not going to touch the last paragraph - the beginning is a mess and not a complete sentence at all. The last sentence is also a fragment.
Enjoy..and let me know if you need an editor for some papers
>I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
I tend to think of it sort of programmatically, too -- precedence of operators... "" go outside punctuation, () inside, etc, etc.... In any case, programmatic language conventions ("asdf","foo","bar") are as inapplicable to English as German ones (compound words, capitalized common nouns, etc).
(*shrug) All of this stemming from me being anal-retentive Grammar Cop; I'm the one that corrects my friends when they split infinitives.
>Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is.
Not necessarily -- the a/an rule is one of what the French call elison, which is a rule of spoken language, putting in a spare consonant between distinct vowel sounds in separate words. You wouldn't say 'an unix' any more than you'd say 'an yo-yo' -- conversely, 'an historical event' is correct for the same reason 'an isthmus' is.
--
I want to buy myself one of those shuttles too!
Someone should retrieve that sucker. The various 750s seem destined to live forever. I bought a couple of remaindered base 750s several years ago because they were cheap. I was suprised to find an active user base for this box. I was even able to get an unauthorized copy of the stylus driver for Win95 that IBM never released. You can still buy memory, 1-gig disks, and spare batteries. Doesn't support a lot of later Thinkpad goodies (such as the drop-in Zip drive), alas.
The base 750 is a particularly interesting model. It has a very nice gray-scale display, and folds flat so you can use it as a sort of book-sized PDA. Alas, if you use it in this mode, you're pretty much stuck with running Win3.1 -- the 486 doesn't have enough cycles to run both the handwriting recognition (which is pretty good) and a 32-bit OS.
When your Thinkpad blue screens while running NT or Win95. Yeah, I can see it now. "Hold on, Houston, I have to reboot the PGCS, it just locked up on me."
this is a serious question.
how much could you over clock a processor in the coldness of space?
would you need to shield from gamma rays or solor wind or whatever the hell is out in space?
is it true that in space, no one can hear you overheat?
-=tonyt=-
From the OED:
elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
What you may mean is
liaison: french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h. <ibid.>
Philosophically written language must derive from the oral, surely?
I suppose it's another vagary of the non-phonetic nature of written english that there are multiple vowel sounds for the same symbol:
we have an umbrella and a unix, and even I'm not going to start saying "an oonix" instead of "a yoonix"!
I do get irritated by the grammar checker in Word informing me that I use the passive voice excessively. I know what I'm trying to say and it's how I was taught to write reports. :-)
No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Excuse me but I happen to work for a company that has one of the largest NT server farms in the US and our LAN guys are always having major problems with MS Exchange, WINS, and just TCP/IP problems in general. And IBM's SNA protocol on NT totally sucks. As far as Linux doing all that stuff you mentioned, well that is easy for Linux to do on a much smaller system. Run X/KDE, serve 500 client computers with sql server, SAMBA server for file sharing to those same 500 clients. And much more. I do it every day. The things you mentioned that your win* box can do is easy because they are not I/O intensive.
Prepare my Ion Cannon! I'm going to transform into Senshi Red and take some names!
------------------------
------------------------
Thus Spake ComradePenguin
Sure, but do you have enough faith in what this crowd could develop collectively to bet your life on it?
NASA never uses the latest thing because they test their stuff out rigorously. And honestly, I'm happy with that. Some day Andy Griffith will make it into space, but not just yet.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Share!", say psychologists.
"Space!", say scientists.
"Share Space!", say savvy social studiers, seeing surrounding success superfluous, showing sound sense.
-Intense introspection
-Into interesting interpretations
-Involving intellectual indulgences
Ahhhhhh, Huston... We have a blue screen...
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
putting your slashdot account on ebay...?
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
>after hearing a professor of English explaining it as being acceptable I am less bothered by it. :-)
:-)
Yah. I've heard a lot of things described as acceptable that I still think of as inelegant. Mostly it seems to me that if you have to split an infinitive, your sentence is constructed in an unclear fashion in the first place. But that's just me.
>elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
>liaison: french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h.
Le Doh! I thought I had those two straight. Been a few years since high school, it seems. I stand corrected.
>No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....
At least it's not as bad as 'should of' or 'would of,' which I see in print from people that should know better, all the time....
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And what happens when their Winblows box blue screens?
"NASA" =~ s/N/MS/;
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
I agree, I still try to avoid it where reasonable, but there are occasion where I would have to contort a sentence beyond other peoples tolerance. I am still this picky sometimes though!
You have no argument here
I object less to sloppy english where the meaning is clear, but I still object.
One of the english misuses which irritates me most is a gem from London Underground:
"passengers must produce on demand a valid ticket for their entire journey" - so when someone asks I have to hold my ticket up for an hour? Why can't they think about getting word order right sometimes?
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
OK, I got curious and looked up the last, two items. Blu-Tack is a clay-like, reusable adhesive made by Bostik. Here's a page that describes it.
Araldite 502 is an epoxy resin embedding medium. Here's a page that describes it as well.
If you check the icon at the top left of the screen capture there it is the standard icon for C++ builder apps (hey they could recompile everything using Kylix...)
My signature is my statement against the Javascript programmers, the Perl-script llamas, and those kernel-weasels out there coding "just because." At least NASA has some rhyme and reason for their actions. Lightning just struck nearby, so I'll shut up for now.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
If the pressure drops too low, wont the heads crash on the platter. Hard drives rely on a 'cushion' of air under the head. If the air pressure drops, that means the head is going to get closer to the platter, making head crashes more likely. If the laptop is exposed to vacuum while the disk is spinning, then there will be no gap between the head and platter...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Duct tape and velcro are holding our space program together?
Remember Apollo 13?
Remember Apollo 1? Velcro in a high-pressure, high-oxygen environment is what turned a small spark into a fire that killed three astronauts.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Linus Torvalds is working on a satellite in orbit, stripping out the Windows OS and installing Linux.
From the top of the screen, John "Maddog" Hall floats in, inverted, wearing sunglasses with a big, evil grin on his face.....
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, different situations and motivations. I realize your quote doesn't quite apply, but it's still amusing to see two sentiments that are so different expressed right next to each other by the same person.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Well, it'd do well, for a while (assuming you had a way to dissipate CPU heat that didn't involve blowing air at it with a fan!). Of course, what you're forgetting is that the "far side" of the moon is NOT the "DARK side" of the moon. When the moon is between the sun and the Earth, your "far side server" would cook real nice in the unshielded sunlight.
(edit) Of course, there are some deep crater floors near the lunar poles which are probably in permanent darkness. You could try one of those. You'll still feel dumb when some socketed component thermo-creeps out of place and it costs you $500 million for a service call.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Apollo 1
Wasn't it the velcro that was highly flammable in an oxygen rich atmosphere?
I imagine that the air composition and the velcro problems since then have been resolved...
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
It is not a big stretch to think that the problem with most software--planning too loosely, coding too soon--is worse for OSS than for commercial software. OSS really is a patchwork of code looking for a purpose. The whole point is that there is no overarching script. (That would be boring, as I am sure writing shuttle code is).
Then again, there are companies around who could easily afford to fork out $35Mil for 500,000 lines of perfect code. There are good reasons why this doesn't happen. It takes a long time, is slow to adopt new features, discourages upgrades, and apparently wastes lots of paper (read the linked article!). Still, we can dream of an enlightened government, or a federation of governments, that recruits an army of patient but otherwise ordinary programmers to write a 5,000,000 line operating system and then distributes it for free. Talk about a lubricant for the the digital economy--a perfectly-written OS! If the costs are comparable, this would run us about $350 Million. Hell, I think we've made movies that cost more! I'm sure that if you add the money spent each year by just the European governments it comes to more than this.
The more I think about it the more I find it stupid that no governments have done this already. It seems this would start paying off pretty quickly as they eliminate the need to import software, plus they would save their citizens money which would have gone to Microsoft and can now go to buying more domestic products (provided the country in question is not the US). Plus, imagine the increases in productivity created by a perfectly architectured and coded operating system. I hold out little hope that my country (the US) is enlightened enough to do this, with all the lobbying power from the software supercompanies. Canada is our bitch so we wouldn't let them try this either. Fine. But how about Europe, or India? Why is China doodling around with Linux when they should be writing the perfect OS from scratch? (Because they're cheap bastards and they want results soon, two reasons I can understand, but still I think it's a shame.)
Well, anyway, interesting article, thanks for the link.
Dave
Although inhabitants of nearby planets might catch a brief flash...
A conventional mouse relies on gravity to work.. take away the gravity, the mouse becomes useless
If you need proof, try this:
Turn your mouse upside down (or on its' side, any orientation that's not normal), and place a book over the bottom, then move the book around.. you'll notice that the screen pointer doesn't move..
Ball point pens don't work in zero G either, for similar reasons.
Optical mice would be a different story
Surely you'd use a trackpad to keep the size and number of moving parts to a minimum. You can even get external ones of these, should you wish.
MS Windows apps on the Shuttle; gives you Linux Zealots something to think about, eh?
I suppose you'll all be mail-bombing NASA now about their choice of OS.
Want to overclock that hardware? Imagine running a bundle of cable through the skin of the craft so you could put your CPU out in space. A fan wouldn't do much for you there!
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
Now when you say that, do you mean a subsitute that is "cheap ass[ed]", or an ass substitute that is cheap?
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
In particular, I was impressed with the avionics computers and software. They have five computers to handle this. During ascent and descent, four of them are running identical software concurrently, and any two computers can vote another out of the loop, if they sense it's malfunctioning. The fifth computer runs an avionics package with identical specs but from a different vendor, in case a bug is discovered in the primary software. The captain or pilot can drop to the alternate software with a press of a button.
This is all pretty impressive stuff to me .. I'm just a Web peon who has to write and maintain Perl scripts. Never seen such an interesting exhibition of how stuff is engineered when lives are on the line.
Perhaps. I think BSD would b the best choice however, much more stable. The problem is, there would have to be a very usable GUI that the astronauts wouldn't need much training for. They have enough things to worry about don't you think? I would say FreeBSD with fvwm95, a UI that they are probably already familiar with. Linux has it's place, but not in mission critical applications imho. They should not be running windows however.
The void of Space has simply No Temperature.
The problem is to evacuate heat.
Just think that Thermos bottles have a double envelope with void in between, just to keep the coffee hot longer.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
they had a couple of links to a story about it... FSCK being a shuttle sysadmin. Imagine what being the Sysadmin of Jupiter would like like on your resume.
"I don't code the things you use, I make the code your things use better."®
I *really* wouldn't want to see the blue screen of death on a space station. Brrrrrr! I get the willies just thinkin' about it!
--- Millihelen -- The amount of beauty required to launch a single ship.
'nuf said
--
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
So, if someone on the station installed Eudora and upgraded to the paid version, would they get a statue on the lawn of Qualcomm's headquarters?
I would expect that in 0 or low gravity, designers would be free of many of the constraints operating on Earth-bound computers.
Laptops? I would have imagined thinks like that personal assistant floating ball that Slashdot said NASA found in Star Wars.
Imagine computers around you, portables, projection screens, holograms, keyboards on your trousers, shaped as a ball, a tube, wahtever, but no laptops.
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
"NASA Astronaughts aboard the International Space Station turn on new multibillion dollar Hybrid Astro-Computational K-rad Eratta Disseminator computer system only to be greeted by...
"j00 r 0w3nd b|47h"
Janie took my gun...
Just install an overclocked server farm on the far side of the moon, and watch how fast they go in the insane temperatures.
Especially during the day when it hits 200+ in the full sunlight!
Best Slashdot Co
Since hard drives today are designed to perform identically in any physical orientation with respect to gravity (ie sideways, upside down) then it seems it would perform the same if there wasn't any gravity at all.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Er... Naturally, I meant moment of inertia of the platters, and the motor's torque.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Anyone notice the prominent "(Alpha)" notice on the Shadow screenshot?
Can't imagine it's referring to the CPU, either.
semper ubi sub ubi
Not original, but I forgot where I heard it.
Yeah that hard lock really gave you a log or wealth of info.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So basically the head acts as an airplane wing, and this helps act as a cushion for shocks and vibrations. However, since the heads are engineered to avoid contact (they don't just fall to the drive surface when you turn the machine off), I imagine that in a microgravity environment, if the air were non-destructivly evacuated from a hard drive (I.E. it didn't blow apart or happen while in use), the drive would probably keep working.
But one small bump and the heads would probably go farming.
Note: I am not a NASA engineer, and my use of the word probably reflects this.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Yeah..off course..not a great deal but still it saves money..more important is that if Linux is not better then NT, why then not use the free OS? NT as a router is in my eyes a stupid choice....Linux is more suited for the job and is free..so?? Also Linux can run on older/cheaper equipment that also can push down their cost..so overall i would say: YES!
true a vacuum is a perfect insulator. but that is against conduction and convection transfer of heat. conduction is from one material to another material. and convection is when a substance flows over another like air from a fan. what about radiation of heat? Laws of thermodynamics and equilibrium of heat and energy. an objects heat should attempt to create equilibrium with the space around it, which in this case is an incredibly vast vacuum. And because space as a vacuum has virtually no particles like atmosphere to hold an ambient temperature around the object to create equilibrium with, it should then theoretically lose all heat into space until it reaches absolute zero. Note: If heat isnt radiated in space, then neither should any other form of energy, but explain the sun and the stars. how do we see light from them, or feel heat from the sun (aside fromstreaming particles hitting us) if heat and energy is not raidated in a vacuum?
Why is it that I can see a comedy remake of Apollo 13 (or any other space disaster movie) made with Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor?
Personally, I think that'd be pretty cool!
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
That would cause some problems for Apple's current trend. They use convection to cool the iBook (which I'm using now), the PowerBook, and the G4 Cube. And if I were NASA deciding to use a Mac in space, I'd prefer one of those smaller systems to a big (but super-importantly expandable, according to all negative reviews of the Cube) G4 mini-tower.
Mac users better start petitioning Apple to add fans back in so Macs can work on on the space computer market-share!
Man, I wish that was actually an issue. Space travel has really let me down. I know even the boomers thought we'd have regular civilian space flight by now.
Oh well, maybe nanotech will make space-flight cheaper...oops, don't have that yet, either.
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
Where do you get this idea?
:-(
From a documentary movie ("From the Earth to the Moon"), a book (I forget the title), and various. I could be wrong, and apparently am. I stand corrected.
No single ignition source of the fire was conclusively identified.
This I knew, but I wasn't saying otherwise.
This atmosphere presents severe fire hazards if the amount and location of combustibles in the Command Module are not restricted and controlled.
And, in the case of a high-pressure, pure-oxygen environment, just about anything can be considered a combustible.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.