Slashdot Mirror
NASA Parts Scroungers Resort To eBay For Parts
beggs writes: "The New York Times is running this article about NASA using ebay and other web resources to find for sale stock piles of old hardware it needs to keep the Space Shuttle fleet up and running -- things like 8086 chips from pre-PC days!" Come to think of it, this might be a better way to take care of most NASA bidding anyhow.
NASA is not so stupid as to not contract for replacement parts for the actual shuttle from subcontractors. This is just for support gear. Probably quite a bit of this gear is custom-built by NASA engineers, like programmers who build their own toolkits. As the article says, it's easier to just scrounge up a board than pay someone to redesign some piece of equipment to use updated components.
I remember reading somewhere, that in order to supply parts to the military or NASA, you have to contractually agree to continue producing (or be able to produce) the purchased parts for something like 30 years, because equipment like jets and space shuttles are built to have a 30 year life span. Intel, when contracted, presumably agreed that they have to be able to make an 8086 until the space shuttle is no longer used.
So either the contract has expired and the shuttles have exceeded their lifespan, or Intel has broken its contract.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
In the Vernor Vinge Hugo Award winning SF novel, "A Deepness In the Sky", a slower than light star-spanning humanity of about 12,000 years from now was unable to consistently stay above barbarism: planets and local systems would collapse into pretechnological cultures, resulting in massive diebacks. In the novel, Earth has been resettled four times after total local extinction. The problem is that in humanity's experience to that point there is a limit to how sustainable that all complex systems, including operating systems, cultures and machine intelligences can be. The hero of the novel (there are several, including several you don't expect), Pham Nuwen, tries and fails to create a way to transcend the cycle of growth and collapse. One of his jobs is "Programmer At Arms" . The novel ADITS is bitingly ironic: it is set in the "Slow Zone", where faster than light travel, sentient Artificial Intelligences and truly complex systems are impossible, whereas Vinge's previous Hugo winner, "A Fire Upon The Deep", is set 30,000 years later in the "Low Transcend", where transhuman intelligences are possible. In AFUTD, the Zones are considered to be artificial constructs of unknown purpose, possibly to allow Slow Zone species a nursary in which to develop before hitting the real world. Vinge, who will be the Guest of Honor at ConJose, the World Science Fiction Convention this year in San Jose, California, U.S.A., has recently retired from teaching Computer Sciences and indicated he wanted it both ways: using his experience in Usenet to give the flavour of low-bandwidth faster-than-light messaging between very diverse alien cultures and transhuman intelligences (much of the first part of AFUTD is at "Relay"), whereas with ADITS he wanted to examine what life would be like where current complexity problems remain insoluble (ie. a setting where his "Singularity" inflection point between human and transhuman intelligence does not occur). At one point, Pham Nuwen is attempting to take control back from his captors and has to deal with very low-level (for the time) software. It is clear that based on the "start date" of that operating system that it is likely UNIX or, for purposes of this post, Linux or other UNIX relation. Vinge is obviously very conversant with UNIX and also happens to be one helluva writer.