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Spirit 'Will Be Perfect Again'
G. Holst writes "NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software. The fix, likely to be made Friday, could completely restore Spirit. "I think it will be perfect again," says the Mission Manager. Chalk this one up for earth!" There are numerous stories about Spirit and Mars: one describes being careful with rm -rf. Reader Tablizer sends in an interesting site: "I discovered Bill Momsen's website where he describes his experiences working on the first successful photographic mission to another planet: Mariner IV to Mars."
I'm reminded of the unforgettable Queen song:
Flash, a-ha, saviour of the universe
Flash, a-ha, he'll save everyone of us.....
".. I think it will be perfect again.." meaning that it was perfect the first time...?
-- Give us your technology and we'll give you all the cow lips you want.
Woo-hoo!
Glad to hear Spirit will be feeling herself again.
For all you kernel and OS heads out there. Was this primarily due to shitty software being run on the rover?
I mean could VxWorks be responsible for not being able to function with the Flash RAM filled?
-- taking over the world, we are.
I clicked the link, and couldn't find a unix command anywhere on the page!
I feel cheated. (And addicted.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Yeah! We're back in business!
(AP) "Attemps to wipe the flash memory clean on the Spirit rover failed today, when it was found out that someone flipped those tiny plastic switches to "protect" on the SD memory cards that are serving the unit.
A press conference is expected tomorrow to announce sending someone to Mars to set the SD cards to allow erasing."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"It's the only way to be sure."
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
I guess DOS was perfect too until someone divided by zero.
These guys are about to wipe the memory of a robot on another planet and they're confident and casual. Just flashing the bios of my motherboard in my computer room causes me anguish and fills me with terror...
What's specific to the science and engineering files that caused so much trouble?
NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software.
Obviously, this is an attempt to suppress the discovery of alien life on Mars. After a "severe communications fault," NASA is destroying the "scientific" data collected by Spirit. Coincidence? I think not.
I postulate that Echelon (yes, that Echelon) intercepted a message being transmitted by the alien race. Yes, our government subsequently disabled the probe to prevent successful reception!
Do you like German cars?
Normally I would be against just getting out the restore disc and starting over... it usually just causes the problem to come back later.
In this case I think it's a good idea. I'd hate to have to go to Mars to make a housecall on a sick puter
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
that sounds a little too similar to what i did with my fancy TI graphing calculator last week...
I'm surprised that they had kept the files that were to be used only during the cruise stage.(source: www.spaceflightnow.com )
Anyone here know why they bothered to keep the files? Wouldn't they want as much space as possible for the scientific data?
One has to wonder, is opportunity going to forego the same problems as spirit?.. As they are "identical" robots.. have steps been put in place to prevent the 2nd robot from "getting full".. I should certainly hope that we dont want this to happen again, as they might not be as lucky to regain it.
How come we're not awash with "Spirit was willing, but flash was weak" jokes?
"We're going to have to blow ROM".
"Dave, stop ... Stop, will you? Stop, Dave ... Will you stop, Dave ... Stop, Dave. I'm afraid ... I'm afraid ... I'm afraid, Dave ... Dave ... my mind is going ... I can feel it ... I can feel it ... My mind is going ... There is no question about it. I can feel it ... I can feel it ... I can feel it ... I'm a ... fraid ... "
They're saying mad-scientist-esque things like "I think it will be perfect again" and calling rocks "Cake."
They've officially lost it.
-n-
For 400 million USD, you better KNOW it will be perfect again before you run mkfs on it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apparently it was simply too many files and the FS ran out of inodes. Remember that they're constrained to a 256MB file system. It wouldn't surprise me if they used an 8 bit or 16 bit number for the inode count. (Ah, the joys of Vx(Doesn't)Works.)
On another note, does anyone know exactly what they're deleting here? While I understand that they need to get this mission underway, is there a chance they could lose valuable mission or navigational information?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Should have deleted all the porn from the flash memory before it launched.
The information coming in about the Rover's the last few days has been fascinating. I never really appreciated the kind of tech that went into these things. It really makes you sit back and think about how very far our species has come in the last 150 years. I mean Jules Verne was only begining to imagine landing on the moon while riding around England in a steam locomotive, now, 150 years later, we routinely launch things into orbit around the Earth, and land radio controlled machines on other planets to roam around.
This is truly a wonderful age to live in.
...sounds like someone forgot to mount /var on its own partition... :-)
/tmp or /var, which is mounted with /, and BAM it's a walk down to the datacenter.
c'mon, what *NIX admin hasn't made that mistake at some point? Process goes apesh*t, fills up
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
Spirit won't go along with the agenda of "the man", so they're taking away it's individuality, man. They just want to make it their robot, taking their photographs and doing their experiments. But will they invite it over for dinner? Will they let it date their daughter? Did they even give it a round-trip ticket? No, no and no, man.
Please restore ecosystem.
there's yer problem.
Everyone knows that hardware support in any unix sucks monkey dongs. Hell, these cheap bastards probably installed lunix based on all those 10 year old HOWTOs floating around the web.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sorry, Schernau's Law tells us that your post has no value, that you probably use AOL, own an X-box, and are as bad as the trolls, since you used the word 'puter' in your post.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I heard the headline that "Opportunity has plunged into the atmosphere of Mars," and I couldn't help adding to this in my head, "as well as Spirit, Motivation, Job Prospects, and Hope."
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
When I was young and foolish, I used a wipe utility (BC wipe) to wipe my main hard drive. First I carefully backed up the main drive to my second hard drive. Then the utility asked me to confirm that I wanted to wipe "Drive 1." I said OK, thinking that it was referring to the main hard drive. I did not realize that the main drive was actually identified as "Drive 0." So I wiped my second drive instead. Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident, but I always feel a twinge of concern when I hear someone claim that wiping a live drive on a production computer will fix everything.
It kind of makes me wonder, hadn't they dont extensive testing of the rovers before they sent them off?... I thought they did full-walkthrough type tests on the rovers here on earth, i.e taking pictures, navigating.. but what?... now the darn thing runs out of memory?.. I bet someone is smacking themselves for not checking that out properly beforehand.
Bad, Bad. stop feeding the trolls...
Their ISP received a subpoena from the RIAA. NASA is now wiping the memory in hopes that lawyers will not find kazaa and the 1,000 mp3s that are on Spirit.
I'm neither a rocket scientist nor a computer scientist, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how come there's not some sort of ROM somewhere in the rover itself that contains a backup of the system in its initial state? Obviously, you'd only use it in a worst-case scenario, but you could restore it and then there'd at least be something and they could reapply all the patches one by one.
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
A chemist, an engineer and a computer scientist are passing through a vast desert in a car when suddenly the car breaks down.
"Goddamnit! There must have been some sudden increase of enthalpy in the cylinder!" the chemist yells, gnashing his teeth, banging on the steering wheel.
"Maybe the fan belt broke or the battery is dead or the wheels came off.." the engineer mumbles.
After thinking a while the computer scientist shrieks in a shrill, frantic voice:
"Let's just try getting out of the car and getting back in!!!@!"
p
They're deleting all the telemetry and science data Spirit's taken since launch. The OS is in the EEPROMS. With one exception, they can repeat all of the measurements & photos that will be lost. The exception: As one of the orbiters happened to fly directly overhead it took some atmospheric measurements; and, simultaneously Spirit performed the same measurement from the ground -- This would have given them a full thickness measurement of what was going on in the atmosphere at that moment.
even with an in-animate object we are not comfortable with our own bodies.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
I wrote some demo fibre channel block-device drivers for vxWorks a few years ago, and I found that VxWorks's FAT FS was buggy. The bug only affected one flavor (I don't remember if it was FAT12, 16, or 32), but it was clearly reproducible and clearly an OS fault. It was a corner case and we found some way around it (like avoiding an writes with a length of 1MB).
Here's the usual rant you see here on slashdot, and it's true: since it was closed source, we couldn't verify that we'd caught all the bad cases, and we couldn't submit the fix to back to WindRiver.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Probably something like this:
/tmp
# ls
dscf0001.jpg* dscf0003.jpg dscf0007.jpg* dscf0009.jpg* dscf0011.jpg* dscf0013.jpg* dscf0015.jpg* dscf0017.jpg*
dscf0002.jpg* dscf0004.jpg* dscf0008.jpg* dscf0010.jpg* dscf0012.jpg* dscf0014.jpg* dscf0016.jpg*
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yes, that's what I always say when I fix a bug.
256 MB of Flash ROM?
Should have sprung for the iPod mini instead...
Badum-dum-ching!
To restart your Mars Rover, simply insert your NASA Emergency Restore Disc into the CD drive bay located at the side of the Rover. If Autoplay is enabled, the reinstallation software will start automatically. To start the reinstallation process manually, please see the Service Manual included with your Mars Rover OEM package...
They had testing but someone decided to install porn on the lander. :(
Is there a chance it's running windoze?
Cause everyone knows you have to reinstall windoze every so often. Yuk Yuk!
Cheap DRAM in your PC = Relatively cheap. Rad-tolerant (it's not really Rad-Hard. Flash sucks for Rad-Hard) memory = not so cheap. I'm sure the engeineers who designed the thing would have loved to have more memory. You can bet 256 Mb was not an arbitrary decision.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
It aint off the shelf compact flash, dingus. This is stuff specially engineered to be fault proof at the extreme heat/cold conditions of space and the martian surface.
I dont know for sure, nor do I care, but I'd imagine a ton of redundant modules running in a best-of-p configuration.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This is great news for the nerds and space geeks in all of us. More 3d pics coming soon!
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"... The we have done file deletes on the spacecraft before, so we've shown that does work. The file directories have all different names and you can convince yourself that you are actually deleting the right thing."
I am rather glad they gave all the directories different names. If they had managed to do otherwise, I would not go so far any more as to call the thing they have a "filesystem".
Might even be a future news: "NASA integrates first non-deterministic filesystem into space probe 'Hope'".
awk. it's too sed i can't fork.
My old man, who works at JPL, says that the current phrase going around campus is:
"Spirit is willing, but the Flash is weak."
And people wonder why NASA's budget keeps getting cut.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident
I kind of like the idea of "send original hard disk to Mars". This can make it hard to accidentally erase.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Isn't the Mars Scorecard missing a player.
The Beagle 2 anyone?
Spirit just needs a good jump start. Anyone got some really long jumper cables?
Remember when Maestro was released to the Slashdot crowd? Big mistake. That poor rover was slashdotted!
Apparently it was simply too many files and the FS ran out of inodes.
Although that is the simple version that most of the press has been relaying, if you've watched the press conferences, the engineers have been carefull to say that they have not been able to fully reproduce the exact same errors on their test rovers here on Earth. The exact cause of the problem really hasn't been determined. And yes, they did stress test the file system before they sent the rovers up and they never saw the type of problem that they're having now.
what about upx or some other compression to help give the flash some more space for the so-called junk files?
...is a really obnoxious habit. I wish slashdotniks would outgrow it. As an alternative, why not tie dental floss to flies and watch them buzz around in circles? It's much more funand educational, too.
You have to remember that the computer wasn't built this year. It was probably assembled several years ago and has been undergoing testing since.
The manager says: "First, we have to appoint a committee to investigate the problem and recommend a solution. Then, we must write a project plan, and review the specifications before we can start design and implementation. I estimate it will require about 3 months."
The engineer says: "I have some tools in my briefcase. I can rebuild the master brake cylinder in an hour or so, and we'll be on our way."
The programmer says: "No, no, no! First, we have to push the car up to the top of the hill and see if the brakes fail again!"
Makes me wonder... when spending over a million dollars, why can't you make sure you have enough memory?
;-)
I remember looking at the specs on this thing, and it seems paltry.
It should be incredibly obvious (by now) how fatal memory errors can be to a computational system, so... why doesn't it:
1) Have enough
and...
2) Have the ability to automatically detect and work around faulty bits
OR... did they fall for the vendor's "on site warranty"?
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I can appreciate having a higher level OS or OS 2nd stage components in an erasable ROM, but wouldn't it stand to reason that you'd want a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage? So that in case of corruption of writable memories you could get into a basic debug mode for reloading OS or otherwise fixing your higher level environment?
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but it strikes me that you'd want a real failsafe for fixing the computer stored in the most permanent memory possible, and kept with the lowest set of features necessary so it could be thoroughly debugged prior to being made.
But, as these things go, greater minds have thought of this I'm sure.
Web Browser Cache, Baja Men mp3 collection,Paris Hilton Video(in hopes to get a new one where the guy knows how to light a scene), and Spam from their mail client
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The history of space exploration is littered with bones.
Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a litterbug!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files...
Science and Engineering files indeed.
In an update to the story, the RIAA has decided to develop and send a battlefleet to Mars, on a tip that no-good-pirate types were resorting to OFF PLANET storage of illegally-downloaded mp3's.
-Styopa
Nasa has a multi-billion dollar annual budget and they can't afford one gigabyte flash card?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Daisy Daisy / Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy, / All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage,
But you'll look sweet on the seat/ Of a bicycle built for two !
no
Released versions of VxWorks do not have protected memory. (The development version does.) So nothing is there to prevent overwrites by concurrent tasks, etc.
Those of you in the audience experienced in embedded systems know that this makes sense for embedded hardwar -- VxWorks or not -- for three main reasons:
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free. It's not like, say, Mozilla, or even the Linux kernel, or even /bin/ls. These things get tested rigourously, not as an afterthought deligated to the junior programmer.
In systems which are allowed to fail once in a while, reboots are fast. There's no hard drive to spin up, no filesystem to fsck, etc. It can just go *click* and humans won't typically see an interruption in [whatever it was the doohickey was doing].
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc. If some critical part of the super-smart pacemaker fails (see #1), there's no victory in digging the device out of the corpse and saying, see, this other critical part wasn't affected, thanks to the memory protection! In those cases, memory protection just increases the cost and size of a device, without helping anything.
Protected memory is good for systems which do more than one thing, and/or have parts which can die without killing the whole device (e.g., a desktop computer). And as I said above, some embedded OSes are added such protection for customers who want to adapt their technology to more general-purpose tasks.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
...and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side!
Flash update you say? I wont enjoy it.
With great numbers come great responsibility!
It's porn. Someone wanted to be the first guy to get Venus to Mars.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Those probably didn't exist when they started development. Or if they did, they weren't yet certified for space travel.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not to flame, but come on dude. You really think they could overlook something that obvious?
...but I don't want to spend a lot of money.
NASA technicians are preparing to wipe Spirit's flash memory clean of science and engineering files that have stymied its software.
...and put games and pr0n on it, which will make the software work as intended.
You forgot to add that the Freemasons are the Bildeburgers' calling service.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
We'd be winning if Earth would quit sending in the second string players (ie. Russia). ;-)
-- Grow up and use mutt.
Other than the huge costs of transmissions equipment, does anyone know what kind of security they use to prevent hackers from doing this (like for instance some mischievous Russian space program scientist)?
Arbitrary sig
Tech-1: Hey, I thought you already rebooted it?
Tech-2: Dammit!!! I'll have to try again [grumble]
Tech-1: I don't understand...I thought this was a pretty simple reboot into cripple mode
Tech-2: [swearing silently]...I know! Remember the budget cuts we had?
Tech-1: Yeah...what have they got to do with this?
Tech-2: Well, project management got worried about whether or not we had any proprietary code from SCO running on the rover.
Tech-1: Oh, for crying out loud! Everyone knows that's a load of crap. So why did that make a difference?
Tech-2: Well, it didn't HAVE to, except that they had to choose an OS that they were fairly sure had no infringing code in it.
Tech-1: So, what did they go with Solaris, unixware?
Tech-2: Nope, too risky...and c'mon...like we're gonna run *unixware* on it...can't say I'm enjoying their choice, though.
Tech-1: I'm dying to know...what OS is it?
Tech-2: Well, Let's just say it's *really* hard to hit F8 at the right time when you're working from 100 million miles away...stupid Windows 98...
Tech-1: [mischevious look spreading across his face]...hey...didn't Microsoft just extend support for Windows 98? Who's got Bill Gates' number?
[Fade to black]
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
They should have completely simulated this mission by putting a rover down in an abandoned field and conducting a full analysis, just as they planned to do on Mars.
How could they have not stress-tested the file system? I'm amazed!
Were these files, by chance, secretly added by an unmentioned government security adminstration that wished to investigate strange emanations from the red planet?
Or am I just getting this expedition confused with the 2001 manned mission to Jupiter?
It also probably waited a while to be launched, and it took seven months just to get there.
They did not have a theory, they had a hypothesis. Christ, if professional engineers can't get it right....
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
They do test the rover in a sandbox, and very agressively at that. The problem they had was with the cruise files - unrelated to the fact that therover is on the ground. Cruise is 7 months, and the activities there are fairly low risk, so they didn't get the testbed for 7 months uninterrupted to test this.
I guess I'm not too impressed with armchair hindsight.
Helium balloons want to be free.
The OS is in the EEPROMS.
I'd be suprised if the main copy is in EEPROM. More than likely the main code is in a PROM, it may possibly be copied into EEPROM (or RAM) and executed from there, then it can be easily patched. There is probably a mechanism to reboot cold from PROM, or to reprogram the EEPROMs automatically (without needing operation of the main CPU).
PROM is way more reliable than an EEPROM for long term storage in a hostile environment.
Actually it is rocket science...
From the example of C-3po in a new hope we can clearly see that whiping things memorys does NOT make them perfect! He was never mean to R2D2 until AFTER his memory was wiped, do they want to start a fight between the two rovers? Better procede with caution!
I don't know what the exact weight of the exact flash card they are using is, but I would think a ROM backup would be in order for future projects.
Just a thought.
- Dan
The memory is not faulty. It is a bug in the filesystem software. The memory isn't full, but there are more files than the rover can handle. They were basically letting everything pile up, so the rover had eighteen days worth of files (and pre-landing files on top of that.) With the other rover they are deleting the files after they are received on Earth.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I've converted many of the raw stereo pairs of images from Spirit and Opportunity into 3D anaglyphs (red/blue glasses required). Check em out here: http://members.cox.net/mars3d Check it out. These are way better than the anaglyphs that NASA has released.
Hell, it should have been identified before lunch.
It is a bug in the filesystem software.
;-)
Maybe they should have gone with $0.25 license... instead of the one with the 512 entry limit.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
All your flash are belong to us!
Looking at some other VxWorks development sites it is apparent that the file system code is not the most robust. For those of you that don't know embedded systems, it is actually quite common to not have any file system at all. Wind River in fact has strong cautions about using FAT because it's not robust and there's all sorts of reports about DOS having problems and having to perform a chkdsk. VxWorks does not have any tools like chkdsk built-in either. About all you can do when there's filesystem corruption is to reformat.
Also, running out of memory in VxWorks is a critical problem. Think of it as a single program with a fixed total amount of memory. "system" calls are basically not much more than local function calls. If you run out of memory, it is highly likely that a function call will die.
The flash file system, from what I can see, appears to be rather limited and quite primitive compared to other Flash file systems like JFFS and JFFS2. The default configuration is limited to a maximum size of 40MB, but can be expanded up to 128MB, I believe you can also have only a limited number of files.
Embedded programming is rather different than writing for a desktop OS. Your application *must not crash* for any reason, must not have any memory leaks, and must be able to handle all boundary conditions.
Also, in VxWorks, a task is like a thread. All memory is globally visible. Any function can call any other function.
You tend to do things a bit differently. You may have a lot more error checking code in the released product when stability is required, and a lot more code to recover if there's a problem. You also tend to write a lot of code for tracing events and debugging and for something like the rovers you'd leave that code in to debug problems remotely.
Filesystems are not one of VxWorks strong points, but then again, many embedded applications don't need much, if any, filesystem. There is no root filesystem either.
Think of VxWorks as the Linux kernel and all tasks as linked-in modules. It can load additional modules similar to how Linux loads loadable modules. In fact, like Linux, they're basically just object files.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
If the mission had gone smoothly, it wouldn't have garnered nearly the same level of publicity. (Don't get me started on the MS v MikeRoweSoft thing.)
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free.
Well, apparently VxWorks itself has some serious bugs.
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc
There is no reason for the propulsion system to malfunction just because it "walks off the end of a garbage pointer". Systems can and should be designed that half the subcomponents can "walk off the end of a garbage pointer" and the whole thing should still function.
But you are right to this degree: the issue is not "protected memory". Protected memory is itself a poor woraround for a language that is ridiculously poor at error handling and that nothing safety-critical or even mildly important should ever get written in: C.
The sad fact is that the quality of programming for embedded systems is as poor as for anything; they simply try to compensate for that with more testing. And that's not the way to do it.
"I want you to take that unit to Anchorhead in the morning and have its memory erased!"
You must think in Russian.
Your use of the word 'bitch' proves my point 100%.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Tycho Brahe lived for 200 years? That's insane!
"In the late 15th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made a great number of celestial observations, concentrating on Mars. In 1600 he hired an assistant,"
Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.
Think "Hubble".
Not Uranus? Ok... so it was lame. It's Friday and I'm bored.
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
with my digital camera on a trip. They went nuts taking pictures. Don't these people know ANYTHING abut digital photograpy?
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
See this slideset, in particular the one titled "DOS File System" (slide 16.)
For a 256MB flash, it'd be FAT16. FAT16 only limits the root directory size to 512 entries for a disk type media (from here.)
Elsewhere it was said that they (NASA's engineers) weren't able to reproduce the problem exactly. I'm still very curious about this... as I said elsehere I've used DOS FAT16 under an RTOS (Thread-X) with lots of files and didn't see this kind of thing happen. Then again we hammered hell out of the FS and even fixed some problems with it.
Seriously, when are people going to realise that you can't just take modern components you'd use with your computer and put it in a space craft?
Not only did it take ~7 months (I think) to get to Mars, meaning it was already 7 months "obsolete" when it landed, it was also probably not launched for a LONG time after it was completed. They have to test it extensively and test for every possible scenario they can come up with. They also have to have equipment that is suitable for the extremes of space travel. High G forces, extreme vibration, extreme temperature differences, radiation, and probably thousands of other things I don't know about.
Put simply, YOUR PC THAT SITS ON YOUR DESKTOP WON'T SURVIVE A ROCKET LAUNCH INTO SPACE. And if it did survive the actual launch and made it into space, it would fail very quickly.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I would put two 250GB harddisk in the orbiter and make the rovers upload all data they can to the orbiter on each pass, and delete those files automatically. The slower transmission to Earth could then proceed from the disks.
Each rover uses 256MB flash and so does my 5 megapixel camera. I know for a fact that I can saturate that space fast in a photography frenzy, so I carry a laptop in the car with charger to transfer everything to it if I'll need more pictures.
Altho the two rovers have been a staggering success on Mars, I am surprised at two overlooks:
(1) Keeping track of file size and free space.
(2) What happens if the space is full.
Even Linux on a measly ARM720T does a much better job.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"I will be man again some day"
Give it up for the old school Sierra games.
Go NASA.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The deadline for the mission was very tight, and there's no slipping a deadline imposed by the motion of planets through space. They either had to declare it ready and "ship", or never ship. They couldn't afford the cost of waiting a couple of years for the next launch window. Now or never.
So they built as fast as they could, used whatever time they had for testing and tweaking, and if they tweaked they had to restart the testing.
Every engineer on the team would have preferred more time for testing and tweaking, I'm sure. They didn't have it.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Might even be a future news: "NASA integrates first non-deterministic filesystem into space probe 'Hope'".
Sure, that comes when they used Embedded Longhorn with the SQLServer based FS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The good news is the disc is right there on the rover.
The bad news is the robot arm is going to have to wrestle the Lego guy for it. And the Lego guy gets to use the arm he HASN'T been holding up in air for eight months solid...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dam hope that there is not power failure during that operation!!
As a friend put it "I am afraid to flash my bios without a good UPS."
I guess they were doing df -k rather than df -ki ...
- J
From the 1965 Mariner 4 website: We also had access to TV cameras located throughout the building, some with tilt and pan controls. A favorite pastime was to train the camera on the front door, and when a particularly attractive female entered, to follow her on her walk through the building.
First skirt-cam? Geeks never change.
It seems typical desktop computer habbits were applied to an embedded system that due to hardware and space-environmental-conditioning constraints, does not have a lot of the protections that a full-fledge desktop-like OS has. Thus, their desktop habbits eventually caught up with them. It would be nice to have desktop-like features, but that was not a practical option.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA does the impossible! It has made me sympathetic to the rich assholes who secretly transfer millions of dollars out of the USA to tax havens like Lichtenstein and Cayman Islands.
The Americans insist on pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on this nonsense, even though they have many real and serious problems that need funds.
The entire space program is based on two principals:
one is creating super-weapons to blast the shit out of anyone with space-based lasers who dares challenge the right of global corporations to take their money.
The second is to provide fat government jobs to white people with science degrees who can't or won't find jobs that provide productive benefit to anyone.
If the rich decide that they don't want to pay for this horseshit anymore, well good luck to them! Let the rest of the people know how you get away with it so that they can do it too.
Hey, this is Slashdot...if *I* thought it was funny, everybody else has to, too. Get with the program, already.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I am indeed, since your post appeared after I updated the killfile with new assholes. I do apologize.
Um. If you think that major software is only ever seen/touched/affected by the original authors and the final end-users, and nobody else, then clearly I won't be getting my point across today. Look, I'm sorry, I don't know how much of our work is covered by the NDA, and I'm not going to bother reading it all just for the sake of a /. post. (Nothing personal, I just avoid lawyer crap as much as possible.)
*looks at three bookcases overflowing, sighs, makes mental note to buy a fourth case*
First I've never read it, now I read it too much. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Like the VxWorks situation, there seems to be nothing I can say that will make you think, hey, maybe just maybe this guy knows what he's talking about.
See, when the actual engineers tell me that they've reviewed a certain feature, measured it, analyzed it, and decided that they don't want it, I'm pretty certain they know what they're doing. Frankly, I don't need to worry about some random slashdotter's opposing opinions, because, well, they're clearly wrong in this situation. I mean, I just got off the phone with one of the engineers, and they're quite pleased that "unneeded and unused features are no longer present, or can be disabled". Hostile /. posts from a collection of armchair rocket scientists aren't going to hold a lot of weight with me.
As I mentioned previously, these kinds of protection are being added in, on request, because they're obviously useful in many scenarios. But nothing comes for free, and what y'all seem determined to ignore is that there are scenarios where the cost of protected memory blocks in time/space/money is not acceptable.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The same people who got miles and kilometers mixed up... :)
Just joking