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Beagle 2 Failure Theories
Dan East writes "New Scientist has an article discussing the failure of ESA's Beagle 2 Lander. Theories as to why the landing failed include thinner than expected upper atmosphere, extreme atmospheric temperature fluctuations, and possible physical damage to Beagle 2 seen in an image acquired immediately after it separated from Mars Express. Recent data acquired by Mars Express, as well as NASA's Mars Rovers, are helping direct investigations into the failure. So far only around half of Beagle 2's landing ellipse has been imaged in an attempt to locate remnants of the lander. USA Today is also running an AP story on these latest theories."
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers. Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized.
Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."
Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.
Fact: XFree86 is dropping support for *BSD. The remaining core group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)
Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.
Well if the Beagle 2 was designed and built by the French I would say someone sent a signal to it saying the Germans were coming an in an attempt to run away it smacked into the surface.
On the other hand if it was designed and built entirley by the English I would say someone sent a signal to it saying the Germans were coming and it tried to turn back and fight like hell with no chance of winning alone and just couldnt hold out long enough for the US rovers could get there.
Either way I am sure the Germans were part of a Beagle 2 failure
I think the Americans jammed the signals from it so they could look like winners when their own probe system got there. The last thing the current administration needed was to play second fiddle to a europe based project.
Maybe FORTKNOX did something to FUCK IT UP?!?!?
Just a thought. In your heart, you know I'm right.
The story says that the American missions landed without a probablem. That was due to their, "robust" airbags. We also spent over twice as much as they did. So when we encounter things we do not except everything still goes ok. When it comes to space flight, I don't mind spending alot of money, as long as that means everything will work out, or close to it. Instead of spending the extra money on the project( Europe ), they decided to waste 370 million, and have nothing to show for it except failure.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
Perhaps it could be because of decimalhexadecimal conversions. It is known that english to metric caused another Mars observer to go down, so the more complicated radix conversions could be at play here. Standardizing on hexadecimal SI (using base units without prefixes) would help.
-I am an elective eunuch.
It was made in the EUSSR.
You saw the report card?
Could it be that it was always an embarassment that his first wife (the non-kosher one), while a gimp, was also a brilliant mathematician and that always led to speculations about his own mathematical prowess?
I mean, whoever heard of re-writing history?
Meme yourself!
I also read once how Al was a great mathematician, so I think the circle is complete.
I bet it will turn out to have two holes shot right through it, and a sticker "Yankee go home".
If you cannot be bothered to include a decent debugging or descent information system, like the MERs did with tones, then you're flying blind. And you kind of deserve to never find out what happened.