Mars Rovers' Software Upgraded

cheros writes to note the news that NASA is upgrading the software in the Mars rovers to make them smarter in a number of ways. From the article: "The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers."

Comments

SCO Sues...

[nemmi]

SCO sues for copyright infringement--new at 11.

Well, Yeah ... Sorta

[vtcodger]

RFID Disruptive? Maybe. But it isn't the technology that is the problem. It's applying it intelligently which seems to me more a management problem than an IT problem. But yeah, I'll buy that it RFID is going to cause a lot of IT people to work 16 hour days learning to deal with its quirks.

Web services? Maybe as much a decade from being ready for prime time. The only disruption will be to folks who are crazy enough to be early implementors of this partially baked concept. Yes, there are a few folks who need this or can use this today. More power to them. But implementing this stuff before bandwidth, latency, defective caching, and probably a bunch of other things that no one has thought are resolved is going to be painful -- for the implementors (who deserve the pain) and the users (who don't).

Virtual Servers? Sure, why not? How big a deal is it? I have no idea. What happens when two virtual machines try to share a device that requires several commands to perform one logical operation? That can't work, can it? Is there some sort of uber-OS that moderates that?

Advanced graphics processing? You're kidding right. Sure, it's a big deal. For about 3% of the users. Who cares about advanced graphics for reading e-Mail, POS, writing Word Docs or even web browsing? I must be missing something here.

Mobile security? A problem? You bet. Solutions that are any damn good. color me skeptical. But that's just a gut reaction. Maybe it's just a matter of learning to use the right existing technologies in the right way. A second coat of skeptical if you don't mind. First one is dry.