NASA Finds Cause of Voyager 2 Glitch

astroengine writes "Earlier this month, engineers suspended Voyager 2's science measurements because of an unexpected problem in its communications stream. A glitch in the flight data system, which formats information for radioing to Earth, was believed to be the problem. Now NASA has found the cause of the issue: it was a single memory bit that had erroneously flipped from a 0 to a 1. The cause of the error is yet to be understood, but NASA plans to reset Voyager's memory tomorrow, clearing the error."

Comments

Re:Just incredible!

[Chris Burke]

Heh, yeah, I love how he tries to prove the mainframe is more powerful than laptops by first making his opinion the default, then requiring you to do something completely ridiculous to prove him wrong, like rewrite the entire software stack for the business mainframe. Oh you aren't going to recreate a hundred person-years of work just to demonstrate what common sense (and half an ounce of computer knowledge) would show plainly? That means I'm right! Put up or shut up, boyo!

The measure of power of hardware is not "what you can do with it", where that means existent software. The function of the software can be recreated on a different machine. Turing completeness and all that. The measure of power is, and always has been, equivalent number of operations per second. And hey that means you get to count your specialized FFT hardware as if it's equal to the same number of operations required on a laptop processor. All the vectorized instructions and the specialized I/O controllers go straight to the bottom line.

Guess what? The 1977 mainframe still gets its ass kicked by a machine running at close to 1 IPC at 500 MHz. The mainframes were very nice architectures with a lot of beefy design in them. They had it because they needed it. You needed a dozen I/O channels with dedicated controllers because the main CPUs couldn't handle that and anything else, and there was no other way to keep a sufficient data throughput from storage.