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Voyager Set To Enter Interstellar Space
Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."
I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.
The Voyager probes are approximately three months younger than me. All my life, I have followed the magical images and data these probes have been sending back to earth. In fact, it was the first images of saturn and jupiter that inspired me to be a scientist. It wasn't the pharma industry in which I work now. It wasn't the lure (lie?) of riches received for making the next big discovery. It was those probes, hurling through space sending back the most fascinating shit my young mind had ever witnessed. I spent almost my entire youth with my head buried in encyclopedias and books about astronomy, all made possible by Voyager 1 and 2. In the end I chose a different science path, but who knows...I could have ended up being a financial analyst (**shudders**)
Web 2.0 sucks too. Like now on slashdot if I feel like reading an article without logging in because I'm on a different computer or for whatever reason, I can't make the slider move so that I can see all the comments. I have to click on each one to expand it. But I like to read without having to opt in to read every comment. It's a lot more effort and detracts from what I want to do, which is concentrate on reading the comments (ALL the comments), without having to keep my hands on the mouse pad to click on each hidden comment. Why do the slashdot editors want to take away my choice of how to read the site, forcing me to log in, forcing me to undergo artificial delays before posting if I choose not to log it? Slashdot was much better in the old days :(
A friend of mine led the development team that built the onboard software for the Huygens probe. The QA cycles they went through would be insane for any normal project.
For example they gave the compiled code to a completely separate team and got them to reverse engineer the specifications.
This uncovered a Y2K bug in the ADA runtime that the code was built on
As the test driven development mantra goes - test until you aren't scared any more
Knowing that your code will be run once and only once in production, there's no second chances and that the box it's running on is some 10's of light hours away makes you rather easily scared
It all comes down to money. If you outsource your development to the lowest bidder and even try to beat a few more pennies out of their offer, you'll get a steaming pile. If you keep screaming "more coding faster!", you'll get a big steaming pile. Chase your best and brightest away with poor management and crazy bureaucratic proceduralism and you'll be lucky if the code is decentish.
If you willingly spend $100/line of code and ASK when it will be done rather than TELLING when it will be done, it'll be near bulletproof.