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NASA To Catalog and Release Source Code For Over 1,000 Projects
An anonymous reader writes "By the end of next week, NASA will release a master catalog of over 1,000 software projects it has conducted over the years and will provide instructions on how the public can obtain copies of the source code. NASA's goal is to eventually 'host the actual software code in its own online repository, a kind of GitHub for astronauts.' This follows NASA's release of the code running the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer a few years back. Scientists not affiliated with NASA have already adapted some of NASA's software. 'In 2005, marine biologists adapted the Hubble Space Telescope's star-mapping algorithm to track and identify endangered whale sharks. That software has now been adapted to track polar bears in the arctic and sunfish in the Galapagos Islands.' The Hubble Space Telescope's scheduling software has reportedly also been used to schedule MRIs at hospitals and as control algorithms for online dating services. The possibilities could be endless."
Code works... User Expectation Changes.
COBOL code still works. However people don't want to use it in a terminal/terminal emulator. They want it on a Web Page, or at least via GUI screens. Being that these screens now have a resolution of at least 1024x768 (Usually much higher) vs 640x200 displayed in text of 80x25 people will want to see more data per screen, charts and graphs next to their data.
We use to have positions called Data Entry and Computer Operators. Who's job was just to punch in data from one system to the next and people who use the software, who are trained not to cause it to crash. Today we get data from many feeds, and the system needs to be crash proof.
Your New Device has a new set of User Inputs and Outputs that the OS needs to handle. Multi-Touch screens, Multible displays, Cameras, motion sensors, GPS... which could offer an advantage if implemented.
We look back at the old computers and we go wow how cool were they, they seem to do the same job as today's computers did but with 1/100th the performance. But what has changed is the software had gradually did more work, that you use to do by hand. Plus they are a heck a lot more reliable then they were 20+ years ago.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I *wish* NASA had released the AGC source code. I run the project providing the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer Code (and other Apollo missions as well) which is linked in the summary, and I can assure you that none of that code was released by NASA, provided by NASA, nor was made available through NASA's assistance. You can thank some dedicated private citizens for the availability of that source code.
-- Ron Burkey
Oblig. https://xkcd.com/1244/
TFA contains links to Wired articles. Couldn't find a link to a NASA catalogue so TFA is a 'heads up' of what is to come, yes?
Here's the link to the DARPA catalogue: http://www.darpa.mil/OpenCatal...
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Over twenty years ago there were computers that hardware and software that were designed to work together. At least two of these systems had extra tag bits in memory that defined the memory contents. Specifically I am talking about Symbolics Lisp Machines and Burroughs Large Systems that natively ran Algol. I worked on both of these systems and they were intrinsically more reliable then any systems I know of today.
Because of the tagged memory they had hardware protection against a large class of errors that current systems encounter all the time. It was possible to find the bugs and eliminate them so they did not re-occur. It also protected against having undetected errors, which is a true nightmare.
Having hardware and software designed at the same time results in a better product. This is even more significant when the system is designed to run a specific high level language. Everything has less bugs.
Heck, Cray machines had ECC memory: SECDED. Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection. They needed it, because memory was not so reliable as today, but now you are lucky to just have a parity bit. All this work is going on, and no one has a clue if there are bad results or not.
As an industry we have gone backwards. That's not an opinion, it's an observation.
Why is Snark Required?
If COBOL stopped working, you'd lose your back account immediately, and likely the entire worlds financial markets would collapse simultaneously.
Yeah sure, like some trifling little issue like global financial collapse would slow down the taxman?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You're on to something here, but not for the reasons that you think. NASA has been releasing source for a long time. It's only that getting this source requires at least a mountainload of paperwork (U.S. citizens only, etc.), and it's usually costly. It's not like they don't have a catalog already. If it's going to be more of the same, then I'd call it outright deception. Note that nowhere it's stated that the code will be under a free source license!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Of course these days all of this can be done, too, much faster, on off-the-shelf hardware. Just because the hardware doesn't have tag bits doesn't mean your compilers can't implement them. I'm running a bit of safety critical code on a bunch of ARM CPUs and all of the data RAM contents are tagged, pointers are tagged, and there is also software-driven error correction for RAM, execution log, restarts, those sorts of things that were en vogue at one point or another in the "hi-rel mainframe" market.
I have a couple of off-the-shelf servers from Dell that not only have error correcting RAM, but also have a spare memory stick and can cope with the failure of an entire chip on a RAM stick. So what you hail so eagerly is - who'd have thought - a standard feature on off-the-shelf hardware that can be had under $2K.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.