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Ground Crew Back In Touch With LightSail Solar Spacecraft
Yesterday, we noted that the Planetary Society's solar-sail powered craft had lost radio contact with its controllers here on Earth; Engadget reports that the group has issued an update, and the news is good. From the Society's release:
"The solar sailing spacecraft test mission, a precursor to a 2016 mission, has now resumed contact after a suspected software glitch affected communications. The LightSail team will soon determine when to attempt deployment of the spacecraft’s Mylar solar sails."
would be nice if everything works, when all the tests are done, to put the sail in a continuos orbit around the sun and get as much speed as possible and then send it to alpha centauri and let it take some pictures from there
SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP's lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.
Link to original source
The GIMP developers aren't happy at all about this. They say that Sourceforge impersonated the GIMP developers, and abused the trademarks owned by the GNOME foundation.
"The solar sailing spacecraft test mission, a precursor to a 2016 mission..."
Uh huh. Lets hope they get a good communications engineer to help them before then. The previous thread on this was full of general embedded practice advice (mostly all good) but one very important thing was not mentioned:
You need the telemetry and command/control hardware to *not* depend on the OS that is running. Ideally, you would even have a simple state machine that continues to send a beacon when the processor is b0rked, and in that case will respond to a (limited set) of simple commands directly in hardware.
This is easy to do. One thing in the other thread that was quite funny are comments along the lines of "it's not like we have to use an 1802 these days..." Except that if there was a 1802 COSMAC in there to deal with basic housekeeping, you could have kicked your linux easily... there is a reason these expensive Silicon on Sapphire chips have occasionally still been used recently... radiation immunity and extreme simplicity, think of it like a remote control.
Land it on Mars and use the mylar sail to cover a cave entrance. A great habitat would be waiting for the colonists. Sure, there are a couple of techincal challanges with either idea - but that can be worked out in the software.
The engineers first thought to write a backend closely adapted to the hardware of the spacecraft, then they saw how PHP just worked and so quickly. This is the fucking result. Never use PHP!!
Are they going to fix the problem or just keep manually rebooting?
Badum TISH!
SourceFarce MUST allow reporting and discussion of it's actions here on SlashOwned, or we WILL know the reason why?
The fault of that lies in Congress.
Spend Middle East War money on NASA and science and it goes a lot faster.
You cannot successfully argue against war itself as a waste of human resources or a needless monetary expense. Sure you can philosophize and get a show of nodding heads in peacetime, but then something awful happens and someone shouts "Remember the Maine!" or "Hitler will invade the UK, then Mexico!" or "Let's get Bin Laden!" and all is moot. Inquiring line items is useful... such as whether ~$60 billion disappeared while out-sourcing the supply line or whether airlifting $40 billion in 'unmarked bills' into Iraq was a great idea.
Be sure to tune in C-SPAN today [Sunday] at 4:00pm ET to see how many senators believe the Patriot Act is a good thing. But I'd bet my bottom dollar that all the NSA rhetoric will center on so-called 'call metadata sharing agreements' with nary a word about full content backbone taps which are the greatest threat.
Government spending is a mysterious process. When it is time for the Fed to mint virtual money for Quantitative Easing, bail out banks by easing their losses, or the Federales to finance wars by raising the trade deficit ceiling and selling bonds to the Chinese we are awash in Magical Unicorn Money. When it is budget time every cent is haggled or omnibussed. Clearly this beast has two heads.
But you have to get more specific than 'military spending'. Pick something, anything and try to start a grass roots movement to attack it. Or better yet, just spend your time 'selling' space exploration in all of its forms. Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn't completely joking when he suggests that a militarized space race with China (or rumors thereof) would jump-start the process. A new Cold War would certainly unlock that Magical Unicorn Money. It may seem odd but weaponizing space is actually a good idea.
But there is something I call the 'Pizza Delivery Syndrome', where someone desirous of something, say a Space Program, will seize upon a money-factoid such as this
cite "Consumers spend around 33 billion U.S. dollars in quick service pizza restaurants each year in the United States. Takeout pizza constitutes the largest share of spending within this category at nearly 15 billion U.S. dollars annually, followed by pizza delivery at around ten billion. This is perhaps unsurprising considering more than 20 percent of U.S. consumers eat takeout or delivered meals at least once a week. While older generations appear less dependent on such services, around 40 percent of 18 to 54 year olds felt that takeout food was essential to their way of life as of November 2014..."
and create, out of thin air, some hypothetical world where every one who desires a pizza is visited by a Fairy Godmother who smiles and asks, do you really want that pizza or could we all fulfill mankind's most glorious dream? Your wish is my command. In this scenario they always choose the pizza, statistics show. It serves as foundation for acerbic commentary on the wretched excess of modern humans. This is a dead end because (on the whole) people would rather talk about pizza than space.
Ask not what pizza lovers can do for you.
Ask what you can do to send pizza into
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
They apparently forgot that you have to keep the string tight between the tin cans.