In the 1960s there was a lot of discussion about FOBS (Fractional Orbit Bombardment System), an idea that was popular in the Soviet Union. This was a nuclear warhead delivery system that involved putting a nuclear warhead in low Earth orbit and deorbiting it over the desired target. The idea of nuclear weapons in orbit, waiting for someone to push a button, made many people unhappy. This type of weapon was banned by treaty.
The plutonium paranoia is a recent development. NASA flew RTGs on deep space missions and used them to power the ALSEP lunar experiment packages left on the Moon by the Apollo missions.
I doubt there are any grounds for declaring the law to be unconstitutional. As I understand it, contract law is covered by the common law, unless a statute like the UCC overrides it. The legislature is free to change the rules.
>SARCASM< Let me take this opportunity to thank all those Maryland voters who voted for Parris Glendenning and all the other fine Democrats who have made Maryland what it is today. >/SARCASM<
I'm not sure that there is a lot of difference between the two. Years ago, I read an interesting observation on how easy it was to convert NAZI fanatics into Communist fanatics, and vice versa, in Germany. I think the author of the observation was Himmler or Gehlen.
I hope Hitler and Stalin are sharing a pit in hell.
I think I had a copy of that program. It was an MS-DOS backup program that wrote a parity sector on every track. This allowed it to recover from disk errors as long as no more than one sector was bad on any given track.
I don't know why everyone seems to hate the Apple iMac mouse. I find it to be comfortable and easy to use. A second button would make it more difficult to use, at least for the way I hold the mouse, with my forefinger on the button's dimple and my thumb and ring finger on the sides of the mouse. When I use multi-button mice, I like the cheap Logitech three-button mice. They fit my hand and I don't have to move my fingers around to click the buttons.
Once the Internet becomes widespread and cheap, cheap enough that portable Internet communication devices are given away like calculators are today, what will happen to languages with a small user base? Will they end up like Gaelic, Yiddish and many aboriginal languages? Will everyone have to learn English, or perhaps English, Mandarin or Hindustani, to be a fully functional person in the New World?
The problem in many areas is the telephone company. They control the right-of-ways and own the copper and fiber. It wouldn't be a problem if they leased the copper or fiber at a reasonable price, but they want to sell you a T1 or T3 for an outrageous price that has no relationship to the cost of providing the service.
What about reliability? If I am building a cluster of hundreds of computers, I don't want bottom-of-the-line boxes that fail all the time. Something like this requires reliability engineering to make sure the system's MTBF is acceptable.
Re:3,300,000 pounds of thrust (Each!)
on
Hubble Turns 10
·
· Score: 2
70 tons of aluminum oxide? Oh my God, we're all going to die!
Don't forget about the vast quantities of dihydrogen monoxide produced by the main engines.
NASA must be stopped before they destroy the planet!
Many vendors try to justify the deletion of printed manuals by saying that it saves trees, reduces shipping costs and other malarkey.
The reality is that they want to save money. It costs serious money to write, edit, design and print high quality manuals.
I recently bought a retail copy of Microsoft Office 2000 and it had no manuals. This is not a cheap software package. I felt I had been ripped off (again) by Microsoft.
Help files and PDF files are not a substitute for printed documentation. You can't do high quality graphics and book design when the output device is a CRT. A two-dimensional display is not an adequate substitute for a book.
There is also a concern about detecting the failure or loss of GPS during a landing approach. You don't want your GPS receiver to be telling you that everything is wonderful, as your aircraft flies into the ground.
Doing something new in metric units is easy. Switching from English/Imperial to metric is a bitch when you have invested huge amounts of money and training in the old units.
Spacecraft navigation is the descendant of aircraft navigation which descended from the navigation of wooden ships. That is why they still use knots, feet and nautical miles.
I've wondered how we could switch to metric units for the operation and navigation of aircraft without killing thousands of people in the process. Everyone is used to "500 knots at 35,000 feet", and the air traffic control system is built around those units. How do we seamlessly change that to metric units? Plus the pilots have the old units deeply embedded in their brains. They know that the stall speed of their plane is 100 knots, the fuel consumption of the engine is 10 gallons/hour and many other important facts in the old units.
I spent years writing telemetry processor software for NASA ground stations, including software to support the Shuttle. You have to have a basic knowledge of Shuttle computer systems to understand how the telemetry is structured.
The GPCs (General Purpose Computer) in the Shuttle use two software packages. Four of the computers run PASS (Primary Avionic Software System), which was originally written by the IBM Federal Systems Division. The fifth computer runs BFS (Backup Flight System), which was originally written by North American-Rockwell. The "operating system" is unique to the Shuttle, it isn't a port of a commercial product. PASS is the primary system, BFS is there as a backup in case of a common mode software failure during ascent or entry. The Shuttle is a fly-by-wire spacecraft. All of the control surfaces, and many other critical functions, are controlled by the computers. Without an operational computer, you crash and burn. Shuttle software is written in a language called HAL/S (High-Order Aerospace Language Shuttle), which was developed by Intermetrics. The Shuttle's operating system is a hard real-time operating system based on cyclic scheduling. A task is guaranteed to get N cycles of CPU time every X milliseconds. The tasks are managed by three executives, the HFE (High Frequency Executive), MFE (Medium Frequency Executive) and LFE (Low Frequency Executive). A task that issues commands to control surfaces is going to run at a high frequency. A task that checks tire pressure (really!) can run at a low frequency.
The main computers in the Shuttle are IBM AP-101S computers. The AP-101S is a member of the IBM 360/370 family of computers.
The problem with hard drives is their fragility. They are too sensitive to vibration and hostile environmental conditions. Tape drives have been successfully flying on spacecraft for decades.
The Space Station was using radiation hardened 80386 chips the last time I checked.
The point is that never before has the US tried to implement a broadcast standards change that wiped out the functionality of existing equipment.
The FCC killed the 42-50 MHz FM broadcast band at the behest of "General" David Sarnoff of RCA. Sarnoff finally succeeded in crushing Major Armstrong, the pioneer of FM broadcasting, who committed suicide after losing too many battles with RCA.
It may not be "fair" but the U.S. Government (the.gov and.mil people) paid for much of the early development and operation of the Internet, which was primarily a U.S. network for years. That is a historical fact, not a devious imperialist conspiracy.
It would be more accurate to say that the modern Negro, and all other human "races" are descendants of Africans from 150,000 (or whatever the correct number is) years ago.
Most of the RISC chips are fairly clean, three address, load-store architectures. You might take a look at the Alpha for a nice 64-bit chip.
What I miss are all those neat PDP-11 addressing modes. I used to love writing assembler in MACRO-11.
At my workplace, we excessed our PDP-11/23 running V7 UNIX last year. It had 256KW of RAM and a 40MB 8" Winchester disk. It was so old that it didn't have vi or csh, just ed and sh. Networking was limited to UUCP over a 1200 bps modem.
I think the no maintenance or tech support is because the Bell System had signed a consent decree with the Justice Department that prohibited their entry into the computer and software business. This restriction was removed when the Bell System was broken up.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1960s there was a lot of discussion about FOBS (Fractional Orbit Bombardment System), an idea that was popular in the Soviet Union. This was a nuclear warhead delivery system that involved putting a nuclear warhead in low Earth orbit and deorbiting it over the desired target. The idea of nuclear weapons in orbit, waiting for someone to push a button, made many people unhappy. This type of weapon was banned by treaty.
The plutonium paranoia is a recent development. NASA flew RTGs on deep space missions and used them to power the ALSEP lunar experiment packages left on the Moon by the Apollo missions.
Information on the bill (Senate Bill 142) can be found here, including the text of the bill and amendments, and the record of the roll call votes.
>SARCASM<
Let me take this opportunity to thank all those Maryland voters who voted for Parris Glendenning and all the other fine Democrats who have made Maryland what it is today.
>/SARCASM<
Here is an article that describes what happened to one gun oriented web page on AOL.
I hope Hitler and Stalin are sharing a pit in hell.
I think I had a copy of that program. It was an MS-DOS backup program that wrote a parity sector on every track. This allowed it to recover from disk errors as long as no more than one sector was bad on any given track.
I don't know why everyone seems to hate the Apple iMac mouse. I find it to be comfortable and easy to use. A second button would make it more difficult to use, at least for the way I hold the mouse, with my forefinger on the button's dimple and my thumb and ring finger on the sides of the mouse. When I use multi-button mice, I like the cheap Logitech three-button mice. They fit my hand and I don't have to move my fingers around to click the buttons.
Once the Internet becomes widespread and cheap, cheap enough that portable Internet communication devices are given away like calculators are today, what will happen to languages with a small user base? Will they end up like Gaelic, Yiddish and many aboriginal languages? Will everyone have to learn English, or perhaps English, Mandarin or Hindustani, to be a fully functional person in the New World?
The problem in many areas is the telephone company. They control the right-of-ways and own the copper and fiber. It wouldn't be a problem if they leased the copper or fiber at a reasonable price, but they want to sell you a T1 or T3 for an outrageous price that has no relationship to the cost of providing the service.
What about reliability? If I am building a cluster of hundreds of computers, I don't want bottom-of-the-line boxes that fail all the time. Something like this requires reliability engineering to make sure the system's MTBF is acceptable.
Don't forget about the vast quantities of dihydrogen monoxide produced by the main engines.
NASA must be stopped before they destroy the planet!
The reality is that they want to save money. It costs serious money to write, edit, design and print high quality manuals.
I recently bought a retail copy of Microsoft Office 2000 and it had no manuals. This is not a cheap software package. I felt I had been ripped off (again) by Microsoft.
Help files and PDF files are not a substitute for printed documentation. You can't do high quality graphics and book design when the output device is a CRT. A two-dimensional display is not an adequate substitute for a book.
There is also a concern about detecting the failure or loss of GPS during a landing approach. You don't want your GPS receiver to be telling you that everything is wonderful, as your aircraft flies into the ground.
Spacecraft navigation is the descendant of aircraft navigation which descended from the navigation of wooden ships. That is why they still use knots, feet and nautical miles.
I've wondered how we could switch to metric units for the operation and navigation of aircraft without killing thousands of people in the process. Everyone is used to "500 knots at 35,000 feet", and the air traffic control system is built around those units. How do we seamlessly change that to metric units? Plus the pilots have the old units deeply embedded in their brains. They know that the stall speed of their plane is 100 knots, the fuel consumption of the engine is 10 gallons/hour and many other important facts in the old units.
Also see CACM Volume 27, Issue 9 (September 1984) for an interesting article on Shuttle software.
I spent years writing telemetry processor software for NASA ground stations, including software to support the Shuttle. You have to have a basic knowledge of Shuttle computer systems to understand how the telemetry is structured.
The GPCs (General Purpose Computer) in the Shuttle use two software packages. Four of the computers run PASS (Primary Avionic Software System), which was originally written by the IBM Federal Systems Division. The fifth computer runs BFS (Backup Flight System), which was originally written by North American-Rockwell. The "operating system" is unique to the Shuttle, it isn't a port of a commercial product. PASS is the primary system, BFS is there as a backup in case of a common mode software failure during ascent or entry. The Shuttle is a fly-by-wire spacecraft. All of the control surfaces, and many other critical functions, are controlled by the computers. Without an operational computer, you crash and burn. Shuttle software is written in a language called HAL/S (High-Order Aerospace Language Shuttle), which was developed by Intermetrics. The Shuttle's operating system is a hard real-time operating system based on cyclic scheduling. A task is guaranteed to get N cycles of CPU time every X milliseconds. The tasks are managed by three executives, the HFE (High Frequency Executive), MFE (Medium Frequency Executive) and LFE (Low Frequency Executive). A task that issues commands to control surfaces is going to run at a high frequency. A task that checks tire pressure (really!) can run at a low frequency.
The problem with hard drives is their fragility. They are too sensitive to vibration and hostile environmental conditions. Tape drives have been successfully flying on spacecraft for decades.
The Space Station was using radiation hardened 80386 chips the last time I checked.
The FCC killed the 42-50 MHz FM broadcast band at the behest of "General" David Sarnoff of RCA. Sarnoff finally succeeded in crushing Major Armstrong, the pioneer of FM broadcasting, who committed suicide after losing too many battles with RCA.
It may not be "fair" but the U.S. Government (the .gov and .mil people) paid for much of the early development and operation of the Internet, which was primarily a U.S. network for years. That is a historical fact, not a devious imperialist conspiracy.
It would be more accurate to say that the modern Negro, and all other human "races" are descendants of Africans from 150,000 (or whatever the correct number is) years ago.
What I miss are all those neat PDP-11 addressing modes. I used to love writing assembler in MACRO-11.
At my workplace, we excessed our PDP-11/23 running V7 UNIX last year. It had 256KW of RAM and a 40MB 8" Winchester disk. It was so old that it didn't have vi or csh, just ed and sh. Networking was limited to UUCP over a 1200 bps modem.
I think the no maintenance or tech support is because the Bell System had signed a consent decree with the Justice Department that prohibited their entry into the computer and software business. This restriction was removed when the Bell System was broken up.
Can't you still broadcast a HDTV network feed even if you have no HDTV production equipment?