The point isn't to pick a nit, only to note that there are reliable mechanisms that can be used for reliable long haul communications at microwave frequencies. I'm not personally familiar with the attenuation of the atmosphere at 1THz and up; perhaps if we generate 100 watts at 1THz we can use tropo there too...
One way to make this process more palatable is to consider implementing it from the ground up, not imposing it from the top down. That is, unless you intend literally to have code police physically approve every line of code, it'll work better if the programming staff buy into the concepts noted above. Said concepts being Good Ideas indeed.
Peer review can go a long way to developing working standards that YOUR programmers want to use in YOUR shop. You won't be revisiting existing code to go make it conform to The New Way, so your programmers will be living with old and new side by side for quite a while.
--buck
IBM's System/38, AS/400 and iSeries computers use exception processing for all errors in all languages on the box. If you don't trap errors, the job will stop and force you to deal with them when they arise. 1978. The Free Dictionary
The fact of the matter is, NASA is eating up billions of dollars
Sure. No engineers get paid. No technicians draw a salary. No supplies get paid for. We put the money in the MPLM and dump it overboard.
I love space the much as the next guy, but what are we doing on other planets if we can't even sort our own one out?
What makes you think that spending money on technology R&D can't/won't help this planet? There's no guarantee that some dramatic breakthrough will come from Mars spending, but the price is cheap enough (in the context of the entire US budget) to try it and find out.
I see little value in Morse on the net, but it is incredible for getting a weak RF signal through noise. On 2.4 GHz (the Wi-Fi band!) I can carry on a conversation with 100mW over 100 miles, no problem.
In the future, when the RF spectrum is even nastier than it is today, I suspect CW or some variant like JT44 will be the best way to have a reliable link, even between machines.
NASA seems to do everything to polish up their public image, in a way that's great, but they're sometimes too obvious, and start looking ridiculous.
While NASA may well be polishing their image up (doesn't it need some shining?), Ed wasn't the first one doing this sort of thing.
Don Pettit, Science Officer on Expedition Six) did something similar, called Space Chronicles before Columbia was lost.
He also did Saturday Morning Science basically in his own free time and of his own volition.
One of the reason to keep CW is that under conditions a CW signal will go father than a voice signal.
Exactly why microwavelength experimenters/contesters use CW instead of voice. I can make a contact using CW easily when conditions are too poor for voice to get through. Rainscatter is very cool.
More recently, computers have been used to work high speed meteor scatter contacts with CW. Although each meteor only leaves a brief ionised trail behind, the accumulated numbers of those trails makes reliable communications possible.
That was also the reason they were in an entirely different orbit.
Erm. This was a scheduled science mission. They were in a different orbit for science reasons, not because they couldn't dock with the station.
One incapable of reaching the ISS with the amount of fuel onboard
That's a dramatic understatement. Since the thread is basic physics, perhaps the easiest analogy to try to get this across goes something like this. You're in the car, in Iowa, on the way to the market to pick up some bread. Your car makes a funny noise so you decide to drive it over the ocean to Japan to have the factory take a look at it. No, you probably don't have enough gas to get there.
This entire topic has been thoroughly beaten to death on the newsgroup
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the geek factor. I'm building a complete microwave station basically from scratch: including the boxes the bits go in. My own hands, my own boards, my own antennas. Homebrew. And it's all portable: I'll be putting it in my car and driving around making contacts os extremely low power with my own geeky creations.
I hate to/. him, but W3IY has a setup that I want to emulate: http://members.fcc.net/wseab/
It's better than hacking Legos! 73 de KC2HIZ Buck.
Well, the reason it sits so high with respect to the ecliptic once again traces back to the Russians, who need to be able to launch Soyuz and Proton missions from Baikonur way up in the frosty northlands.
That's the party line, probably delivered because the questioner was 12 years old.
However, it's also trivial to look up earlier shuttle missions like STS-9 and see that NASA launched at high inclination orbits. Spacelab-1, 57 degree inclination. Oddly enough, you can see all of the planet from 57N to 57S latitude this way.
The main feature of mainframes are the staggering amounts of data it can move.
I think nothing about running SQL statements over a 10 million record database file on my iSeries. It takes under 3 minutes to traverse every row and build a result set of 50,000 rows.
We routinely see tables in excess of a hundred million records. The PC guys think 500 rows is large.
It's all about the database.
http://www.iseries.ibm.com
Spare me the tired homily about how NASA could not cost justify itself to the public. That's Hollywood's job, not NASAs. NASA is an R&D organisation.
And spare me the madatory NASA-bashing about how they had to get in bed with the military. Here's a hint: Congress controls the budget. Congress told the Air Force and NASA to get together on the Shuttle program. Neither NASA nor the Air Force are enamoured of the demand.
By the bye, NASA's charter includes 'manned missions.' They MUST pursue those missions as well as the aircraft R&D that nobody ever seems to mention.
One more repetition of the obligatory "private business could do it much better" speech and I'll barf. If they could, why aren't they? After all there's a thriving satellite launch business, or has that gone unnoticed?
NASA quashed private enterprise? Huh? NASA has several co-operative ventures with business; they specifically reach out to private enterprise. And there's always the aforementioned satellite launch business.
The military never wanted the Shuttle; they had their arm twisted by Congress. Challenger was the excuse the Air Force wanted all along to get away from the civilian agency.
The reason we have a small fleet of aging Shuttles is that Congress doesn't want to spend the money.
It isn't a coincidence that before 11 September, the Immigration and Naturalisation service had a mediocre budget and were charged mostly with keeping Mexicans in Mexico. Oddly enough Congress had a fire lit under their collective butts and opened the spigots. In a year their fickle minds will have flitted on to the next crisis du jour.
While it's theoretically possible to convert the source code (it certainly won't be a line-by-line conversion!) with a Perl script, it's incredibly unlikely that the runtime environment got converted along with it. Which means that you may be running (I stress MAY) a single payroll program but you are not running an application.
Overrides, UPSI, LDA and externally defined files are only some of the things you lost going to Linux. Did I mention losing the integrated DB/2 database?
OS400 commands follow a reasonable naming convention; it's not burdened with the randomly named legacy set that the various Linuces/Unices have accreted over the years. That makes OS400 easier to learn and use than Linux.
The remark about more reliable and proprietary is simply a troll and I shan't rise to the bait. A posting i/. doesn't make it so. Please post the measurement you used to compare the AS/400 to the Linux cluster.
No, it was the managers (at Morton Thiokol - mfrs of the rocket boosters) that OVERRULED the decision of their engineers who had a agreed that a launch in the cold January temperatures would be disasterous. (sic)
a) "their engineers" said nothing of the kind. What they said was "We've never done it and we don't know for sure what will happen."
b) The first failure of the O-rings was noted by a NASA engineer named Mr Ray in 1979 as cited in the Rodgers Commission report.
c) The first in-flight failure of the O-rings occurred very early and in very warm temperatures. Cold weather in Jan 1986 merely added to the original problem of poor engineering.
d) The fundamental problem of "the O-rings" is that they shouldn't be there in the first place. The O-ring manufacturers repeatedly stated that they were being used in an improper application. The reason they exist is that Morton Thiokol was the lowest bidder on the boosters. Congress (the budget people) scrapped liquid boosters as being too costly. Thiokol was already building solid rocket motors for ICBMs and voila. Because they're built in Utah, they can't be constructed in one solid piece so they're built in segments, joined at the launch site. This joint is weaker than the solid part of the case and exhibits "joint rotation" which briefly expands the joint enough to allow exhaust gasses to escape. The O-rings were a cheap engineering answer to the problem of a weak case.
e) NASA flies a stronger case now - but not because of Challenger. Because they're lighter. The uprated cases were on the drawing board in 1984. The joints are still fundamentally weaker than the case. The problem is still not fixed despite the addition of another tang and yet another O-ring.
f) The public at large could care less about the space programme. If you ask someone the names of "the Challenger Seven" you might get one or two. They died "doing their job" but the public have a hard time understanding what that job is.
Slashdot Mirror
> Once you get to microwaves they act even more
t er99.htm Some communications records held by hams: http://www.nzart.org.nz/nzart/vhf/world_dx_records 2006.html
> like light. They need a line of sight and are
> easy to block.
High microwaves, maybe. Amateur radio contesters have been using troposcatter for long haul contacts for decades at frequencies up to 24GHz. For an explanation of troposcatter: http://www.qsl.net/oz1rh/troposcatter99/troposcat
The point isn't to pick a nit, only to note that there are reliable mechanisms that can be used for reliable long haul communications at microwave frequencies. I'm not personally familiar with the attenuation of the atmosphere at 1THz and up; perhaps if we generate 100 watts at 1THz we can use tropo there too...
One way to make this process more palatable is to consider implementing it from the ground up, not imposing it from the top down. That is, unless you intend literally to have code police physically approve every line of code, it'll work better if the programming staff buy into the concepts noted above. Said concepts being Good Ideas indeed.
Peer review can go a long way to developing working standards that YOUR programmers want to use in YOUR shop. You won't be revisiting existing code to go make it conform to The New Way, so your programmers will be living with old and new side by side for quite a while.
--buck
IBM's System/38, AS/400 and iSeries computers use exception processing for all errors in all languages on the box. If you don't trap errors, the job will stop and force you to deal with them when they arise. 1978. The Free Dictionary
--buckSure. No engineers get paid. No technicians draw a salary. No supplies get paid for. We put the money in the MPLM and dump it overboard.
I love space the much as the next guy, but what are we doing on other planets if we can't even sort our own one out?What makes you think that spending money on technology R&D can't/won't help this planet? There's no guarantee that some dramatic breakthrough will come from Mars spending, but the price is cheap enough (in the context of the entire US budget) to try it and find out.
I'll have to try them out when I get a laptop and TNC in the car when I'm roving. Until then I'm stuck with the straight key!
--buck KC2HIZ
I see little value in Morse on the net, but it is incredible for getting a weak RF signal through noise. On 2.4 GHz (the Wi-Fi band!) I can carry on a conversation with 100mW over 100 miles, no problem.
In the future, when the RF spectrum is even nastier than it is today, I suspect CW or some variant like JT44 will be the best way to have a reliable link, even between machines.
73 de KC2HIZ FN32at
You mean like the 2.4GHz wireless devices? Wi-Fi? (part of the spectrum specifically left unlicensed by the FCC) See part 15: Radio Frequency devices.
--buck
While NASA may well be polishing their image up (doesn't it need some shining?), Ed wasn't the first one doing this sort of thing. Don Pettit, Science Officer on Expedition Six) did something similar, called Space Chronicles before Columbia was lost. He also did Saturday Morning Science basically in his own free time and of his own volition.
--buckOne of the reason to keep CW is that under conditions a CW signal will go father than a voice signal.
Exactly why microwavelength experimenters/contesters use CW instead of voice. I can make a contact using CW easily when conditions are too poor for voice to get through. Rainscatter is very cool.
More recently, computers have been used to work high speed meteor scatter contacts with CW. Although each meteor only leaves a brief ionised trail behind, the accumulated numbers of those trails makes reliable communications possible.
73 de KC2HIZ
Erm. This was a scheduled science mission. They were in a different orbit for science reasons, not because they couldn't dock with the station.
One incapable of reaching the ISS with the amount of fuel onboardThat's a dramatic understatement. Since the thread is basic physics, perhaps the easiest analogy to try to get this across goes something like this. You're in the car, in Iowa, on the way to the market to pick up some bread. Your car makes a funny noise so you decide to drive it over the ocean to Japan to have the factory take a look at it. No, you probably don't have enough gas to get there.
This entire topic has been thoroughly beaten to death on the newsgroup
--buckNASA designed a 'rescue ball' for just this contingency. It was never deployed. Personal Rescue Enclosure
--buckI'm surprised nobody mentioned the geek factor. I'm building a complete microwave station basically from scratch: including the boxes the bits go in. My own hands, my own boards, my own antennas. Homebrew. And it's all portable: I'll be putting it in my car and driving around making contacts os extremely low power with my own geeky creations.
/. him, but W3IY has a setup that I want to emulate: http://members.fcc.net/wseab/
I hate to
It's better than hacking Legos!
73 de KC2HIZ Buck.
Well, the reason it sits so high with respect to the ecliptic once again traces back to the Russians, who need to be able to launch Soyuz and Proton missions from Baikonur way up in the frosty northlands. That's the party line, probably delivered because the questioner was 12 years old.
However, it's also trivial to look up earlier shuttle missions like STS-9 and see that NASA launched at high inclination orbits. Spacelab-1, 57 degree inclination. Oddly enough, you can see all of the planet from 57N to 57S latitude this way.
Not very good for science at all.
The main feature of mainframes are the staggering amounts of data it can move.
I think nothing about running SQL statements over a 10 million record database file on my iSeries. It takes under 3 minutes to traverse every row and build a result set of 50,000 rows.
We routinely see tables in excess of a hundred million records. The PC guys think 500 rows is large.
It's all about the database.
http://www.iseries.ibm.com
Spare me the tired homily about how NASA could not cost justify itself to the public. That's Hollywood's job, not NASAs. NASA is an R&D organisation.
And spare me the madatory NASA-bashing about how they had to get in bed with the military. Here's a hint: Congress controls the budget. Congress told the Air Force and NASA to get together on the Shuttle program. Neither NASA nor the Air Force are enamoured of the demand.
By the bye, NASA's charter includes 'manned missions.' They MUST pursue those missions as well as the aircraft R&D that nobody ever seems to mention.
One more repetition of the obligatory "private business could do it much better" speech and I'll barf. If they could, why aren't they? After all there's a thriving satellite launch business, or has that gone unnoticed?
NASA quashed private enterprise? Huh? NASA has several co-operative ventures with business; they specifically reach out to private enterprise. And there's always the aforementioned satellite launch business.
The military never wanted the Shuttle; they had their arm twisted by Congress. Challenger was the excuse the Air Force wanted all along to get away from the civilian agency.
The reason we have a small fleet of aging Shuttles is that Congress doesn't want to spend the money.
It isn't a coincidence that before 11 September, the Immigration and Naturalisation service had a mediocre budget and were charged mostly with keeping Mexicans in Mexico. Oddly enough Congress had a fire lit under their collective butts and opened the spigots. In a year their fickle minds will have flitted on to the next crisis du jour.
Which is exactly what happened to NASA in 1970.
While it's theoretically possible to convert the source code (it certainly won't be a line-by-line conversion!) with a Perl script, it's incredibly unlikely that the runtime environment got converted along with it. Which means that you may be running (I stress MAY) a single payroll program but you are not running an application.
/. doesn't make it so. Please post the measurement you used to compare the AS/400 to the Linux cluster.
Overrides, UPSI, LDA and externally defined files are only some of the things you lost going to Linux. Did I mention losing the integrated DB/2 database?
OS400 commands follow a reasonable naming convention; it's not burdened with the randomly named legacy set that the various Linuces/Unices have accreted over the years. That makes OS400 easier to learn and use than Linux.
The remark about more reliable and proprietary is simply a troll and I shan't rise to the bait. A posting i
No, it was the managers (at Morton Thiokol - mfrs of the rocket boosters) that OVERRULED the decision of their engineers who had a agreed that a launch in the cold January temperatures would be disasterous. (sic)
a) "their engineers" said nothing of the kind. What they said was "We've never done it and we don't know for sure what will happen."
b) The first failure of the O-rings was noted by a NASA engineer named Mr Ray in 1979 as cited in the Rodgers Commission report.
c) The first in-flight failure of the O-rings occurred very early and in very warm temperatures. Cold weather in Jan 1986 merely added to the original problem of poor engineering.
d) The fundamental problem of "the O-rings" is that they shouldn't be there in the first place. The O-ring manufacturers repeatedly stated that they were being used in an improper application. The reason they exist is that Morton Thiokol was the lowest bidder on the boosters. Congress (the budget people) scrapped liquid boosters as being too costly. Thiokol was already building solid rocket motors for ICBMs and voila. Because they're built in Utah, they can't be constructed in one solid piece so they're built in segments, joined at the launch site. This joint is weaker than the solid part of the case and exhibits "joint rotation" which briefly expands the joint enough to allow exhaust gasses to escape. The O-rings were a cheap engineering answer to the problem of a weak case.
e) NASA flies a stronger case now - but not because of Challenger. Because they're lighter. The uprated cases were on the drawing board in 1984. The joints are still fundamentally weaker than the case. The problem is still not fixed despite the addition of another tang and yet another O-ring.
f) The public at large could care less about the space programme. If you ask someone the names of "the Challenger Seven" you might get one or two. They died "doing their job" but the public have a hard time understanding what that job is.
Remember: Scobee, Smith, Resnik, Onizuka, McNair, Jarvis, McAuliffe.