It does sound pretty funny, but in the specific context of flight software, it's true. When sending something complicated and expensive into space, you don't want it running bleeding edge code. You want to stick to the tried and true, even boring, stuff. Granted, there are missions that push the software envelope, but for those missions it's done deliberately and treated as a risk, not just because someone doesn't want to seem old fashioned.
Good point, but do you think the people behind this program even know what a false positive is? C'mon. "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Heh heh. Hail, fellow Apple II geek! I saved up my allowance for a long, long time to buy (yes, buy!) a copy of Merlin. That was a tremendous program for its time - made assembly programming fun, and almost easy. Watching Sourceror spit out page after page of source code for Apple II BASIC was like stumbling into a top secret CIA vault - all kinds of deep dark secrets being revealed before your eyes.
Those were the days of *real* computers - the kind whose reference manual included a circuit diagram of the motherboard and a complete ROM source listing, and assumed you could figure out how to plug in the power cord on your own. (No, I wouldn't go back to those days, but I sometimes wonder if the kids these days aren't missing out on some of the primal thrill that was personal computing in its earlier days).
Just remember, the same disaster plan that will keep the company going if half the employees die in a flu pandemic, will keep it going if those same employees are simply laid off. Which is more likely to happen?
Ok, color me cynical. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was gee, just what the NSA needs to help them process their enormous collection of data on the day-to-day lives of law abiding American citizens...
Of course, in these enlightened times, no one would ever let a showman with an ice pick tour the country for decades hacking up peoples' brains. Nope, we're safe now...
I agree with you, but I also believe that "terror" is a state of intense fear, not the act of committing violence against innocent people in order to advance political goals. We're a dying minority.
So IBM has reclaimed its title of Evil Empire after all this time. Not that there's anything wrong with installing a government monitoring box in every automobile in the country and building a nationwide network of sensors to keep an eye on what every driver does at all times. After all, safety and security are more important than a so-called right to privacy. And not that any government has ever misused a data collection system that covers the entire population. How could anyone have a problem with this?
Some brief stories from AVWeb about the destruction of the Meigs runway and closure of the airport can be found here, here , and here.
Apparently the Mayor wanted the place for a park...
I never claimed there are no challenges or difficulties in IV&V work. Just like in any workplace, there are. But you just claimed that NASA is too cheap to do IV&V on the Shuttle program and that is patently false. Your other points sound like horror stories to frighten kids, certainly that is not the way it works in the manned spaceflight arena.
The tone of your posts makes me think you have some personal issue with the IV&V facility. I imagine others with experience in this field would have differing views.
This is so far off, I don't even know where to start.
Let me just say that "Even STS has no IV&V, after all it's a "mature" system and there are no bugs left" will be a big surprise to the folks at the IV&V center and elsewhere who are responsible for IV&V on Space Shuttle flight software...
"What we hope is that the software is not imperfect in ways that cause death." I'm copying that into my code file. That really says it.
I agree with your other points by the way. The code is the least of your worries. If it does what the requirements says, that leaves you more time to worry about whether the requirements are right, especially in the face of all the things that can screw up while it is running.
"The first problem is that nobody has any really convincing evidence that, all other things being equal (testing, design methods, skill of people involved, time/money available), SPARK or similiarly restricted languages actually gets you any meaningful improvment in security as compared to, say, Pascal, Ada95, C++, Java, O'Caml, or a similiarly "full of pointy bits" language."
Maybe not, but I can offer my anecdotal evidence that avionics software written in Ada is a hell of a lot more understandable that avionics software written in C / C++. Ada may be boring, but it isn't plain mean:-)
Honestly, I always disliked Ada on general principles. But after working with a few hundred thousand lines of the stuff, I've changed my mind because "what you see is what you get." You don't have to worry about a lot of invisible and semantically subtle things happening behind your back (thinking of C++ here in particular). Ada has its own issues, but that isn't one of them.
With all that, I've discovered over time that the real problems (the ones that cause me personal heartburn) tend to be in ambigous or poorly specified requirements, and in interaction with other systems (which again often is due to requirements). At best the code is solid enough that you can look for requirement or interface issues without wondering what the code is doing, that you don't see.
...the poor kid. At least kids these days have plenty of decent porn to jerk off to.
Seriously... There is a big difference between images of people who consensually appear in porn, and images of real live children who have been victimized and will continue to be seriously damaged by someone else doing this TO them.
I just can't buy the "slippery slope" argument that says, "well, if we ban images of child pornography, the next thing you know we'll be banning regular porn, yadda yadda."
Posting an image on the Internet irrevocably publishes it to the entire world and in this case, it perpetuates the harm to the victim. To be blunt, if your child was molested, even if the molester is put away, pedo's all over the world can and will continue to collect and trade the pictures and get their rocks off on the pain and suffering of your child.
NixLuver: Are you saying that while it would be wrong to molest a child, it would be ok to post pictures of the child being molested, since posting such pics would only be posting evidence that a crime had been committed, and would not be a crime itself?
O'Keefe was also the head of the Office of Management and Budget, which was probably more relevant to his being hired for NASA.
While there are some military connections, NASA is a civilian agency. The DoD has its own space capability, they don't want a civilian agency doing military stuff that they can perfectly well do on their own.
And while there were some military payloads launched on the shuttle, the DoD wasn't thrilled to use the Shuttle to begin with, hasn't used it for quite some time, and has not shown the slightest interest in using it ever again.
Come on. Whatever one's opinion about the President's space exploration plan - and I for one approve wholeheartedly - let's argue it based on the facts, not on completely ridiculous accusations.
Slashdot Mirror
It does sound pretty funny, but in the specific context of flight software, it's true. When sending something complicated and expensive into space, you don't want it running bleeding edge code. You want to stick to the tried and true, even boring, stuff. Granted, there are missions that push the software envelope, but for those missions it's done deliberately and treated as a risk, not just because someone doesn't want to seem old fashioned.
JWST to use Rational Rose, film at 11.
Good point, but do you think the people behind this program even know what a false positive is? C'mon. "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Heh heh. Hail, fellow Apple II geek! I saved up my allowance for a long, long time to buy (yes, buy!) a copy of Merlin. That was a tremendous program for its time - made assembly programming fun, and almost easy. Watching Sourceror spit out page after page of source code for Apple II BASIC was like stumbling into a top secret CIA vault - all kinds of deep dark secrets being revealed before your eyes.
Those were the days of *real* computers - the kind whose reference manual included a circuit diagram of the motherboard and a complete ROM source listing, and assumed you could figure out how to plug in the power cord on your own. (No, I wouldn't go back to those days, but I sometimes wonder if the kids these days aren't missing out on some of the primal thrill that was personal computing in its earlier days).
The Shuttle definitely uses brakes as well as a parachute. See this NASA page.
Just remember, the same disaster plan that will keep the company going if half the employees die in a flu pandemic, will keep it going if those same employees are simply laid off. Which is more likely to happen?
Ok, color me cynical. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was gee, just what the NSA needs to help them process their enormous collection of data on the day-to-day lives of law abiding American citizens...
What a jolly read.
Of course, in these enlightened times, no one would ever let a showman with an ice pick tour the country for decades hacking up peoples' brains. Nope, we're safe now...
Preach on, brother!!!
Anything whose gravity is strong enough to give a round, rather than potato-like, shape. :-)
I agree with you, but I also believe that "terror" is a state of intense fear, not the act of committing violence against innocent people in order to advance political goals. We're a dying minority.
I like PHP because it's basically a bastardised dialect of Perl... Heh heh. I dislike PHP for exactly the same reason.
So IBM has reclaimed its title of Evil Empire after all this time. Not that there's anything wrong with installing a government monitoring box in every automobile in the country and building a nationwide network of sensors to keep an eye on what every driver does at all times. After all, safety and security are more important than a so-called right to privacy. And not that any government has ever misused a data collection system that covers the entire population. How could anyone have a problem with this?
Blah.
I thought he was joking, but no. I highly recommend this article. Although parts of it read like a gag from Seinfeld:
Penis panics in southeast Asia have become known under the term "Koro"... The word Koro means "head of the turtle" in Malay.
Some brief stories from AVWeb about the destruction of the Meigs runway and closure of the airport can be found here, here , and here. Apparently the Mayor wanted the place for a park...
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I never claimed there are no challenges or difficulties in IV&V work. Just like in any workplace, there are. But you just claimed that NASA is too cheap to do IV&V on the Shuttle program and that is patently false. Your other points sound like horror stories to frighten kids, certainly that is not the way it works in the manned spaceflight arena.
The tone of your posts makes me think you have some personal issue with the IV&V facility. I imagine others with experience in this field would have differing views.
This is so far off, I don't even know where to start.
Let me just say that "Even STS has no IV&V, after all it's a "mature" system and there are no bugs left" will be a big surprise to the folks at the IV&V center and elsewhere who are responsible for IV&V on Space Shuttle flight software...
"What we hope is that the software is not imperfect in ways that cause death." I'm copying that into my code file. That really says it.
I agree with your other points by the way. The code is the least of your worries. If it does what the requirements says, that leaves you more time to worry about whether the requirements are right, especially in the face of all the things that can screw up while it is running.
"The first problem is that nobody has any really convincing evidence that, all other things being equal (testing, design methods, skill of people involved, time/money available), SPARK or similiarly restricted languages actually gets you any meaningful improvment in security as compared to, say, Pascal, Ada95, C++, Java, O'Caml, or a similiarly "full of pointy bits" language."
:-)
Maybe not, but I can offer my anecdotal evidence that avionics software written in Ada is a hell of a lot more understandable that avionics software written in C / C++. Ada may be boring, but it isn't plain mean
Honestly, I always disliked Ada on general principles. But after working with a few hundred thousand lines of the stuff, I've changed my mind because "what you see is what you get." You don't have to worry about a lot of invisible and semantically subtle things happening behind your back (thinking of C++ here in particular). Ada has its own issues, but that isn't one of them.
With all that, I've discovered over time that the real problems (the ones that cause me personal heartburn) tend to be in ambigous or poorly specified requirements, and in interaction with other systems (which again often is due to requirements). At best the code is solid enough that you can look for requirement or interface issues without wondering what the code is doing, that you don't see.
> Java is boring, but uniform, and much more suited to large projects.
Agreed. Of course this makes Java the new Cobol... am I the only one that thinks this?
Yes, it's dependable. Yes, it's good for large scale projects. But God yes, it's boring.
...the poor kid. At least kids these days have plenty of decent porn to jerk off to.
Seriously... There is a big difference between images of people who consensually appear in porn, and images of real live children who have been victimized and will continue to be seriously damaged by someone else doing this TO them.
I just can't buy the "slippery slope" argument that says, "well, if we ban images of child pornography, the next thing you know we'll be banning regular porn, yadda yadda."
Posting an image on the Internet irrevocably publishes it to the entire world and in this case, it perpetuates the harm to the victim. To be blunt, if your child was molested, even if the molester is put away, pedo's all over the world can and will continue to collect and trade the pictures and get their rocks off on the pain and suffering of your child.
NixLuver: Are you saying that while it would be wrong to molest a child, it would be ok to post pictures of the child being molested, since posting such pics would only be posting evidence that a crime had been committed, and would not be a crime itself?
Maybe you could clarify this.
-1, Paranoid.
O'Keefe was also the head of the Office of Management and Budget, which was probably more relevant to his being hired for NASA.
While there are some military connections, NASA is a civilian agency. The DoD has its own space capability, they don't want a civilian agency doing military stuff that they can perfectly well do on their own.
And while there were some military payloads launched on the shuttle, the DoD wasn't thrilled to use the Shuttle to begin with, hasn't used it for quite some time, and has not shown the slightest interest in using it ever again.
Come on. Whatever one's opinion about the President's space exploration plan - and I for one approve wholeheartedly - let's argue it based on the facts, not on completely ridiculous accusations.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.