Actually, there are things in the vxWorks OS to prevent this. And it didn't "get" the last vxWorks-powered rover; only the lander part of Mars Pathfinder had a computer powerful enough to even have an OS (the rover's CPU was an Intel 8080 IIRC). The lander's computer kept resetting, and the problem was traced back to a priority inversion.
There was an obscure setting in vxWorks that needed to be enabled to protect against priority inversion, but for a reason that I've forgotten it wasn't enabled. Enabling it fixed the problem.
You realize that the Mars Pathfinder lander stopped functioning because its batteries died, right? The constant drain-recharge cycle wrecked them.
Viking I used RTGs for power, though, and lasted for about 6 years. Viking II, which also used RTGs, lasted for 3.5 years.
Secondly, it doesn't take a year to get to Mars. In fact, it only takes about 6 months.
Thirdly, research and development costs are a big reason projects like the 2 Mars Exploration Rovers cost so much. If NASA decided that they wanted to re-use the design of the MERs for future Mars rover missions, the vehicles themselves would probably only cost a few million apiece. They'd already know all the ins and outs of the design, what the vehicles are and aren't capable of, that the components can handle the harsh environment, etc.
3. A two year mission to Mars will require that astronauts recycle almost all of the resources aboard, including oxygen, food, and human waste. To date, such technology has never worked well enough for a two year mission. Biosphere 2, for example didn't work for still undetermined reason and it was right here on Earth.
What? BioSphere2 failed mainly due to inadequate planning and design. For example, the concrete used to build parts of the structure was absorbing oxygen. Using BioSphere2 as an example for anything is stupid, as BioSphere2 was mainly a tourist attraction, with scientific value being secondary.
I've actually been to the BioSphere2, BTW. Have you?
The problem was that there were a TON of files on the flash drive, and the flash management software wasn't able to handle them all. It would freak out and crash, causing the watchdog timer to reset the computer.
The solution so far has been to disable the flash drive until they find out exactly what part of the software failed and can fix it.
The RAD6000 is basically a radiation hardened version of IBM's RS/6000 PowerPC processors. While RS/6000s are PowerPC chips, it was Motorola who supplied all Macintosh processors until the Mac G5.
The IBM PowerPCs and Motorola PowerPCs are different beasts that just so happen to share the same instruction set.
There is more to Thief than action. In fact, there was very little action in Thief. The game was about sneaking around. You had to stay in the shadows, stay quiet (walk instead of run, and be careful what type of surface you're walking on), etc.
You had to snipe your enemies from the shadows, then drag their bodies away and hide them so they wouldn't be discovered, all without making a lot of noise. If you hit an enemy with an arrow, and it didn't kill him, it usually meant a lot of trouble for you, as he'd either let out a loud scream (and then his friends would come running), draw his sword and fight you (which often meant death, since your character wasn't a master swordsman), or both.
You had to sneak up on guards and swipe keys off their belts. You couldn't always just kill them (or knock them out) and then take the keys, since there wasn't always a place to hide the body.
You had to be sure not to draw your weapon on the street, lest the guards take too much notice of you.
Thief was a thinking man's game, and often a very slow moving (though never boring) one.
Oh sure, the 3rd person perspective might be optional, in the same sort of way that you don't have to use the lightsaber in Jedi Knight II or Knights of the old Republic. If the gameplay is designed around the 3rd person perspective, then the fact that you can switch to 1st person perspective is somewhat irrelevant.
Thief is not about running, jumping, climbing, and swinging from ropes. If I wanted that, I'd play Tomb Raider. While the gameplay was a major factor in what made Thief & Thief 2 so great, another big factor was the game's atmosphere. You very often felt as though you had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I don't see how they can get that across in 3rd person perspective, especially since in most 3rd person perspective games the environments are made a little (or a lot) bigger to accomodate the camera.
And when it comes to seeing around corners, Thief did have a lean feature. IIRC, there was a small chance you might be seen, though. Not quite the same with 3rd person perspective.
Was WinXP64 specifically optimized for the Itanium? Probably not. The Itanium places a lot of burden on compilers, and Microsoft's compilers probably aren't generating optimal Itanium code yet.
And, of course, if Win64 is running in the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode, then of course it's going to be slower. Intel has advertised from the very beginning that the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode was just to help ease the transition to the Itanium, and has always said that it would run slower than the Itanium's native 64-bit mode.
I'm not a huge fan of the Itanium myself, but please try to get things straight.
How would they fit an SRG onto a rover? Sure, there might be enough room on large rovers like Spirit and Opportunity, but on Sojouner? No. Maybe on the Pathfinder lander itself, but not on the Sojouner rover.
When was Kodak ever a major manufacturer of film cameras? Claiming this signals the end of film is like saying Nokia pulling the plug on the nGage signals the end of the handheld gaming market.
Who said anything about tourism? Do you think that if we bothered to send humans to Mars they'd spend the entire mission inside the lander? Of course not, they'd walk around, pick up some rocks for analysis, examine any interesting geological features near the landing site, etc.
Well of course picking up rocks in and of itself is of little scientific value. The point was that a human could decide which rock to examine, walk over to it, pick it up, and use a spectrometer on it a lot faster than a rover could.
We can't send our latest and greatest computing technologies to Mars, or anywhere outside of Earth's magnetosphere, because of the radiation. Slower processors than the latest and greatest are used because the gates are larger, and therefor less likely to be affected by background radiation, or so I have read.
I didn't say there wouldn't be problems. There are a whole new series of problems when humans are sent, but the kind of problems that mean utter failure for a rover, like getting stuck on a rock, in soft soil, or on an uncooperative airbag aren't an issue for humans.
And what's the hurry to explore Mars? There's no particular hurry, except that the longer it takes the more likely public interest is to wane, which means a smaller budget for NASA, which means that Mars exploration will take even longer.
Of course, when it takes a week to look at a single rock, and you have a mission time of only a few months, time certainly becomes much more important.
I should add that spreading out the risk is also part of the reason the launches (and subsequent landings) of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were done at different times instead of in close proximity (even without the delays, Opportunity would've taken off and landed later than Spirit). If there was a problem with Spirit, NASA would have a little bit of time to try and find out what went wrong, and figure out how to keep that from happening to Opportunity.
Sending 2 rovers instead of one allows them to explore different areas of the Martian surface, and spreads out the risk. What if your big, Hummer-sized probe encountered a computer glitch during landing that caused it to leave a nice big crater on the Martian surface?
I didn't say they went for complexity. Perhaps over-engineered was the wrong term. What I meant was that their hardware tends to be very well tested and well engineered. Voyager 1 is still sending back data, despite having been in space for nearly 30 years. While there have been some glaring failures, NASA also has a lot of successful missions under its belt, but those don't usually get much press coverage because they don't suit anyone's political agendas. I'm honestly surprised that the Spirit rover is getting the amount of attention that it is.
You are correct. I confused Mars Polar Lander with Mars Climate Orbiter.
There was a/. story a while ago about a US gov't agency having pictures that suggest Mars Polar Lander may have landed intact. NASA's official reason is still the one you mentioned, though.
The images aren't "tinted" using filters. They use the filters to cut out specific wavelengths, since the CCDs themselves are grayscale IIRC. For example, the red filter blocks out all light except red, so that only red light reaches the CCD. Scientists will take 3 photos, each one using a different filter: one for red, one for green, and one for blue. Then, they combine these 3 images into one, using the image taken with the red filter as the red channel, the one taken with the green filter as the green channel, and the one taken with the blue filter as the blue channel to create a true-color image. The color on these images then needs to be adjusted to reflect what it would look like to a human standing there on Mars.
And this practice is done practically everywhere in spacecraft imaging systems AFAIK. It's easier to have one CCD that is sensitive to a wide variety of wavelengths (some of which may be outside the visible spectrum) and a bunch of filters so you can control which wavelengths reach the CCD than to have a bunch of CCDs, each of which is only sensitive to a specific wavelength.
Complaining about this and calling it a conspiracy is like complaining about the common practice of taking many images in quick succession of an object (such as, say, Jupiter) and then averaging them together to cut down on noise. All it does is show the complainer's lack of knowledge.
What exactly do you expect to discover with a manned Mars mission that couldn't be discovered faster and cheaper with robots?
Except that exploring Mars with landers and rovers is incredibly slow. IIRC the Spirit rover has a top speed somewhere around 0.2 miles per hour, and it takes a long time for scientists to decide which rock to look at and plan the route to it.
And you don't get real-time feedback from a lander or rover, due to the communications lag. A human being can pick up a rock and know almost immediately if it's like all the other rocks he or she's seen today or if it has some interesting quality that warrants further study.
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Actually, there are things in the vxWorks OS to prevent this. And it didn't "get" the last vxWorks-powered rover; only the lander part of Mars Pathfinder had a computer powerful enough to even have an OS (the rover's CPU was an Intel 8080 IIRC). The lander's computer kept resetting, and the problem was traced back to a priority inversion.
There was an obscure setting in vxWorks that needed to be enabled to protect against priority inversion, but for a reason that I've forgotten it wasn't enabled. Enabling it fixed the problem.
Titanic's approved budget was $114 million. It's final, actual cost ended up around $200 million.
Both Titanic and The Abyss had ambition in spades.
Yes, the full-face helmets were patented.
James Cameron's brother designed the cameras used to shoot the actual Titanic wreckage for the movie.
You realize that the Mars Pathfinder lander stopped functioning because its batteries died, right? The constant drain-recharge cycle wrecked them.
Viking I used RTGs for power, though, and lasted for about 6 years. Viking II, which also used RTGs, lasted for 3.5 years.
Secondly, it doesn't take a year to get to Mars. In fact, it only takes about 6 months.
Thirdly, research and development costs are a big reason projects like the 2 Mars Exploration Rovers cost so much. If NASA decided that they wanted to re-use the design of the MERs for future Mars rover missions, the vehicles themselves would probably only cost a few million apiece. They'd already know all the ins and outs of the design, what the vehicles are and aren't capable of, that the components can handle the harsh environment, etc.
What? BioSphere2 failed mainly due to inadequate planning and design. For example, the concrete used to build parts of the structure was absorbing oxygen. Using BioSphere2 as an example for anything is stupid, as BioSphere2 was mainly a tourist attraction, with scientific value being secondary.
I've actually been to the BioSphere2, BTW. Have you?
The problem was that there were a TON of files on the flash drive, and the flash management software wasn't able to handle them all. It would freak out and crash, causing the watchdog timer to reset the computer.
The solution so far has been to disable the flash drive until they find out exactly what part of the software failed and can fix it.
The RAD6000 is basically a radiation hardened version of IBM's RS/6000 PowerPC processors. While RS/6000s are PowerPC chips, it was Motorola who supplied all Macintosh processors until the Mac G5.
The IBM PowerPCs and Motorola PowerPCs are different beasts that just so happen to share the same instruction set.
It isn't a Macintosh. The article was wrong when it said that the RAD6000 is a radiaton-hardened version of the same CPU that used to be used in Macs.
While the RAD6000 is a PowerPC processor, it's based off of IBM's RS/6000 CPUs. Macs, on the other hand, used Motorola CPUs until the G5.
There is more to Thief than action. In fact, there was very little action in Thief. The game was about sneaking around. You had to stay in the shadows, stay quiet (walk instead of run, and be careful what type of surface you're walking on), etc.
You had to snipe your enemies from the shadows, then drag their bodies away and hide them so they wouldn't be discovered, all without making a lot of noise. If you hit an enemy with an arrow, and it didn't kill him, it usually meant a lot of trouble for you, as he'd either let out a loud scream (and then his friends would come running), draw his sword and fight you (which often meant death, since your character wasn't a master swordsman), or both.
You had to sneak up on guards and swipe keys off their belts. You couldn't always just kill them (or knock them out) and then take the keys, since there wasn't always a place to hide the body.
You had to be sure not to draw your weapon on the street, lest the guards take too much notice of you.
Thief was a thinking man's game, and often a very slow moving (though never boring) one.
Oh sure, the 3rd person perspective might be optional, in the same sort of way that you don't have to use the lightsaber in Jedi Knight II or Knights of the old Republic. If the gameplay is designed around the 3rd person perspective, then the fact that you can switch to 1st person perspective is somewhat irrelevant.
Thief is not about running, jumping, climbing, and swinging from ropes. If I wanted that, I'd play Tomb Raider. While the gameplay was a major factor in what made Thief & Thief 2 so great, another big factor was the game's atmosphere. You very often felt as though you had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I don't see how they can get that across in 3rd person perspective, especially since in most 3rd person perspective games the environments are made a little (or a lot) bigger to accomodate the camera.
And when it comes to seeing around corners, Thief did have a lean feature. IIRC, there was a small chance you might be seen, though. Not quite the same with 3rd person perspective.
Was WinXP64 specifically optimized for the Itanium? Probably not. The Itanium places a lot of burden on compilers, and Microsoft's compilers probably aren't generating optimal Itanium code yet.
And, of course, if Win64 is running in the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode, then of course it's going to be slower. Intel has advertised from the very beginning that the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode was just to help ease the transition to the Itanium, and has always said that it would run slower than the Itanium's native 64-bit mode.
I'm not a huge fan of the Itanium myself, but please try to get things straight.
How would they fit an SRG onto a rover? Sure, there might be enough room on large rovers like Spirit and Opportunity, but on Sojouner? No. Maybe on the Pathfinder lander itself, but not on the Sojouner rover.
When was Kodak ever a major manufacturer of film cameras? Claiming this signals the end of film is like saying Nokia pulling the plug on the nGage signals the end of the handheld gaming market.
I should also add that another reason we can't send our fastest processors is because they require a lot of power.
Who said anything about tourism? Do you think that if we bothered to send humans to Mars they'd spend the entire mission inside the lander? Of course not, they'd walk around, pick up some rocks for analysis, examine any interesting geological features near the landing site, etc.
Well of course picking up rocks in and of itself is of little scientific value. The point was that a human could decide which rock to examine, walk over to it, pick it up, and use a spectrometer on it a lot faster than a rover could.
We can't send our latest and greatest computing technologies to Mars, or anywhere outside of Earth's magnetosphere, because of the radiation. Slower processors than the latest and greatest are used because the gates are larger, and therefor less likely to be affected by background radiation, or so I have read.
I didn't say there wouldn't be problems. There are a whole new series of problems when humans are sent, but the kind of problems that mean utter failure for a rover, like getting stuck on a rock, in soft soil, or on an uncooperative airbag aren't an issue for humans.
And what's the hurry to explore Mars? There's no particular hurry, except that the longer it takes the more likely public interest is to wane, which means a smaller budget for NASA, which means that Mars exploration will take even longer.
Of course, when it takes a week to look at a single rock, and you have a mission time of only a few months, time certainly becomes much more important.
I should add that spreading out the risk is also part of the reason the launches (and subsequent landings) of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were done at different times instead of in close proximity (even without the delays, Opportunity would've taken off and landed later than Spirit). If there was a problem with Spirit, NASA would have a little bit of time to try and find out what went wrong, and figure out how to keep that from happening to Opportunity.
Sending 2 rovers instead of one allows them to explore different areas of the Martian surface, and spreads out the risk. What if your big, Hummer-sized probe encountered a computer glitch during landing that caused it to leave a nice big crater on the Martian surface?
I didn't say they went for complexity. Perhaps over-engineered was the wrong term. What I meant was that their hardware tends to be very well tested and well engineered. Voyager 1 is still sending back data, despite having been in space for nearly 30 years. While there have been some glaring failures, NASA also has a lot of successful missions under its belt, but those don't usually get much press coverage because they don't suit anyone's political agendas. I'm honestly surprised that the Spirit rover is getting the amount of attention that it is.
Like the Beagle 2, your sarcasm detector seems to be in a million pieces spread across the Martian surface.
You are correct. I confused Mars Polar Lander with Mars Climate Orbiter.
/. story a while ago about a US gov't agency having pictures that suggest Mars Polar Lander may have landed intact. NASA's official reason is still the one you mentioned, though.
There was a
The images aren't "tinted" using filters. They use the filters to cut out specific wavelengths, since the CCDs themselves are grayscale IIRC. For example, the red filter blocks out all light except red, so that only red light reaches the CCD. Scientists will take 3 photos, each one using a different filter: one for red, one for green, and one for blue. Then, they combine these 3 images into one, using the image taken with the red filter as the red channel, the one taken with the green filter as the green channel, and the one taken with the blue filter as the blue channel to create a true-color image. The color on these images then needs to be adjusted to reflect what it would look like to a human standing there on Mars.
And this practice is done practically everywhere in spacecraft imaging systems AFAIK. It's easier to have one CCD that is sensitive to a wide variety of wavelengths (some of which may be outside the visible spectrum) and a bunch of filters so you can control which wavelengths reach the CCD than to have a bunch of CCDs, each of which is only sensitive to a specific wavelength.
Complaining about this and calling it a conspiracy is like complaining about the common practice of taking many images in quick succession of an object (such as, say, Jupiter) and then averaging them together to cut down on noise. All it does is show the complainer's lack of knowledge.
Except that the Americans used pencils too. The problem was that the graphite could float around.
Snopes.com is your friend.
As would I. As long as I didn't blow up or die of some other catastrophe before I got out of LEO, I'd consider it worth the risk.
Except that exploring Mars with landers and rovers is incredibly slow. IIRC the Spirit rover has a top speed somewhere around 0.2 miles per hour, and it takes a long time for scientists to decide which rock to look at and plan the route to it.
And you don't get real-time feedback from a lander or rover, due to the communications lag. A human being can pick up a rock and know almost immediately if it's like all the other rocks he or she's seen today or if it has some interesting quality that warrants further study.