Phoenix is a re-fly of MPL using flight-spare MPL hardware. The difference is that since the spacecraft and instruments were already on the shelf, there was relatively more budget for the kind of investigation, review, and rework that the original mission should have had. As a result, we've identified and fixed a sobering number of fatal errors in the original design.
The disposition of the team at this time is "cautiously optimistic", which is more confidence than we had on MER at the same time. That said, there is always residual risk and the chance of just having a bad day.
This spacecraft does not have any means of detecting and avoiding rocks on the surface. In addition, due to the physics of how the landing radar works, it will actually steer the spacecraft into any obstacles on the surface.
As a result, we're targeting for a landing location that's flat and relatively free of large rocks in order to provide the least risk to mission success.
The science payload on this mission is not dependent on landing near any rocks for success. In contrast, it needs to land near dirt that its arm is capable of digging into.
Considering that Phoenix is a re-fly of the 1998 Mars Polar Lander mission, this was the subject of an intensive study of the command dictionary, flight software, and ground software.
Please remember that the 1998 MPL and MCO missions were part of NASA's "Better Faster Cheaper" movement. These were budget class missions that exchanged significantly increased risk, in the form of less internal and external oversight and review, for significantly lower cost. The problem is that landing on another planet is a very hard problem, especially Mars. This mission carried "flagship" mission difficulty (ala MER) but wasn't given the budget to address anywhere near all the higher order risks. Keep in mind the atmosphere on Mars is too thick to use retro rockets all the way to the ground, like on the Moon, and too thin to use parachutes all the way down, like we have done on Earth. Also keep in mind that MPL and Phoenix missions use a landing system which is closest to a system that we hadn't flown in over 20 years (Viking). And it was chosen primarily for budgetary not technical reasons. I'm not even going to get started with the landing radar...
The kinds of errors that killed MPL and MCO were exactly the kinds of risk that NASA bought by forcing the budget low. They purchased a mission with flagship risk on a budget that precluded mitigating those risks.
Phoenix is a three-quarter measure to fix the errors of MPL. It's a re-fly of the 1998 MPL mission with the kind of oversight and peer review that the original mission would have had if it were designated the kind of budget that it deserved. The results of these ongoing studies have led to numerous design changes in hardware, radar firmware and antenna design, flight software, and fault protection. The team at Lockheed and JPL is cautiously optimistic.
Google owns the GMAIL mark, at least in the US
on
New Legal Threat To GMail
·
· Score: 4, Informative
According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the "GMAIL" mark has been assigned to Google, who applied for the mark on April 2nd, 2004. The Trustees of the "Smith Trust", Shane Smith and Karen Griffith, applied for the same "GMAIL" trademark on April 3rd, 2004, one day after Google Inc. The "Smith Trust" has not been assigned the trademark by the US PTO, and the latest rejection of their application was June 11th, 2005.
Perhaps someone else can post the equivalent info from the UK?
The "Neato Eyes" applet is useful for multihead displays where the mouse has a lot of room to get lost. I can look at the "eyes" and immediately know what direction to look for the mouse. It is usually quicker than using the "move the mouse and scan the monitors until I see it" method alone. Especially when the desktop gets busy/cluttered.
The "ati" driver included with X.org works. I'm using it now on Gentoo amd64. Also, the "radeon" driver included with xfree 4.3.99-rcX worked for me as well (and I assume Xfree 4.4.0 would work as a result, although not tested here for license issues). This is on a 9800XT.
I diagnosed a friend's system that was experiencing similar issues. It turns out that it was a ground loop between the coax on the cable TV line and his computer that was causing it. He had the CATV box and computer both hooked into a AV receiver. It took a while to isolate the problem since it at first appeared that only the computer was grounded (via a 3-prong outlet). Experimentation revealed the CATV coax as the other ground source, which of course was grounded in a distant location. A home-made 75ohm unun was made to decouple the line. After that, things worked as expected. Another option would be to isolate the computer from ground by cutting the 3rd prong off the power connector, but that's not the best approach.
In 1971 five different Mars-bound spacecraft were launched by the US and the USSR. Of the five, only Mariner 9 returned much useful data, to the tune of 7,329 pictures. The USSR "Mars 3" returned a few pictures and some data before it died. The other three craft failed.
Beagle2 landed at Isidis. MER-A Spirit is landing at Gusev crater. So we did a trajectory corection maneuver in order to land in a crater:)
Seriously, this is the fourth trajectory correction maneuver. We planned for up to six, but we had a pretty good initial insertion from the Delta rocket. The trajectory correction maneuvers are neccessary due to the precise angle at which we must enter the atmosphere of Mars. Too shallow and we bounce off, too steep and we make our own crater. Its like throwing a dart from Earth and having it hit a bullseye on Mars. We can't throw a dart that accurately so we control the dart on the way.
The Beagle2 and MER rovers have similar science instruments and goals. Both have several spectrometers, a mechanical arm, a rock grinder (to grind a fresh surface on the rock) and stereoscopic cameras amongst other things. Their goals are the same: Look for life or evidence that life once existed. They're also looking for evidence that liquid water was once present on the surface of Mars. The main difference is that the US built craft are mobile on the surface.
BTW, the first time 3 probes were sent to Mars (MER-A, MER-B, and Mars Express. Nozomi doesn't count since it was launched in 98) was in 1964 when the Russians sent Zond 2 and NASA sent Mariner 3 and 4. Only Mariner 4 returned useful data. Zond2 suffered a failed radio and Mariner 3 suffered a mechanical failure. (In 1962 the Russians sent 3 probes but 2 failed to reach space and the last died en route). The first successful lander was Russian, but if I remember correctly it landed in a sand storm and died before useful data could be returned.
Well, I've got to get some sleep. Got to get back to work early tomorrow to monitor the spacecraft.
-- I speak for myself. JPL and NASA can speak for themselves.
IANAL, but this seems easy. Source code is defined as, "The preferred human-readable and human-modifiable form of the program." (The Jargon file, aka New Hacker's Dictionary) Therefore, this company's byte-code obfuscation is not source code, and does not fulfill the requirements of the GPL.
All COTS cd players have a DAC. Acheiving perfect digital reproduction is a simple matter of intercepting the clock, channel, and data lines going to the DAC. The cd player control circuitry has already made the error correction, and this data is ready to be converted to analog. The data will almost always be in I2C format (I squared C). Some professional equipment uses this format and can accept it directly. There are commonly available chips to convert i2c to sp/dif (this is how you can upgrade your old analog output cd changer to a analog + digital for cheap). There is also the possibility to build a usb interface for ripping. If you do that you might as well hook into your cd player's control buttons and make a computer controled cd changer.
As far as analog cell phones, the quality here in LA was for me much worse with analog. The cross-channel interfearance was so bad it was often like being on a party line, especially during the time just before and just after switching cell sites while on the move (when you could be physically close to someone on another cell site who is using the same channel).
I'm looking at a Seagate ST-157A 42 meg hard drive, born on 3rd day of the 21st week of 1989 in Singapore, if the date code is to be believed. The drive still spins up and checks out with zero bad sectors. It fits in a 5.25 inch bay. It even has a copy of MSDOS 5 with Peter Norton's Utilities on it (I must have upgraded DOS - don't remember which version I had at the time - 3.0?). I use one of the Norton programs to check the disk surface. This was the first IDE drive I ever owned. My, it brings back memories (which is why I still have it sitting here). It has my first PC programs on it.
Several 2.3.X have had filesystem bugs that could destroy your ext2 partition. Make backups when using development kernels, or be willing to loose your data.
Beat you both! I have a 20mb ide drive from an old Laser 286 12mhz 1mb machine. It still works. Slow as hell though. When I was in middle school I put stacker on that baby and got a whopping 40mb equivalent drive. It fits in a 5 1/4 bay.
I'm sure someone here has one of those Mountain 5Mb drives that cost 10 grand . . . but they weren't IDE.
But seriously, the manufacturer's MTBF on some SCSI drives is significantly higher than that of most IDE drives. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
You kids these days...
Phoenix is a re-fly of MPL using flight-spare MPL hardware. The difference is that since the spacecraft and instruments were already on the shelf, there was relatively more budget for the kind of investigation, review, and rework that the original mission should have had. As a result, we've identified and fixed a sobering number of fatal errors in the original design.
The disposition of the team at this time is "cautiously optimistic", which is more confidence than we had on MER at the same time. That said, there is always residual risk and the chance of just having a bad day.
This spacecraft does not have any means of detecting and avoiding rocks on the surface. In addition, due to the physics of how the landing radar works, it will actually steer the spacecraft into any obstacles on the surface.
As a result, we're targeting for a landing location that's flat and relatively free of large rocks in order to provide the least risk to mission success.
The science payload on this mission is not dependent on landing near any rocks for success. In contrast, it needs to land near dirt that its arm is capable of digging into.
Considering that Phoenix is a re-fly of the 1998 Mars Polar Lander mission, this was the subject of an intensive study of the command dictionary, flight software, and ground software.
Please remember that the 1998 MPL and MCO missions were part of NASA's "Better Faster Cheaper" movement. These were budget class missions that exchanged significantly increased risk, in the form of less internal and external oversight and review, for significantly lower cost. The problem is that landing on another planet is a very hard problem, especially Mars. This mission carried "flagship" mission difficulty (ala MER) but wasn't given the budget to address anywhere near all the higher order risks. Keep in mind the atmosphere on Mars is too thick to use retro rockets all the way to the ground, like on the Moon, and too thin to use parachutes all the way down, like we have done on Earth. Also keep in mind that MPL and Phoenix missions use a landing system which is closest to a system that we hadn't flown in over 20 years (Viking). And it was chosen primarily for budgetary not technical reasons. I'm not even going to get started with the landing radar...
The kinds of errors that killed MPL and MCO were exactly the kinds of risk that NASA bought by forcing the budget low. They purchased a mission with flagship risk on a budget that precluded mitigating those risks.
Phoenix is a three-quarter measure to fix the errors of MPL. It's a re-fly of the 1998 MPL mission with the kind of oversight and peer review that the original mission would have had if it were designated the kind of budget that it deserved. The results of these ongoing studies have led to numerous design changes in hardware, radar firmware and antenna design, flight software, and fault protection. The team at Lockheed and JPL is cautiously optimistic.
According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the "GMAIL" mark has been assigned to Google, who applied for the mark on April 2nd, 2004. The Trustees of the "Smith Trust", Shane Smith and Karen Griffith, applied for the same "GMAIL" trademark on April 3rd, 2004, one day after Google Inc. The "Smith Trust" has not been assigned the trademark by the US PTO, and the latest rejection of their application was June 11th, 2005.
s no=78395746e ntry=78395931
Perhaps someone else can post the equivalent info from the UK?
See Google's GMAIL trademark assignment:
http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=tm&
and the Smith Trust's application status: (rejected)
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&
The "Neato Eyes" applet is useful for multihead displays where the mouse has a lot of room to get lost. I can look at the "eyes" and immediately know what direction to look for the mouse. It is usually quicker than using the "move the mouse and scan the monitors until I see it" method alone. Especially when the desktop gets busy/cluttered.
The "ati" driver included with X.org works. I'm using it now on Gentoo amd64. Also, the "radeon" driver included with xfree 4.3.99-rcX worked for me as well (and I assume Xfree 4.4.0 would work as a result, although not tested here for license issues). This is on a 9800XT.
Yeah, could be ground loop.
I diagnosed a friend's system that was experiencing similar issues. It turns out that it was a ground loop between the coax on the cable TV line and his computer that was causing it. He had the CATV box and computer both hooked into a AV receiver. It took a while to isolate the problem since it at first appeared that only the computer was grounded (via a 3-prong outlet). Experimentation revealed the CATV coax as the other ground source, which of course was grounded in a distant location. A home-made 75ohm unun was made to decouple the line. After that, things worked as expected. Another option would be to isolate the computer from ground by cutting the 3rd prong off the power connector, but that's not the best approach.
Mars Scorecard:
.5/1 (so far, maybe the Beagle will bark)
USA: 8/14 (so far, not counting MER-A and MER-B)
USSR/Russia: 4/16 (two of the four returned very little data)
Japan: 0/1
Europe
Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/
In 1971 five different Mars-bound spacecraft were launched by the US and the USSR. Of the five, only Mariner 9 returned much useful data, to the tune of 7,329 pictures. The USSR "Mars 3" returned a few pictures and some data before it died. The other three craft failed.
04:35 Jan. 4, 2004, Universal Time
8:35 p.m. Jan. 3, Pacific Standard Time
"wake" is appropriate considering Beagle2 is likely dead.
Beagle2 landed at Isidis. MER-A Spirit is landing at Gusev crater. So we did a trajectory corection maneuver in order to land in a crater :)
Seriously, this is the fourth trajectory correction maneuver. We planned for up to six, but we had a pretty good initial insertion from the Delta rocket. The trajectory correction maneuvers are neccessary due to the precise angle at which we must enter the atmosphere of Mars. Too shallow and we bounce off, too steep and we make our own crater. Its like throwing a dart from Earth and having it hit a bullseye on Mars. We can't throw a dart that accurately so we control the dart on the way.
The Beagle2 and MER rovers have similar science instruments and goals. Both have several spectrometers, a mechanical arm, a rock grinder (to grind a fresh surface on the rock) and stereoscopic cameras amongst other things. Their goals are the same: Look for life or evidence that life once existed. They're also looking for evidence that liquid water was once present on the surface of Mars. The main difference is that the US built craft are mobile on the surface.
BTW, the first time 3 probes were sent to Mars (MER-A, MER-B, and Mars Express. Nozomi doesn't count since it was launched in 98) was in 1964 when the Russians sent Zond 2 and NASA sent Mariner 3 and 4. Only Mariner 4 returned useful data. Zond2 suffered a failed radio and Mariner 3 suffered a mechanical failure. (In 1962 the Russians sent 3 probes but 2 failed to reach space and the last died en route). The first successful lander was Russian, but if I remember correctly it landed in a sand storm and died before useful data could be returned.
Well, I've got to get some sleep. Got to get back to work early tomorrow to monitor the spacecraft.
--
I speak for myself. JPL and NASA can speak for themselves.
Member of the future Elite Slashdot 6 Digit ID Society
Got you beat.
Segmentation Fault
This kind of thing has been done since the 1960s at NASA's JPL. See http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/adv_tech/rovers/tmblweed.h tm
SegFault
IANAL, but this seems easy. Source code is defined as, "The preferred human-readable and human-modifiable form of the program." (The Jargon file, aka New Hacker's Dictionary) Therefore, this company's byte-code obfuscation is not source code, and does not fulfill the requirements of the GPL.
All COTS cd players have a DAC. Acheiving perfect digital reproduction is a simple matter of intercepting the clock, channel, and data lines going to the DAC. The cd player control circuitry has already made the error correction, and this data is ready to be converted to analog. The data will almost always be in I2C format (I squared C). Some professional equipment uses this format and can accept it directly. There are commonly available chips to convert i2c to sp/dif (this is how you can upgrade your old analog output cd changer to a analog + digital for cheap). There is also the possibility to build a usb interface for ripping. If you do that you might as well hook into your cd player's control buttons and make a computer controled cd changer.
Would be a fun project for some EE student.
make modules_install does depmod for you now. Doesn't anyone pay attention to what the build actually does anymore? Sheesh.
lol, nice sig. I loved my C64!
As far as analog cell phones, the quality here in LA was for me much worse with analog. The cross-channel interfearance was so bad it was often like being on a party line, especially during the time just before and just after switching cell sites while on the move (when you could be physically close to someone on another cell site who is using the same channel).
I'm looking at a Seagate ST-157A 42 meg hard drive, born on 3rd day of the 21st week of 1989 in Singapore, if the date code is to be believed. The drive still spins up and checks out with zero bad sectors. It fits in a 5.25 inch bay. It even has a copy of MSDOS 5 with Peter Norton's Utilities on it (I must have upgraded DOS - don't remember which version I had at the time - 3.0?). I use one of the Norton programs to check the disk surface. This was the first IDE drive I ever owned. My, it brings back memories (which is why I still have it sitting here). It has my first PC programs on it.
Political and legal issues aside, I think Einstein said it best, "Sometimes one pays the most for things one gets for nothing."
You know that someone's going to find out how to fix it sometime or other..
Kinda reminds me of security by obscurity . . .
This was a big release, even if drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c doesn't compile. The fact is that after years of effort Devfs is finally in the kernel.
It is, IMHO, newsworthy.
Congrats Richard
Several 2.3.X have had filesystem bugs that could destroy your ext2 partition. Make backups when using development kernels, or be willing to loose your data.
Beat you both! I have a 20mb ide drive from an old Laser 286 12mhz 1mb machine. It still works. Slow as hell though. When I was in middle school I put stacker on that baby and got a whopping 40mb equivalent drive. It fits in a 5 1/4 bay.
I'm sure someone here has one of those Mountain 5Mb drives that cost 10 grand . . . but they weren't IDE.
But seriously, the manufacturer's MTBF on some SCSI drives is significantly higher than that of most IDE drives. Go figure.