Fer what it's worth, I know/knew most of the parties involved and the story fits the sequence of events.
Corroborating evidence: If someone posts the first line off the back of one of the MO Launch Team tee shirts, I'll post the second. (Which proves I know something about the internals of the MO project, not that Ira is in solar orbit presently.)
- pdmoderator
Re:cause of Mars Observer loss and other problems
on
First Man To Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Nope. Ira was not the cause. Apparently, due to a poorly analyzed last-minute engineering change, some fuel vapor accumulated where it should not have, and MO blew up at Mars orbit insertion.
I know Lee, Technician X, and Prestomeco, and had met Ira and his African-American princess sweetie Tahoma a couple of times before he died. I still have a couple of MO Launch Team T-shirts. Although I didn't personally witness any part of Ira's boarding of the spacecraft, I have no particular reason to doubt the story.
Your comments bear out Pike's insularity premise very well.
For instance, the dining philosophers problem is interesting in a nice, clean, theoretical sense. Practice is seldom, if ever, that clean. The behavior of a concurrent program often cannot be understood without also understanding the eight or nine different overlaid and interacting concurrency and synchronization models that are used in any real world machine/OS/interpreter stack. Hence, making tweaks to dining philosophers isn't a burning issue, so no one in the biz world pays any attention to them.
I couldn't even sell a tool that analyzes systems for deadlock, unless I worked for either Microsoft or Rational. And they don't need to, so they don't put any time into developing such tools.
As someone who's gone all the way up the academic ladder, I would strongly advise anyone who's contemplating such a move to bail out while there's still time. Pike is right that the problem exists and wrong in assuming that it is fixable. Research is unneeded and unwanted in industry and is a Potemkin village in academia.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Jake brakes.
2. Truck tailgates banging.
Is anyone trying to develop quiet trucks? I sure hope so.
ya just blew yer cover, prestomeco... :D
See ya Saturday!
- pdmoderator
Fer what it's worth, I know/knew most of the parties involved and the story fits the sequence of events.
Corroborating evidence: If someone posts the first line off the back of one of the MO Launch Team tee shirts, I'll post the second. (Which proves I know something about the internals of the MO project, not that Ira is in solar orbit presently.)
- pdmoderator
Nope. Ira was not the cause. Apparently, due to a poorly analyzed last-minute engineering change, some fuel vapor accumulated where it should not have, and MO blew up at Mars orbit insertion.
I know Lee, Technician X, and Prestomeco, and had met Ira and his African-American princess sweetie Tahoma a couple of times before he died. I still have a couple of MO Launch Team T-shirts. Although I didn't personally witness any part of Ira's boarding of the spacecraft, I have no particular reason to doubt the story.
But I doubt that Ira was the first, either!
- pdmoderator
Bologna. Use piezoelectrics to physically shift the LCD array. Same way adaptive optics is done.
Your comments bear out Pike's insularity premise very well.
For instance, the dining philosophers problem is interesting in a nice, clean, theoretical sense. Practice is seldom, if ever, that clean. The behavior of a concurrent program often cannot be understood without also understanding the eight or nine different overlaid and interacting concurrency and synchronization models that are used in any real world machine/OS/interpreter stack. Hence, making tweaks to dining philosophers isn't a burning issue, so no one in the biz world pays any attention to them.
I couldn't even sell a tool that analyzes systems for deadlock, unless I worked for either Microsoft or Rational. And they don't need to, so they don't put any time into developing such tools.
As someone who's gone all the way up the academic ladder, I would strongly advise anyone who's contemplating such a move to bail out while there's still time. Pike is right that the problem exists and wrong in assuming that it is fixable. Research is unneeded and unwanted in industry and is a Potemkin village in academia.