Faulty hardware found on shuttle

Oh, no doubt about it - I work with it every day. My point is not that the
orbiter *isn't* an astonishingly complex vehicle - it surely is. My point
is that airliners have *also* become astonishingly complex over the last
few decades.

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Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Its also dangerous to payload and crew even when everyone does their job right.
It has way too may possible failure modes, many of which end in lost vehicle
and crew.

Worse yet its old and costs too much to operate.
Hey this is my opinion

rk wrote in
:

I haven't seen any plans or even discussion to "hire microsoft weenies
to code the next shuttle" and to eliminate sitting down and thinking
so is this a real problem?

And Thank GOD for that.
The mere thought of Microsoft-generated code running something as expensive
as the Shuttle gives me cold shivers.

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

Marvin wrote:

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

D.
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Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:


Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.


*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Oh, horsehit! Expecting it to run with negligible maintainence and no
progressive degeneration is not an unrealistic standard. This only true
if your standards have degraded due to constant exposure. Run multiple
different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor quality and
reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly obvious.

Brett

Brett Buck wrote in
. com:
Run multiple different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor
quality and reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly
obvious.

Brett

Amen!

Windows is a very fancy system, its got more bells & whistles than anyone
can discover in a lifetime.

But what users actually need (despite contrary propaganda from microsoft),
is a *stable* and *predictable* and *secure* system.

There have been other operating systems that delivered this, but they didnt
have nearly the public-relations and legal-wrangling skills of microsoft,
thus they got gobbled up or trampled out of business.

Microsoft is an incredible business success. It is not a software or
systems success.

"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:

Richard Lamb wrote in
:

But, just for a moment, everybody take a couple of steps back,
and take in the whole thing at once.

This really is one awesome machine.

Oh, no doubt about it - I work with it every day. My point is not that the
orbiter *isn't* an astonishingly complex vehicle - it surely is. My point
is that airliners have *also* become astonishingly complex over the last
few decades.

--
JRF



No argument with that!

And you, sir, are a lucky man...

rk wrote:
Currently spacecraft (not launch vehicles) are not commercial products.

Exactly why anything NASA orders from Boeing et al ends up costing a lot more
than had been anticipated. NASA isn't buying a product, it is buying a service
to design and manufacture a product for one time use.

The 777 was nothing radical. Planes of that size had been built already,
and Boeing drew a lot from Airbus's experience with FBW.

References for this design lineage please.

DC-10, MD-11, A340. Furthermore, Boeing had already built a larger plane (747)
so the 777 wasn't stretching any limits on technology. The 777 is simply a
succesfull integration of available technologies. Planes of that size had been
flying for 20 years, so there was a lot of data to help design a better plane
than DC10s/MD11s. Where Boeing innovated is in the design and testing
processes with computer integration that had not yet been done for commercial
aircraft before. The 777's engines however did force advances in technology to
permit building of engine turbines of a size never built before.

The 777 is an example of a job very well done, not of radical new
technologies. The shuttle was radically new both in materials such as tiles,
in aerodynamics and integration between plane and spaceship. It hadn't been
done before, so it wasn't a question of improving a design.

In the case of the 777, when Boeing set out to build a plane that size, it had
20 years of knowledge about planes the same size, and about 3-4 years
knowledge about FBW on commercial aircraft (A320 started to fly in 1987-1988
time frame). It was a question of making a better mousetrap, not inventing a
mousetrap as was the case with Shuttle.


And Airbus couldn't launch it until it
was reasonably sure it had solved many of the show stoppers that had

Irrelevant.

Actually, this is VERY relevant. Building the 777 would be the equivalent of
building Shuttle Mark II. You'd benefit from all the experience and knowledge
of 20 years of Shuttle flights, and be able to focus on improving the
mousetrap with with existing technologies, and even have the luxury of develop
a few new ones to improve it even more. But at the core, all the technology
exists today to build Shuttle Mark II.

NASA has dabbed into other technologies such as lifting bodies but is there
really any such technologies that are matire enough to really go into
production as a replacementf or Shuttle now ?

I say "NOW" because with the current retirement shedule, NASA is already a few
years late and doesn't have anywhere near the money to ever get really started
on the project.


What what will it be ? Building an updated model of proven technology with
many improvements, or continue to dab into new esotheric technologies in the
hopes of finding something radically cheaper ?

Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.


Uhh, ask anyone why they are running MS OS on their system
and they'll tell you that it's because that's what came on
it, not because they actively sought it out. MS has been
one of the best at coercing PC makers into using MS OS
exclusively, that's already been documented worldwide. The
fact that millions are using it is spurious to the argument
that it's any good as an OS.

As to unrealistic standards, maybe it is unreasonable to
expect an OS to not crash in any given 24 hour time period.
I like blue screens of death.

JazzMan
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"Brett Buck" wrote in message
. com...
Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:


Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal
staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on
the
priority list.


*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Oh, horsehit! Expecting it to run with negligible maintainence and no
progressive degeneration is not an unrealistic standard.

Really? I'll tell that to my servers that have experienced 0 crashes in
several years.

My laptop is over 3 years old, only maintenance I do is apply patches as
required and defrag the disk. I can't remember if it's crashed at all or
not. I don't believe so.


This only true
if your standards have degraded due to constant exposure. Run multiple
different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor quality and
reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly obvious.


Funny how many multi-million dollar businesses run just fine.


Brett

In article ,
Derek Lyons wrote:
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
[Microsoft] priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Nothing unrealistic about the standard at all. All it takes is a certain
amount of *attention* to things like stability and security. There are
several other systems which are at least an order of magnitude better in
those respects.

The reason why millions of people around the world use Windows on a daily
basis has nothing to do with technical quality. Microsoft was simply the
only major software supplier which didn't drop the ball badly at the
crucial time -- the late 1980s -- when there was a huge pent-up market
demand for a Mac-ish GUI-based system running on commodity PC hardware.
Microsoft had to struggle desperately for years to produce something half
usable -- Windows 1.x was junk and 2.x wasn't much better -- but the other
major players, mostly notably IBM with OS/2, fumbled the job so totally
and so disastrously that Microsoft had the time it needed.
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