Faulty hardware found on shuttle

Pat Flannery wrote:

Here's a shot of the Hound Dog's star tracker under test- I assume that
the top assembly is the star tracker and the pylon-mounted electronics
system; and the large pod it's sitting on top of, the missile's INS
gear: http://www.ammsalumni.com/PlatforAst...r2_340x240.jpg

Your assumption would be correct based on the systems I've
seen/studied/worked with. For obvious reasons you want your star
tracker rigidly (and if possible physically) aligned with your
intertial platform.

I'd be willing to bet that it was an analog system, and the star
tracker and INS were aligned and maintained as mated pairs.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:


So what? I mean what does that level of reliability really gain you
for home or office usage?

A lot. Every hour spent being the office IT guy is an hour (or several
hour) I can spend doing my real job. Furthermore, every time Word or QB
Pro crashes, there is a non-trivial risk of file corruption. Retyping a
two page letter isn't a big deal but losing an entire appellate brief or
the day's financial work can result in a major reconstruction effort.

Yeah, I can tweak, nudge, update and fiddle with the Wintel boxen to get
them to work reasonably well (except for that damn Quickbooks/Win98
memory leak . . .) but the point is I shouldn't have to. And I don't
with my OS X machine. *THAT'S* the standard I've come to expect working
with OS X and that's how I now measure acceptability of a computer I
have to rely upon.

XP is much, much better in this regard. I just wish that if they're
going to slap a WHQL-Approved label on a vendor's device drivers, MS
would make sure the drivers really don't crash the system under common,
repeatable circumstances.

In home usage, if I want to record my guitar playing or my kids'
singing, or if I want to edit videos and burn a DVD for distant
grandparents, a driver glitch shouldn't be able to crash the box! When
XP BSOD's it can either restart fairly quickly (a minute or two,
usually) or slowly (a complete 1 gig memory dump can take awhile).
However, to be safe, you probably ought to do a scandisk upon restart,
but you still have a serious risk of a damaged file. If you've spent an
hour dumping a home movie to disk, you don't want to have to spend
another hour doing it again because the file you were editing got
damaged in the crash. Or if you're transcoding that file to MPEG2 (for
DVD authoring) you may have to do it again - also a lengthy process.

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

In article , derekl1963
@nospamyahoo.com says...
Ah. So since my mini-van won't perform as well as bus or semi, I
should complain? (Which means ignoring the fact that my mini-van
wasn't designed or intended for such usage.)

If the wheels fall off your mini-van, but not too often, and never at
high speed, I should tell you to stop complaining?

Blaming the end-user for not knowing about driver installation, registry
optimization or how to harden the security profile of Windows is just
silly. Windows is *not* primarily sold to to geeks and networking
experts. Windows is sold to folks who want to do email, surf the web and
maybe balance their checkbook.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

"Ami Silberman" wrote in message
...
OK, what word do you want to use for "instructed to use as a condition of
further employment"?

2 words: free choice.

They're not "forced to use Windows" the way the Jews of
Spain were forced to convert (at least publicly)

Really? Are you saying your boss would physically harm you if you refused to
use Windows software?

Having a gun to your head still gives you a choice, and if you
feel strongly enough about it, you will decide to let your brains be blown
out.

Which points right back to what I said. Please provide a verifiable name and
contact information for *anyone* who can show that their life was directly
threatened as a result of their refusal to use MicroSoft software.

I think it is a valid moral position to object to using a particular
OS, to try and persuade others not to use it, and still to use it when one
is instructed to.

Of course- but that means that *you choose* to use it. Talk is all well and
good, but actions talk louder. No matter how loudly you protest, if you use
it, it's your choice. The alternatives may be more painful- unemployment,
for example- but the matter is still entirely in your hands.

"Dave Michelson" wrote in message
news:q0W9c.43102$li5.20374@pd7tw3no...
(And the hundreds of metres of heavy duty extension cords that
are taped to the floor and which provide power to the outlet strips
conveniently placed under every table...)

I attended a programming contest many years ago. It was very clear to me,
since my father was a licensed electrician, that the circuits were badly
overloaded. All went well until someone turned on a printer.

(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
In article ,
LooseChanj wrote:
...Anyone who
thinks unix should be held up as a shining example of operating systems should
be forced (preferably at gunpoint) to read the Unix Hater's Handbook.

That's about the only way that most of the UHH is readable...


I read it at the same time I was learning Linux, and it actually
served as a useful reference, I thought. It certainly gave me a good
grounding in things that are difficult to find in most books (and as I
was sorta learning on my own personal machine I didn't have any good
contacts to ask for advice on softer things like best practices).

Yes, it's whiny, but some of their emails are absolutely hilarious.

Chris Manteuffel

"Herb Schaltegger" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Scott Hedrick" wrote:

I wouldn't want the shuttle to depend on Windows, although XP sounds
like a
vast improvement.

XP *is* a vast improvement. Nonetheless, a screwy WDM sound or video
driver can still BSOD the system.

I got a test disk, and it immediately flagged a number of items on my system
as being incompatible. That's why the test disk remains stuck in a box
somewhere.

"Peter Stickney" wrote in message
...
One of the biggest problems with Windows-based systems is that you
don't ever really know what's on it. Every bit of code, every
application, every little widget has to insert its own little bit of
cruft into the fundamental operation of the machine.

*That* is the fundamental reason why I give my system an enema at least
every 6 months, and why I so strongly oppose all that "activation" crap. I
understand their viewpoint, but it is a major hassle when I've had all that
time to lose the keys.

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...
A realistic standard is "does the machine meet the daily needs of it's
owner/user".

WHich is why I use a Celeron, and why my alternate systems are an old 486
and two old Pentiums. My laptop is a P3, but I haven't used it much.

My system does everything I ask of it. I play Solitaire and the original
Civilization, so I don't need much in the way of graphics, and that means I
don't need much in the way of a CPU.

"Scott Hedrick" wrote in message
news

"Ami Silberman" wrote in message
...
OK, what word do you want to use for "instructed to use as a condition
of
further employment"?

2 words: free choice.

They're not "forced to use Windows" the way the Jews of
Spain were forced to convert (at least publicly)

Really? Are you saying your boss would physically harm you if you refused
to
use Windows software?

That's not the be-all and end-all of 'forced', you know.