Faulty hardware found on shuttle

"JazzMan" wrote in message
...
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.

Thus, the free market in action. Nobody is forced to buy MS products. They
buy MS products because they either sought out an MS product or they didn't
care when they bought a product that happened to include something from MS.
In short, it was an intentional action on the part of the buyer. Thus, it's
very clear that MS operating systems are the best on the market, because the
market buys them more than the alternatives.

"Best" does not, of course, mean better than all of the alternatives at a
particular technical standard, although it could. In the real world,
technical merit doesn't carry much weight. MS operating systems are the best
because they provide what the public wants at an affordable price. The proof
that the public wants what MS has to offer is MS's market share. It's
completely unnecessary for a buyer to intend to buy a MS product- apathy
works as well; the proof that the product does what the public wants is the
fact that people keep buying it, even after they have complained about a
previous MS purchase. Alteratives are available, some of which have greater
technical merit and some of which are cheaper and a few which are both.
Information about these alternatives is also freely available. The public
knows about these alternatives, but buys MS products, because MS products
best serve their needs. Not wanting to think about the OS is a need that MS
addresses better than anything else on the market, as sales show.

In article ,
rk wrote:
...Commercial aircraft don't have star trackers that
look at the sky and see if they spot the one star they are expecting to
see based on current location around earth AND current attitude of
shuttle.

Star trackers, scanners, etc., are rather common devices, even for small
spacecraft. Didn't the SR-71 have a star tracker?

It did, as did other military aircraft (and even some cruise missiles)
dating back well into the 50s. Commercial aircraft of the day didn't have
quite such an urgent need to minimize crew, so they simply carried human
navigators. (If you look carefully at the pre-jet airliners, somewhere
near the main cockpit windows you'll usually see a small transparent dome
sticking up -- that's for the navigator to do star sightings.) Both the
military star trackers and the civilian navigators were swept away by the
advent of aircraft-sized inertial navigation systems.

MOST, which weighs 53kg as launched and totalled maybe US$4M development
cost, has a star tracker that holds it on target to within a few
arcseconds. The software for it, while by no means trivial, is nothing
supernatural (and I speak as the project's Software Architect).
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

Derek Lyons wrote:

*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.

Perhaps you should preface your remark, "In my uninformed opinion, people
hold it to an unrealistic standard...."

Other desktop and server computing environments, from Solaris to Linux,
achieve much higher reliability than Windows, and are far, far less vulnerable
to attack by viruses and such. Why is it unrealistic for Microsoft, with far
greater financial resources at its disposal, to achieve the same degree of
success in a similar environment?

You know the reason that "millions of people" use Microsoft: They're forced to
maintain compatibility with the MS Office file formats. Because these file
formats are not Open Standards, no one can build applications that can compete
with MS Office, handing MS a defacto monopoly. It's telling that Microsoft is
losing share in areas where Open Standards permit fair competition, e.g.,
webservers and enterprise databases.

--
Dave Michelson

Scott Hedrick wrote:

"JazzMan" wrote in message
...
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.

Thus, the free market in action. Nobody is forced to buy MS products. They

Sigh... Nevermind.

JazzMan
--
************************************************** ********
Please reply to jsavage"at"airmail.net.
Curse those darned bulk e-mailers!
************************************************** ********
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of
supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to
live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry
************************************************** ********

Marvin wrote in :

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.

Hate to break it to ya, but MS code does run on the shuttles. Granted, it's
on the crew's laptop PCs and not the main flight computers, and it's not
trusted for anything critical, but it's there.


--
JRF

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

Do you fly on fly-by-wire aircraft like the 777?

Or an Airbus (e.g., A340) with machine generated code for their fly-by-wire
system in the primary computers?

--
rk, Just an OldEnginee

Ifd commercial airliners failed at the rate the shuttle does probably 2 a day
would go down. This would chill the market for airplane tckets dramatically.
Hey this is my opinion

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...

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.


I tried to use Lotus 1.0 under Windows 3.0 I think it was. 2nd worst piece
of commercial software I ever used. (the first for those curious was a
Novell dial-in program...) Forget questions about MS having access to the
Windows API, etc. Lotus simply was NOT stable. It was a completely useless
piece of crap. Considering there were other non-MS spreadsheets out there
that didn't crash every 5 minutes, it's evident that their QA was very
questionable. (Though to be fair, Lotus had bet a lot on OS/2.)

In any case, Excel won the spreadsheet wars not because it had access to
APIs or shipped with computers (every customer I set up at that time had Ami
Pro and Lotus come with the computers for free.)

This is not to deny that MS marketing and their business deals with computer
vendors didn't play a role in MS's dominance of the market, but it certainly
wasn't the sole reason.


--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On 29 Mar 2004 03:16:58 GMT, rk
wrote:

So, would you go with complex software-based fly-by-wire system with extremely
elaborate sets of computers that have very complex design considerations?

Or fly-by-steel and fly-by-oil which is simpler and has less possible failure
modes?

Yes, I would. Yes, I have. The F-4E for the latter and the NF-16D
for the former. Yes, I'd do it again.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

On or about 29 Mar 2004 00:23:41 +0200, Marvin made
the sensational claim that:
But what users actually need (despite contrary propaganda from microsoft),
is a *stable* and *predictable* and *secure* system.

So why aren't you running one?
--
This is a siggy | To E-mail, do note | Just because something
It's properly formatted | who you mean to reply-to | is possible, doesn't
No person, none, care | and it will reach me | mean it can happen

"JazzMan" wrote in message
...
Thus, the free market in action. Nobody is forced to buy MS products.
They

Sigh... Nevermind.

The way you folded when confronted with the facts is telling.