[extropy-chat] SPACE: Spirit Problems

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Spaceflightnow has a nice summary of what they think
happened with spirit.

http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040126spirit.html

Best quote:
"Then, as we were getting ready to send the next beep command,
the vehicle decided to communicate with us in one of its nominal
communications windows at which point we got a little bit of data
that had very little information in it. In fact, originally we started
to decode it and it was from the year 2053 and we thought 'this is not
good!' Eventually we found out the data was corrupted, and we
were all cheering at that point because there weren't a lot of
scenarios that would put us in 2053 on Mars."

Aw, come on!  What good is a multiverse if some fraction of
it doesn't run at a faster clock speed?

Seriously though, JPL needs to get some really *old* programmers
(like moi) that know really well what running out of swap space
does to your system...  These guys are spoiled -- 256 MB of
swap space and 128 MB of ram.  384 MB of memory!  We don't
need no friggen 384 MB of memory.  I could tell you stories
about what one can do with a PDP 11/10 and 16 MB of memory...

And I'll bet those JPL programmers know *nothing* about
entering a program into the machine using the front panel
flip switches!

Robert