And you know this how?

Post #137,981 by pwhysall 1/26/04 5:54:03 PM Reply	And you know this how? Yeah, I'm sure that NASA hired some REAL dumb programmers for this job. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home Page - Now with added Zing!]
Post #137,987 by deSitter 1/26/04 6:01:55 PM Reply	It's POCS plain old common sense. What is the former failure rate of NASA spacecraft computing? Somewhere around 0. What is the failure rate of business computing based of "tested methologies using canned software"? What, 50-60 percent? You decide. How many really shitty engineers have I met? Somewhere around 0. How many shitty IT types have I met? I mean - no vision, sloppy, slapdash, careless, clueless? No telling - dot lots and lots. You decide. NASA's webpage talks abot ISO.Bullshit and TQManglement. It's their "corporate ethos". Before, someone like John Houboult could go straight to the top with an issue if he felt justified. Now, 10 layers of total quality management would be in his way. You decide. -drl
Post #137,988 by pwhysall 1/26/04 6:03:14 PM Reply	Way to not answer the question. How do you know? Answer: you don't. Space is a HARD PLACE TO DO BUSINESS. STUFF BREAKS. GET OVER IT. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home Page - Now with added Zing!]
Post #138,013 by deSitter 1/26/04 6:18:55 PM Reply	Re: Way to not answer the question. Peter, in my other life before bumness descended on me like a broken rover, I was a "software engineer" in the Radar and Instrumentation Lab at Ga. Tech Research Institute. We dealt with hardware all the time (Star Wars). No one had VxWorks or any of that BS. We ran hardware simulations on large 'frames, and then coded directly to the simulator. My part was radar codes. Everything was home grown. It always worked. I wonder why? -drl
Post #138,014 by pwhysall 1/26/04 6:20:27 PM Reply	Because it was a simulator :-) Simulators have a tendency to be like the environment you're coding to. Wonder why we have bugs on the road but not in the lab? Wonder no more. We can't put a motorway in our lab. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home Page - Now with added Zing!]
Post #138,020 by deSitter 1/26/04 6:26:29 PM Reply	Re: Because it was a simulator :-) This was the standard way of dealing with hardware of any complexity. The Apollo computers were done that way. Intel makes CPUs like that. The hardware has design specs, you feed them in, and run them. One thing we did was model something like a tank, bounce fake radar from a fake antenna off the fake tank, then calculate the cross section of the return - then go out and deal with an actual radar. The numbers always matched. -drl
Post #138,021 by altmann 1/26/04 6:27:00 PM Reply	BTW, Pathfinder used VxWorks too ... ... with interesting results: [link\|http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.49.html#subj1\|http://catless.ncl.a.../19.49.html#subj1] -- Chris Altmann
Post #138,027 by deSitter 1/26/04 6:45:18 PM Reply	heh, with hardware, it's always timing :) Could one reason the "homegrow" solutions have been so good - sometimes things were honed down to the "literally counting clock cycles" level. -drl

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