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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

INTC 48.72

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Jan 14 3:59 PM EST

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To: Gary Kao who wrote (176660)	1/26/2004 9:20:57 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (1) of 186894

somebody's head might deserve to roll with this snafu With your standards there would be very few programmers left ! In hindsight all problems look silly. But given the extreme complexity and size of code, there are human oversights. So the key is extensive testing and simulation. The Rover software was not extensively tested before launch because of insufficient time. The software was to be modified once it landed on Mars. The longest test of the Rover lasted 9 days. This problem surfaced after 18 days on Mars, and also after accumulating lots of data during the several month flight from Earth. It is not clear if the program did not handle file overflow correctly, or if there was a corrupted pointer which clobbered the program or vital data. NASA tends to use very old processors for hardware reliability reasons. The last Mars mission used an 1970's era 8085 processor. This mission may be using an 8086 vintage, which corresponds to the first IBM PC era. More recent processors and operating systems handle wild pointers better than older processors, making it easier to locate the problem.

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