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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100559)	3/28/2000 8:18:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1572918

Jim, It all depended on testing all possible situations. Some one who was in charge was too stupid to think out all the possible outcomes and to step through them. I am not sure what actually happened, but one suspects the legs had weight sensors on the so when it landed they were depressed by the crafts weight and the machine knew it had landed. The legs must not have been fully tested under the landing/vibration/? scenario and some signal was made, possibly a transient one and off went the rockets. I not know what kind of computer was up there, but arcane military reliability rules often keep items out of space unless they are proven for 5 years and then you add the 5 years of the planning phase and they may end up with a 286 machine up there? beats me, however there was enough money spent to do it right, they just spent it in the wrong places. The software 'machine' needs to be tested just as well as the mechanical devices. Of course now we have a finger pointing exercise...NASA is good at that...then there is the deniability of each person and at the end of the day it will be determined to be your fault....how do you feel about that? Bill

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100559)	3/28/2000 8:20:00 PM
From: 5dave22	Respond to of 1572918

Jim <How hard is it really to write a piece of software?> That's all a coverup. The truth is, the Polar Lander was operated by a series of Intel processors. One gigs to be exact. When they recover the debris, they will find a note from Intel promising delivery before it lands on the Red Planet. Thirty days, something or other. Dave

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100559)	3/28/2000 9:15:00 PM
From: Goutam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572918

Jim, < How hard is it really to write a piece of software? dailynews.yahoo.com; Thanks for posting it. NASA must have learned a valuable lesson for not adding extra landing sensors. I'm sure a link to this article was posted here before, but this golden piece of info was not detected by anyone (credits to JC jc-news ) - Is Compaq developing Fortran Compiler optimized for Athlon? See this C't article - translator.go.com - partially translated (you will find comments about Compaq Fortran compiler at the end of this article) Goutama