[H-GEN] Dismal performance of Mars mission software

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Greg Black wrote:

> The company representatives are busy congratulating themselves
> on their cleverness in getting it to re-start in this way, when
> they should be falling on their swords for the incredible
> stupidity that allowed the system to fail in the first place --
> and, by failing, to cause a lot of grief and wasted effort on
> the part of the mission control people back on Earth.

Greg you've taken the words right out of my mouth.  This is exactly what I
thought when I read about these problems.  I'm applying one phrase to much
of computing these days: "This is not good enough."

> The restricted memory of the system could not possibly have been
> a surprise to the designers; the squandering of this limited
> resource without any thought about its management is the height
> of stupidity.  I really don't understand how it is that people
> with so few clues can ever get to be in charge of stuff that is
> so hard to fix when it's in the field.

Computing used to be about the persuit of excellence.  For the most
part, this is no longer the case.

> Many of us here have spent time excoriating Microsoft for their
> woeful software -- and that's fine, for their software is really
> bad and its failures cost people and organisations huge amounts
> of time, money, grief, etc.  But here we have an embedded
> systems company that prides itself on making vastly superior
> products, and somehow convinces customers of its superiority,
> making schoolboy mistakes.

Yep, it really is inexcusible.

> [1] This footnote is for those who have noticed that this might
>     have been a blog entry if I had a blog ...

Haahaha :)

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah