Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Spirit and Opportunity computer guts

A post over at Slashdot and an article over at Space.com talk about the computational innards of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They’re surprisingly low-tech, but work well and NASA seems to find them reliable.
From the Space.com article,

RAD6000 microprocessors are radiation-hardened versions of the PowerPC chips that powered Macintosh computers in the early 1990s, with 128 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second.

Not as powerful as one might think, but then again I suppose you don’t need much computing power to operate a robot. They did jam it full of memory though.
What I think is more cool is

In addition to VxWorks’ reliability, the system allows users to add software patches — such as a glitch fix or upgrade — without interruption while a mission is in flight. “We’ve always had that [feature] so you don’t have to shut down, reload and restart after every patch,” Blackman said, adding that some commercial desktop systems require users to reboot their computers after a patch

Now if only Microsoft could make Windows do that…

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My Yahoo! has RSS aggregating!

Learned from Jeremy Zawodny that My Yahoo! now has an RSS aggregator module you can put on your My Yahoo! page. I might actually start using the thing again now. It’s only in beta, but I haven’t seen anything resembling a problem yet in the 5 minutes I’ve been casually using it. And you can even ping it.

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RSS Feed validating

Over at Dive into Mark, he talks about RSS Feed validating, and how even with feed validating services, there are still plenty of RSS feeds with badly formed XML. So there’s this nifty feed validator that’s simple to use, and offers suggestions to fix your bad feeds. Very neat. Worth checking out.

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2003 True Stella Awards

The winners of the 2003 Stella Awards have just been announced! This is the real thing now, not the fake ones that have been making the rounds.

And the winner is…

The City of Madera, Calif. Madera police officer Marcy Noriega had the suspect from a minor disturbance handcuffed in the back of her patrol car. When the suspect started to kick at the car’s windows, Officer Noriega decided to subdue him with her Taser. Incredibly, instead of pulling her stun gun from her belt, she pulled her service sidearm and shot the man in the chest, killing him instantly. The city, however, says the killing is not the officer’s fault; it argues that “any reasonable police officer” could “mistakenly draw and fire a handgun instead of the Taser device” and has filed suit against Taser, arguing the company should pay for any award from the wrongful death lawsuit the man’s family has filed. What a slur against every professionally trained police officer who knows the difference between a real gun and a stun gun! And what a cowardly attempt to escape responsibility for the actions of its own under-trained officer.

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Mars Scorecard

The Mars Scorecard is a pretty funny play-by-play summary of the our record with Martian probes over the past 40 years. So far, the Martians are winning.