61–70 of 72 posts
I'm surprised that they had to design custom inertial stabilization, considering how many times it's been done successfully before. Was it NIH mentality? Or did it have some requirement for more precise stabilization than other space telescopes?
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Someone traveled from the future doesn't want those calorimeters up there?
Or aliens with cloaking ships that work in every spectrum except the X-ray one.
It seems very strange that the 3 missions that would deploy an X-ray calorimeter have all failed. I feel sad for the scientists who have been hoping to get a working one into space for what sounds like over 16 years now (based on the article).
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(I have absolutely no insight into the software development practices of JAXA and their subcontractors, so I apologize if this is insensitive or uniformed.) Is this another sign of how bad japanese hardware -oriented companies and organizations are at doing software? Like the organisational software crisis at Toyota? Or was it a fluke?
I would call it a fluke. Two things to keep in mind: * Don't compare JAXA (or anyone else) to NASA at this point. We (the US) have a ton of experience, some of it bought the hard way. * This isn't Japan's typical performance. They have a nice string of very good space science missions. And don't forget things like the Mars Climate Orbiter[1], where ground based commands sent it through the atmosphere due to a unit mi…
Space is hard, and in many cases you have only one chance to get it right.
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I work for a Japanese company and sometimes work with people from other companies as well. Most of the people around me avoid English at their best, therefore cannot not access to the knowledge on stackoverflow, also documents in Japanese are usually old or incomplete. Of course it depends on the field (e.g. Japanese documents of ruby on rails are pretty good), I am not sure about aerospace engineering, but I'd not b…
> Most of the people around me avoid English at their best, therefore cannot not access to the knowledge on stackoverflow, also documents in Japanese are usually old or incomplete. Is there not a Japanese version of Stack Overflow? Maybe there should be?
A Japanese Stack Overflow would inevitably be less useful than access to the English Stack Overflow.
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Outside of legally-critical software, such as automotive control systems: it doesn't seem that there is much focus on quality. The analysis of Toyoda's software that might have been behind the claimed acceleration/can't stop the engine problems indicates that even there, at least Toyota is all but hopeless.
Yup. > There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a…
The priority seems to be reliable real-time computation, and the solution is to calculate everything as a continuous function. Anything that would be a branch is instead a binary mix of the conditions, triggered with a threshold function.
I can think of many ways of structuring programs which are spaghettiish in C, but would yield the desired results in an automotive ECM.
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Or aliens with cloaking ships that work in every spectrum except the X-ray one.
Or architects of the Simulation worrying X-ray spectrum could expose some dirty hacks they are ashamed of.
sorry, had to.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11603023 and marked it off-topic.
I actually used to respect you. You disgust me by what your profile quotes. Enjoy your existence at the expense of others.
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Yup. > There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a…
I have seen analyses of ECM software; and I think they could benefit greatly from a new language. The priority seems to be reliable real-time computation, and the solution is to calculate everything as a continuous function. Anything that would be a branch is instead a binary mix of the conditions, triggered with a threshold function. I can think of many ways of structuring programs which are spaghettiish in C, but w…
void doit(const tststructptr* in) {
assert(in); /* Because we test our code, for safety */
const tststructptr t = *in;
if ( t.t1 && t.t2 && t.t3) { f1(); }
else if ( t.t1 && !t.t2 && t.t3) { f2(); }
else if ( t.t1 && t.t2 && !t.t3) { f3(); }
else /* TODO: Fix, this should never happen */
releasenerveagent(SLEEPINGQUARTERS);
}