Yesterday News Conference
I found the discussion about Spirit's troubles very interesting. I can't remember the ladies name, but she gave a pretty detailed account of what happened and when. She also described how they approached the trouble shooting. This included something that I have seen many times. The Sr developer had an intuitive guess that it had something to do with the flash memory. There current theory on what is wrong is that they got too many files in the flash memory and it overflowed the file system portion of RAM. They are now going to delete a bunch of files that they don't need and that should resolve the problem. Being a software developer, it sure sounds like a good theory. Dave
Yep, that's waaay better than the address line issue that was batted around a few days ago. Jennifer Trosper (the woman who's name you couldn't remember) said that they'd only run the testbeds for 9 days in a row. The rover had been on the surface for something like 18 days when the problem showed up. Sure sounds like they missed some garbage collection. But these are all good indications that Spirit may be able to lead a full and happy life. Michael
Being a software developer, it sure sounds like a good theory.
Dave
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Hi Dave, I watched the news conference too and I thought her analysis seemed reasonable, not that I know much about computers. A colleague had a computer crash because it had too much stuff in it, so I think that makes sense. But the question that immediately comes up is, Why didn't someone think of this? Suerely the federal government has plenty of computer scientists who know exactly what happens when too many files stack up -- so why didn't they give poor Spirit a protocol to dump files before they got too numerous? Best wishes, Joe
participants (3)
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David Dunn -
Joe Bauman -
Michael Carnes