Newsgroup: it.scienza.astronomia
Titolo: I computer della ISS (Ing)

> 
<< caught a glimpse of one of the astronauts obviously attempting to
retrieve some e-mail from his laptop.. And then complaining over the com
that he was getting a "you can only have one instance of Outlook running" -
ground control advised for a laptop reboot, but the guy upstairs wasn't too
keen on doing that
The personal communication laptops the astronauts have are windows
machines.
The machines that run both ISS and Shuttle are *not*. They are derivatives
of UNIX, and, as grandparent said, have many eyes and many thousands of
dollars poured into each line of code. There was a good article not too
long
ago in Fast Company [
fastcompany.com
] about the shuttle coding team.
From the article: the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000
lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software
had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity
would
have 5,000 errors. That's impressive. The same care went into the ISS
computers, at least from the US's side. I can't speak for Russia as I don't
have that level of familiarity with them.
Last, everyone is talking about the 'russian' computers.. Well, this guy
last night in the press conference did state these were actually "western
style" european computers !
The Russian computers failed. The US computers have 'taken over'
temporarily. Why? Because we have this nice little satellite network called
TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) which lets us relay
communications with shuttle over the vast majority of the orbit. Russia
does
not. They can only communicate over line of sight, which is a few times
each
day for about 8 or so minutes.>>
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>
<< caught a glimpse of one of the astronauts obviously attempting to
retrieve some e-mail from his laptop.. And then complaining over the com
that he was getting a "you can only have one instance of Outlook running" -
ground control advised for a laptop reboot, but the guy upstairs wasn't too
keen on doing that
The personal communication laptops the astronauts have are windows machines.
The machines that run both ISS and Shuttle are **not**. They are derivatives
of UNIX, and, as grandparent said, have many eyes and many thousands of
dollars poured into each line of code. There was a good article not too long
ago in Fast Company [
fastcompany.com
] about the shuttle coding team.
From the article: the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000
lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software
had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would
have 5,000 errors. That's impressive. The same care went into the ISS
computers, at least from the US's side. I can't speak for Russia as I don't
have that level of familiarity with them.
Last, everyone is talking about the 'russian' computers.. Well, this guy
last night in the press conference did state these were actually "western
style" *european* computers !
