Mars 2053 [Spirit rover sends back data stating that it is in the year 2053!]

Astrobiology Magazine ^ | 1.26.04 | Astrobiology Magazine

[StriperSniper]

I wonder if they brought it back because K-9 was getting fresh with it. ;-)

Would spirit have fit through the door on the tardis?

Stuck in 'police box' mode, I don't know.

[dware]

fascinating

[MD_Willington_1976]

So what happened did it over-write its bios with a buffer overflow??

[searchandrecovery]

Yea, my watch says 2053 too. Spirit (or Spirit & Opportunity) must have stumbled onto a tear in the space/time continuum. Feels just like 2004, though. Still trying to party like it's 1999, although I'm a bit behind schedule.

[Salamander]

ROFLMAO!

[ancient_geezer]

still untouched by global warming

You are not keeping up on the news are you?

Red Planet Warming;

"It might seem like the weather's getting warmer here on Earth, but Mars appears to have an even bigger global warming problem."

Seems that when the Sun warms up everyplace does.

[VOA]

...or it encountered a time warp.

This is actually brilliant PR.
At one stroke, NASA gets the Star Trek crowd and the Rocky Horror Picture Show fans.

Now I won't be suprised if I see that Sean What's-His-Name of NASA decked out in
Frank-n-furter garb and leading all those NASA/JPL braniacs at Pasadena
in a chorus of "Let's do the time warp again!"

[mhking]

Exterminate! Exterminate!

Just damn.

If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...

[cyborg]

[LRS]

[mikegi]

I remember, many many moons ago, running into a somewhat similar problem (bus contention, priorities). My code was slamming bits to the graphics accelerator using IO instructions, effectively flooding the PCI/Vesa bus. Meanwhile, the floppy driver was busy formatting a disk. The floppy hardware on a PC is extremely primitive and has tight timing for interrupt servicing - especially during a format. Anyway, my code would hog the bus long enough so that the floppy driver didn't get around to servicing the format interrupt in time. The result: error formatting floppy disk even though there was no real hardware problem.

The floppy driver guy raked me over the coals for hogging the bus. My reply was that I wasn't about to slow down the font code, which is used millions of times a day, in order to handle the rare case of floppy formatting. Eventually, I got him to do a better retry algorithm.

Anyway, IMHO, most of the bugs in software are because of performance pressure. In order to make code fast you make design decisions that end up biting you (deferring too many operations, don't do full parameter validation, hog the bus, etc.). This is especially bad in graphics software/hardware. How many bad video drivers are out there, 100%? Every driver I've ever used has display corruption to some degree. Yet, if you go to review websites all you read about is that one piece of hardware is 2% faster than a competitor. Display corruption is occasionally noted but basically passed over.

[gcruse]

bttt

[dougherty]

It's 2053 on Mars? Wow, I wonder how the flag at the Apollo-11 landing site is holding up, it's almost 84 years old.

According to Sheila Jackson Lee, it's holding up fine.

[Calvin Locke]

Is it just me, or did a great premise become yet another lousy movie. I could not watch it out of sheer boredom.

And I usually enjoy B movies.

Geez, I remember ramdisks under dos. They would fill up without crashing the system.

Maybe they should have used the archive bit for "xmited successfully - okay to delete".

[cyborg]

Hehe... I can hear the pen scratching away for the movie treatment... Event Horizon was one creepy movie. God I wish Art Bell was on during the week so I can hear him speculate whether Spirit is in this dimension.

[SquirrelKing]

Great Pic!

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Well, he is called Rover, so it stands to reason that his timescale is calibrated in Dog years. This is Sirius.

[Professional Engineer]

I like it! Thanks

[Salamander]

:)

[Salamander]

Thank you...:)