Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Friday 11 December 2009 21:00:49 Dale wrote:
That would be cool of you had a system that just couldn't be rebooted.
Is there such a thing tho? What would be the reason a machine just
could not be rebooted? I guess one would be if the puter was on planet
Mars maybe? Is that how NASA does it? lol Could you imagine getting a
blue screen of death on a computer that is on Mars? O_O
IBM mainframes many years ago could be rebooted. I mean rebooting was
physically not supported; there wasn't even an on/off switch. There was a
guillotine blade around the incoming mains feed attached to an explosive bolt
and only supposed to be activated by the building's Fireman's Switch :-)
Mars probes can be rebooted, but the underlying BIOS-type code cannot, and it
has all kinds of fail-safe routines built in, if code doesn't work it reverts
back to the last known good version. Much like today's smartphones which is
the prime reason why it's normally insanely hard to permanently brick them.
But all that really does is move the "you can't ever halt this code" section
one level lower
One reason I mentioned the Mars thing, I recall them having a puter on
Mars or something that had a hiccup and they thought they had lost it.
Somehow it just popped itself back up tho. I guess it was trying to
find some code that did work and finally did. I remember them saying
they tried to upload something to fix a error then it went all wacky on
them. It amazes me tho how long those puters they send to Pluto and
such can last. It also seems that something always goes wrong too. I
remember the Pluto thing had a antenna that didn't open up all the way.
It wasn't able to send as much data as they wanted but they worked
around it.
I have no idea how those things can work in the environment they are in
either. It does help me to understand how my old rig here hangs in
there tho. Six years old and still kicken. I blow the dust out and no
deadly cosmic rays either.
Dale
:-) :-)
