TESS was competing w/ another exoplanet survey instrument:
http://finesse.jpl.nasa.gov/

Roughly the same amount of money, same launch date, different people working on it.

Good luck to the TESS team, too bad it wasn't FINESSE.

For some reason I totally disregarded any warnings about this upgrade. I didn't uninstall the Qt scripting binding I had been told would break an upgrade and I didn't even bother to look up instructions. And as such, getting there was difficult. Now I am there, doing all of those things I should have let the upgrade task do (like hand edit menu.lst). I like it. Kubuntu looks great. And everything I have tried has worked. But it has only been 5 days. I am sure that others have had different experiences.

I don't see how this is clever. It actually causes the users and the hackers to work more closely and their numbers will always win out. I bet this concept dies too.

I will believe Intel's promises 2 or 3 years down the road when they have cleared the merger and they can do whatever they want with the company. Same thing goes for Oracle w/ the Sun merger. What they say today cannot be taken as fact because they are currently saying whatever they think they have to to get the SEC and stock holders to approve of the merger. But let's be hopeful. It would be good if Intel only improved WRS's real-time Linux stake and kept helping VxWorks get better.

I was in a class the other day and a technologist asked the question, "Why do we always pick VxWorks for our flight s/w OS?" The answer was, because once something flies, it basically always flies. If Linux, ecos, qnx or any other embedded OS flew once - it can then always fly. It is a strange problem. VxWorks should not be picked just because it flew. That is unless you need an OS for a flight system.