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Programming IT Technology

NASA Releases Classic Software To Public Domain 193

Posted by CmdrTaco from the someone-quick-find-a-moon-lander dept.
xpccx writes in with a bit from NewsBytes, "NASA turned 43 this month and marked the occasion by releasing more than 200 of its scientific and engineering applications for public use. The modular Fortran programs can be modified, compiled and run on most Linux platforms." The software can be found at OpenChannelSoftware.com. At long last I am ready to prepare my own space mission. I wonder if a whiskey barrel is gonna be air tight after I launch it/me into space with a trebuchet. (It's this sort of unconventional thinking that should get me my job at NASA. Or at least get me put to sleep).
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NASA Releases Classic Software To Public Domain More

NASA Releases Classic Software To Public Domain

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  • Next they'll be buying NASA.com - my mate is a support geezer and got his manager ringing him saying 'I want to see the mars landings but www.nasa.com has just got breasts all over the place' - oh how we laughed...
  • To port this to FORTRAN.Net!
    I mean, uh. Well. It is pretty nifty: I'm always interested to take a look at old programs and see what dirty tricks old-school programmers used to cram as much code as they could into the tiny amount of space that they had to work with.
    Lunar Lander, please?

  • NASA (Score:2)

    by MxTxL ( 307166 )
    It will be cool to see what the NASA coders have up their sleeves. It will be interesting to see just how they think. Of course, as a younger coder, i'm not sure i'm going to want to learn FORTRAN just to do it.

    Are there other examples of NASA released code?

    • Learn FORTRAN? That's funny. If you know basically any language, you can read FORTRAN... Just don't shudder too often. And no loud shouting, either.

      • Be sure to be specific when Fortran bashing. Fortran 77 should justifiably elicit shudders and shouts, but Fortran 90 and later are very nice for scientific programming. In fact, modern Fortran doesn't look a whole lot like Fortran 77.

        • Re:NASA (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Regarding the evolution of Fortran, I had a CS professor who used to say, "Nobody knows what the programming language we'll use 20 years from now will look like, but you can bet it will be called Fortran."
        • Yeah... I forgot my manners. I didn't get to use F90 until my last 3 months or so (after 5 years of F77)... it did look like a much better language.
      • A few odd corners of the language should be checked into before delving too deeply into FORTRAN.

        For a lot of code that doesn't declare everything, you'll need to understand the variable name/typing default rules.

        You should understand what a COMMON, and EQUIVALENCE. Uhhmm, remember that everything is call by reference is important.

        That about does it, though, certainly up through FORTRAN77. FORTRAN90 is a much more complicated language.

      • The old joke:

        A good FORTAN programmer can write FORTAN code in any language!
    • When I was at NASA, I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center's HEASARC [nasa.gov] group, and all our software was free via an ftp site. (That's been a while, so I can't say where every URL is anymore.) Now, I don't know how useful it is to us unwashed taxpayers, but surely SOMEbody could use free software to do coordinate transformations between cylindrical and spherical coordinates.
    • I was the in the last class of my engineering program to be offered a FORTRAN class. However, the whole aerospace industry is dominated by FORTRAN... in fact, I'm writing some code in FORTRAN 77 today... to calculate spacecraft orbits no less...
      • I'm as old as NASA and I will be writing FORTRAN code as soon as I get off my ass and start my workday.

        It's not about the language, it's about the analysis, and frankly, for straightforward engineering (heat transfer, aero, even simulation), there is not a more appropriate language.

        It's nice not having to program windows and GUI's, but Real Analysis (TM).

      • Well, fortran and Ada. Actualy, while there's a kick-ass GPL Ada 95 compiler, there's no comparably complete fortran 95 gcc frontend, just an embryonic project. Which is a pity. F95 is pretty different to F77, and not actually all that bad...

    • FORTRAN is the language of math and science applications. Almost all usefull engineering applications in the nuclear and aerospace industries are written in it. It's a language that engineers can easily master and use. Where peer review and undertanding of the code is needed you will find FORTRAN, and engineers maintaining it. Many of those applications have litteraly thousands of man years of development behind them so that replacement is not only undesirable, it's not cost effective.

      This is a great gift from NASA. I can imagine FEA and finite difference packages for thermal, stress and rad flux. Other languages can be used to devolop graphical front ends where that is useful. Sooooo cool.

    • For many of the problems that NASA code addresses, you're going to find all the code is in FORTRAN. It's the language that engineers & scientists have used for programming. Nowadays the front end might be programmed in another language, but the number crunching will probably still be done in a F77 library.
    • As a younger coder, if you have problems reading FORTRAN code, then that's absolutely the best thing you could be doing with your time.

      You should be able to read any reasonable language(except, perhaps APL), developing that talent can't be a waste of time.
  • I'll get to see the code for that annoying Pop Under Ad; X10 Camera.

    Only an evil Gov't conspiracy can be to blame for such a thing!

    You know like the way NASA monitors what cable channels you watch with the "cable box"... Oh come'on you _do_ know about that don't you?

  • And..... (Score:2, Funny)

    by mbadolato ( 105588 )
    ...a new discovery in the cause of the Apollo 13's malfunction was made when someone noticed hacked code with the comment "3y3 0WnZ j00, N@5@"
  • If CmdrTaco gets put to sleep, can I have his ID?

    I didn't think NASA did that type of thing, I thought Vets did that...so that what they're doing to supplement their budget...Yeah!!!

    Sean D.

  • Succumbs to the slashdot effect. I got far enough to find something interesting and it crapped out. I mean, defecated externally. 'Crap' is double ungood. . .
    • Hi, my name is Larry and I've been slashdotted.

      The good news is that we're back on the air. Apologies to all who were not served because of the sudden spike in requests.
      More good news in this situation is that Rackspace.com [reackspace.com] was very responsive in getting a RAM upgrade installed quickly. From the time I got the alarm that the site was down, to the diagnosis, ordering the upgrade having the RAM installed and the server restarted was under an hour. Thank you to all the folks at Rackspace. When the machine came back up, we did a bit of Apache tuning and we've been ok since. The load on the server spiked to 80 before it stopped responding to commands. After the RAM upgrade and tuning, we're down to around 30 with no swapping. (OK, I just noticed a little swapping) Sorry for taking so long to get a response to this comment.

      Again, I apologize for not being able to serve all of the requests initially. Please take a few minutes to revisit the site and take a look at the NASA software and the other scientific and academic software.

      Larry Mills-Gahl
      Open Channel Software

  • Sounds Good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Friday October 26, 2001 @10:01AM (#2483570) Homepage
    The NASA code used on space missions is some of the most throughly debugged anywhere. Can't afford a blue screen of death when lives are actually on the line. Also, you have to be pretty fault tolerant in case cosmic rays or other external phenomena are messing with your data.

    Of course the drawback is that most NASA code is too specialized to be of general interest.
    • I'm just disappointed they didn't release the shuttle sync stuff... the shuttle runs two computers, the ground runs another... and they have software that keeps in sync, down to the system clock. I've even heard rumor that it runs on commodity (radiation-hardened) 386 CPUs.

      That would be some cool software to get my hands on...

      • Re:Sounds Good (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Detritus ( 11846 )
        Congratulations, everything that you posted is wrong.

        See this page [nasa.gov] for some factual information on the Shuttle's computer systems.

        • Are they trying to cloak the low power of their computers when they use "words" as storage units rather than bytes?

          • Re:Sounds Good (Score:3, Insightful)

            by MentlFlos ( 7345 )
            The thing you gotta remember when thinking about these kinds of systems is that they are specialized to do only a few things. Even then, they usually have tons of support hardware to actually do the hard work.

            For example, I have a cisco 2514 router. Its main processor is a 68030 (think Mac LC series or around there). Do you think that this processor does all the work in this device? Nah. It just tells the chips that do the actual work what to do.

            The same idea could go for the computer in your car. If the sensors can only read in X samples per second... why waste the money on a computer that can read in X^2 samples/sec.

            NASA isn't doing the "big dick" contest with computers. They are building these things on a budget to do a task and do it well. If they need a computer that has a 1bit bus and a clock speed of 1hz, then so be it.

            end rant.

      • Dunno about the shuttle's comp systems, but i remember reading that the ISS's life support system is running on a rad-hardened 386. Though any way you look at it, much of the syncing code is going to be unusable, because of the simple fact that its fairly hard-coded to what it does. Yeah, you'll probably get some good ideas about how to go about syncing the code, but the code itself is probably in some horribly ugly language like ADA.

        Though the syncing code may exist. I was just able to poke around the tiniest of amounts before the site was slashed out. Soon as things settle down a bit, I'm checking out the parallel computing stuff myself. Probably a few interesting tidbits in there.

      • Gee... guess it's my day to be wrong.

        I distinctly remember reading that some NASA program had a setup like this, but can't recall where I read it...

        In any case, I do want to take a look at the redundency / parallelism stuff. Should be some really nice code there...
      • I'm just disappointed they didn't release the shuttle sync stuff... the shuttle runs two computers, the ground runs another...

        No the orbiter runs 5 (though IIRC some of the early flights actually carried 6). How can anyone get this wrong, considering that it was problems with synchronising the orbiter computers which delayed the first flight...

        I've even heard rumor that it runs on commodity (radiation-hardened) 386 CPUs.

        More likely you are thinking of the HST.
      • I thought the shuttle had three and the ground and one which was contacted in case on of the three on the shuttle gets voted out????

        • As one of the replies pointed out, this is clearly not the case.

          What you're describing is known as Tell Me Thrice bitwise redundancy. Three-way bitwise redundancy relies on three processors, any time a bit doesn't match, it has a best of two rule. Tell Me Thrice consults a seperate computer, usually on a slower link but in a secure, controlled environment, in that case.

          I don't think Tell Me Thrice has ever actually been implemented, though. If anyone has done it, it would be NASA... any idea what program it might have been?
          • It was in _Man Plus_, by Frederic Pohl. Except that he fucked it up - he ended up suggesting that you could have three bits without having at least two agree.
            • Yeah, but Tell-Me-Thrice has relevance even if two bits out of three always agree... it basically makes the assumption that if any of the bits don't agree, then something has gone wrong, and the minute chance that two of your processors are wrong and one is right is enough of a risk to a critical application (e.g. guiding a couple billion dollars worth of hardware around the solar system such that it gets where its going) that its best to just consult a known-good bit source (ground computer) in that case...
    • Indeed. The one place where you can blame a crash on cosmic rays and get away with it, and they debug the code too well to use our favourite excuse (well save the phase of the moon).

      Sheesh!
    • Can't afford a blue screen of death when lives are actually on the line.
      NASA's record is less than perfect. Remember Apollo 11? The onboard computer went into "executive overload" when it was most needed. I guess that's nicer than a simple crash, but not much of a difference from Armstrong and Adlrin's POV.

  • Bugs? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ebcdic ( 39948 )
    It will be interesting to see if the "many-eyes" effect of free software turns up bugs in these programs that have been used for years.
    • I think the 'fall and hit the ground very hard' effect would have found any serious bugs in these programs long ago.


      Or the 'burnup in the atmosphere' effect... or the 'flies into nearby residential area' effect... or the...

  • As someone who does scientific programming in FORTRAN and even MORTRAN. I will love to pour through old math routines.
    Tax payers paid for this and now we get to use it. Gotta like when the system works for you not against you.
    • As someone who does scientific programming in FORTRAN and even MORTRAN.

      FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslator, but what do MORTRAN stands for? A computer language which has omething to do with matrices, a bit like Matlab (even if it's not really a real computer language)?
      Never heard of that one.
    • MORTRAN was descibed to me as FORTRAN for dummies. The MORTRAN is more forgiving to write but it will take the code and convert it to FORTRAN. Sort of like macros.
  • So, when are the NSA going to release theyre code :)

    Is the NASA code stuff that went throught the CMM level 5 process?
  • ... to convert all measurements (and I do mean ALL) to metric!! They missed a few of those...
  • Hey, if they award you the X-Prize posthumously, be sure to leave at least part of the money to the Free Software Foundation, or some such .org.
  • after I launch it/me into space with a trebuchet

    Thanks to memepool [memepool.com]'s links, you can Buy a nice trebuchet for only $89 [trebuchet.com] !!!
  • Make sure you check the metric to English unit conversions before you use the sofware for anything important.
  • The name FORTRAN scares me. FORmula TRANslator. Good god...that's the coder's equivalent to Beezlebub. Or was that COBOL? Oh well...back to attempting to fit my head into a goldfish bowl. Mars or bust!

  • Public Domain ?? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by dpilot ( 134227 )
    What the heck is that?

    I thought the Senators for MPAA and RIAA outlawed that *years* ago.
  • I'd love to look at their stuff, but it has been years since I "spoke" Fortran fluently, having moved most of my old stuff to C or C++. Are there any converters out there that are up to snuff for this kind of work?

  • System Requirements (Score:5, Funny)

    by jwriney ( 16598 ) on Friday October 26, 2001 @10:25AM (#2483714) Homepage
    readme.txt
    ==========
    To run this code, you will need the following:

    * a Fortran compiler
    * a space shuttle

    --riney
  • Those who haven't read it yet should read this [trebuchet.com] link where Ron L. Toms launches people with a trebuchet. (You can also find him jumping the grand canyon if you look around.)
  • ... I'm using a Cement Mixer [imdb.com].

    (Score yourself two bonus points if you remember this show.)


  • Shouldn't the software used by NASA, a public institution, already be in the public domain, by definition?

    • Only if it is written by civil servants. Most NASA software is written by contractors.

    • Re:Finally (Score:2, Informative)

      by johnbk ( 104913 )
      I am president of Open Channel Software. Most of the NASA software we are listing have a fee associated with the software, imposed on us by NASA and an organization called NTTC. We are trying to 'open' the process, at minimum, pushing for free downloads for private individuals. We are also trying to get community activity going around some of the more popular programs.

      • Re:Finally (Score:2, Informative)

        by SkewlD00d ( 314017 )
        1. Who gets the fees and how much?

        2. NTTC says "Open Channel Software (OCS) is an Internet-based organization that publishes, distributes and commercializes software created at academic and research institutions"

        3. NTTC describes themselves as a "research commericialization center."

        4. What are we paying tax dollars for if we have to pay to use the products of Federally Funded research? I thought the whole point of federally funded research was to do the jobs that typically wouldn't be undertaken in a commercial environment. Now these Special-Interest Groups (SIGs) and lobbyists are trying to sell-out the system. What gives? By the way, I work in a federally funded security research lab, so I have a basic idea of how the 'System' works.



        See this [nttc.edu] NTTC press release on this article.

  • By chance, does anyone have a mirror of this site? It's completely slammed. I got less than 10 bytes before it timed out.
    • Sorry, we don't. We are adding RAM now to accomidate. - John Kennedy, President, Open Channel Software
    • Slammed is a good word. We certainly did get slammed. The good news is that Rackspace.com was able to respond to a RAM upgrade request quickly and between the time I got the alarm about the site availability through diagnosis, upgrade order, installation and restart was a bit under an hour. After some additional system and apache tuning, we were back on the air by 11:45 and have been serving the load since then.

      I apologize to those whose requests were not served this morning due to the spike in demand. We've upgraded our service now and we invite you back to check out the NASA software.

      Larry Mills-Gahl
      Open Channel Software

  • welp, you would have the highest acceleration at the beginning, and if you wanted to get into orbit, that acceleration would need to be so high, that you would become meat-and-bone pulp on the bottom of that barrel... provided that the barrel itself will survive.

    Therefore, I encourage you to try, maybe you won't get the job at NASA, but at least you will succeed SPAMming the outer space!

  • nifty (Score:1)

    by Pierre ( 6251 )
    This is pretty cool.

    I know a lot of these codes are relatively old and not that glamorous (lot of simulation, thermodynamics etc.) but the science behind them hasn't changed dramatically - energy is still conserved in fortran or C++ right?

    For those of us that are writing scientific code it's nice to be able to reuse bits here and there and to see how somebody else tackled a similar problem.

    Just browsing around I see quite a few codes that I used in classes for homework and projects (provided at the time by the instructor). Mechanical Engineers still like fortran (when it's spelled in lower case).

  • Most modern NASA software is open (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@@@deforest...org> on Friday October 26, 2001 @10:55AM (#2483908)
    Most of the software developed for NASA projects these days is open -- at least, the scientific operations and data analysis software. For example, check out the solarsoft [lmsal.com] distribution of solar physics analysis software, including planning tools for most existing solar instruments. CVS and Sourceforge it ain't -- but you can get your hands on the actual software that is being used in the SOHO [nasa.gov], TRACE [lmsal.com], Yohkoh, and HESSI missions (and soon STEREO and Solar-B too).
  • > I wonder if a whiskey barrel is gonna be air tight
    The severity of this problem depends on the method used to drain the whisky barrel.

    Hic
  • I used to work for a conttractor for NASA and did quite a bit of maintenance and development for some of the applications in this library. They are written in FORTRAN mostly because the original development took place in the early 70s for most of them. When I got there 20 years later, I was maintaining spaghetti code that had been modified and remodified ad nauseam.

    I recieved a couple letters informing me that "my" code had been incorporated into the COSMIC library. At that time, it was mostly research and academic organizations that used COSMIC. Anyway, it wasn't really my code. I was just the person currently modifying it.

    Also, much of the code is not real-time. Sustantial time is spent doing simulations to make sure everything is everything. It's an expensive mistake to fix once you've launched. Nonetheless, I had to sit around during launches (always at 3 am) just in case... I saw a post earlier that talked about the rigorous testing, and that was certainly true which led to me doing pretty much nothing during the launch and checkout of the spacecraft. It was kind of neat to watch it all, though...
    • Yes, COSMIC is also mentioned by this announcement.
      "Originally published as part of the COSMIC collection - 500+ programs across the widest imaginable range of disciplines - NASA CLASSIC software essentially is the "retail" end of that collection.
      Unfortunately, COSMIC [uga.edu] has been dead since 1998. Their web page finally says the stuff is available again. The page was modified 10-Apr-2001, so apparently openchannelfoundation.org has had the collection for several months. COSMIC links to this list [openchanne...dation.org] of that collection.
  • By Musan S
    WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
    25 Oct 2001, 11:47 AM CST

    Kenme, Government Office of Strange Rumors. NASA turned 43 this month and marked the occasion by releasing more than 200 of its scientific and engineering appliances for use on BattleBots, the robot fighting show on Comedy Central. The outer space-ready booster rockets, thermal shielding equipment and gyroscopes can be modified and pitted against each other or most exisitng BattleBots such as Son of Whyachi and BioHazard. The Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center in Wheeling, W.Va., and BattleBots Inc., a for-profit scrap metal producer, are collecting the "NASA Classics" collection of new BattleBots based on discarded NASA equipment.

    The Byrd center has distributed more than 50 NASA technology-based BattleBots created by NASA engineers, said the center's president, Joseph Allen, in a statement. BattleBots now has access to NASA tech and "will help NASA promote the use of Cosmic Ray Shielding, Reagan-era Star Wars laser technology, and Hydrazine-based propellants for the television viewing public's benefit," Allen said.

    The classic tech, waiting to be annhilated for over 30 years in showers of sparks and smoke on cable television, served a variety of purposes at NASA. None of which is as interesting as what the twisted minds behind past BattleBots envision. Said Robert Everhart, creator of Atomic Wedgie, "Those NASA engineers are some scary folks. Atomic Wedgie can withstand most onslaughts, such as Diesector's Pick Axe or Minion's Fireman's emergency saw, but a 300 terawatt neodymium laser? Forget about it." Details are sketchy, but one NASA engineer with a giant smirk on his face who spoke on conditions of anonymity identified three NASA tech BattleBots in the works: the "Apollo Lunar Launcher", the "Viking Mission to Hell", and the "Rubble Telescope".

    Reported by Bewsnytes.com.

    11:47 CST
  • "Friday, October 26, 2001
    We would like to apologize to visitors from Slashdot, along with the rest of our community, for the problems we have experienced with our server this morning. We are in the process of upgrading our server to accommodate the spike in requests. We thank everyone for both their interest, and their patience.

    For those interested in downloading code from the NASA Classics Collection, you should be aware that we are currently required to charge a fee for the software. We are working with the people from NASA to try to "open" this software to enable downloads without fees, at least for private, non-commercial use."

    Sounds like something associated with the U.S. government eh?? :-P
  • So, why isn't all (non-classified) government software open-source? Haven't we already paid for it? Why is NASA the exception?

    It seems to me that state governments in particular could drastically reduce software developement costs by reusing code already built by other states.
  • Cool, I open /. and see NASA software. Click on the link wait for it to load, watching TV while waiting...

    After a few seconds I look and the first think I see on the right is, "Crack Growth and Fatigue Analysis"

    What does this have to do with uh software, nasa, umm computers?
    • I'm not sure if that was a serious question, but... Metal fatigue is a big concern at NASA because it can cause spacecraft to come apart in flight. A piece of metal under stress can develop tiny cracks. (If you designed the metal as thin as possible to save wait, substitute "will" for "can".) When the stress is relieved and then applied again, the cracks may grow. After a certain number of cycles, the cracks get too big and the metal breaks.

      The classic case of this was a very early jet airliner called something like Comet. Because early jet engines were pretty inefficient, they made the skin exceptionally thin so as to have more weight-carrying capacity available for fuel. When it climbed to altitude, the pressurized cabin would slightly bulge the skin outwards around the windows. When it landed, the skin would pop back. After a few months, planes started coming apart in mid-air. Microscopic examination (of not yet crashed planes) found patterns of cracks in the skin near the windows. They had to scrap the entire fleet...

      The same thing could quite easily happen with the space shuttle -- not just from cabin pressure, but also from high-stress launches and landings. Or the skin on a Mars probe may expand and contract thousands of times due to sun heating as it rotates in space. Making the metal thicker will prevent this, but every ounce of structural metal takes away an ounce of payload. So NASA has to design right to the edge of initiating metal fatigue for repeated-use items (the space shuttle), and for some probes it may accept that metal fatigue will happen, but the cracks will grow so slowly that the mission is finished before it fails. This requires very good software for simulating crack growth and analyzing metal fatigue.
  • Friday, October 26, 2001
    We would like to apologize to visitors from Slashdot, along with the rest of our community, for the problems we have experienced with our server this morning. We are in the process of upgrading our server to accommodate the spike in requests. We thank everyone for both their interest, and their patience. For those interested in downloading code from the NASA Classics Collection, you should be aware that we are currently required to charge a fee for the software. We are working with the people from NASA to try to "open" this software to enable downloads without fees, at least for private, non-commercial use.


    Just so I don't troll too terribly :)


    Probably the most famous application they are releasing is the NASTRAN (NASa STRuctural ANalysis) System which most of us aerospace types are already using in the industry. They also released some composite and general structural design tools.


    They also release numerous 2D and 3D aero flow tools.


    The one that caught my eye: SCRAM - An Engineer's Tool for Prediction of Airframe Integrated Scramjet Performance.


    The one-I-expected-to-be-there-but-wasn't: Planetary, interplanetary, and/or Mars multiple degree of freedom dynamic simulations. They gotta have a few of those, but apparently none were released.

  • OpenChannel Software is SELLING copies of these programs. Don't expect any of them to be free or even cheap.

    One projects i was looking at (a compression algorithm comparision program) was about $154 for source.

    Sounds like another backroom deal where things get put in the public domain, but one company get control of it.

    Blech. And people wonder why no one trusts the government...
  • For example: NASTRANS license fees: [openchannelsoftware.com]

    Unix source docs: $250

    DEC Alpha AXP executable use: $2000 / year
    HP9000 HP-UX executable use: $2000 / year
    IBM RS/6000 executable use: $2000 / year
    DOS/Win3.1/95 executable use: $1000 / year
    Sun Solaris 2.x executable use: $2000 / year

    DEC ALPHA OSF/1 source access: $7000 / year
    SGI IRIX 5.x source access: $7000 / year
    Sun Solaris 2.x source access: $7000 / year


    Be nice when this code IS actually open source.

  • So I visited the site to look at their AI offerings, and the first interesting package I saw, AUTOCLASS III, costs $900 to download. If that's your idea of public domain, I'll just keep hoping we encounter alien life that uses the GPL.
  • MWSG, more whining slashdot geeks. Those free for non-commercial use contracts people use are ridiculous because you all know damn well that it is rare that anyone who uses that software in a corporate fashion pays for the stuff. How many of you have "free for educational or non-commercial use" software on your PCs at work? I bet a good number of you do. If you just want the code to play around with you can find a number of CFD Fortran programs all over the internet. The cost of binaries for these toys is about what you'll pay for FLUENT anyhow. Funny how the same people that complain about NASA messing up mission or needing more money are the same ones bitching that they dare charge money for something they worked on.

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