I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.
That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.
It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.
Still faster than the average Windows update.
Microsoft can’t even release a fix for Window’s recovery partition being too small to stage updates. I had to do it myself, fucking amateurs.
Certainly better tested.
Well, they only had to test it for a single hardware deployment. Windows has to be tested for millions if not billions of deployments. Say what you want, but Microsoft testers are god like.
Interviewer: Tell me an interesting debugging story
Interviewee: …
Heh. Years ago during an interview I was explaining how important it is to verify a system before putting it into orbit. If one found problems in orbit, you usually can’t fix it. My interviewer said, “Why not just send up the space shuttle to fix it?”
Well…
I think the term “metal” is overused, but this is probably the most metal thing a programmer could possibly do besides join a metal band.
Or activate Skynet.
Great documentary on the Voyager team: It’s quieter in the twilight
I prefer the sequel Star Trek: the motion picture.
I wont even upgrade the BIOS on my motherboard because im afraid of bricking it.
As a teenager I experienced a power outage while I was updating my bios.
Guess what happened?
I’m still bitter about it.
I updated mine a couple of weeks ago. I was actually really anxious as It went through the process, but it worked fine, at first…
Then I found out Microsoft considered it a new computer and deactivated windows. (And that’s when I found out they deleted upgrade licences from windows 7 & 8 back in September)That’s Microsoft in a nutshell for ya.
When I hear what they did, I was blown away. A 50 year old computer (that was probably designed a decade before launching) and the geniuses that built that put in the facility to completely reprogram it a light-day away.
It reminds me that there are still very intelligent and talented people within our ranks. A nice breath of fresh air.
OTS flashing.
Like OTA but with space rather than air.
OTV (void)
Fuck it, we’ll fix it live
Let’s hope the over-the-air update didn’t get Man-In-The-Middled…
Suspect #1:
And the IT support service can’t even fix a computer problem of an customer 20 km away.
