To be fair, that was copypasta from TFA. And they carefully omitted the next sentence: "The manufacturer of the avionics board corrected this glitch in later software revisions. But alas, LightSail’s software version doesn’t include the update."
That still doesn't excuse a problem that would have been found by bench-testing the thing for a few days before sending it up. Nor does it excuse constantly appending one file to store data in an unattended system. Also, anything that JPL sends up has a backup channel that can push that little red button on the main computer. All they can do now is hope for cosmic rays to reboot it randomly. At least it's in LEO and not zipping off into interplanetary space.
In the meantime, the team is looking at several fixes to work around the software vulnerability once contact is reestablished. One is a Linux file redirect that would send the contents of the troublesome beacon.csv file to a null location, a sort-of software black hole. Lab testing on this fix has been promising—over a gigabyte of beacon packets have already been sent into nothingness without a system freeze.
Well, isn't that special. Now they test it. So if they can just link it to/dev/null, did they really even need that data? It's always fun to cause a mission to fail by recording data that wasn't even needed.
Why are you fixated on 12VDC? The only thing special about 12V is 6-cell lead-acid automotive batteries. Data centers use 48VDC, which gives 4 times the wattage over 12VDC (though still less than half of 120VAC), while not needing heavy-duty switches because of arcing. (120VDC is scary with a big knife switch where you can see the arc)
I recommend you go to Youtube and look for videos showing 110 volts AC vs DC with a knife switch to see the important difference. Hint: "zero crossing". You can't just splice your whole house into the same voltage of DC expect anything to work the same. Sure, your incandescent lights would work, but the wall switch wouldn't be able to turn it off, and might even start a fire from the arc. There's a reason that data centers use 48VDC and no higher.
Except that those weren't built into every wall of a house, and so were easy to replace. Good luck trying to rewire your house for anything that requires a larger gauge of wire or extra wires, if the wires are all behind sheetrock and run through studs on a slab house with no basement. And you'll also have to change all your plug outlets, because no electrical code is going to allow a completely different standard to use the same plug.
Sure, things change, but some things also don't change. The compact disc (both audio and data) is still with us, over 30 years later. Despite Blu-Ray, DVD is in no danger of dying off. Whatever new electrical standard you think could possibly happen would need to have good enough reasons to justify the time and expense of rewiring. Knob-and-tube wiring went away because of safety (no ground, fire hazard, you may not even be able to get insurance), and it was cheaper to install cables than to nail up a bunch of knobs.
Windows 3.0 was part of my first venture into the PC platform. I got my first computer, an Atari 800, in 1984. I stayed with the Atari 8-bit platform until 1991, when I was able to purchase my fist PC: an 80386SX-16, running DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0, despite it's repeated UAE errors and other frustrations, was absolutely AWESOME. I was a junior in high school, and using a mouse and icons felt so cutting-edge and... just fun.
Now you know how Mac users felt six or so years earlier. I went from TRS-80 to Mac in 1985. By 1991 I was already moving to the Mac IIci.
Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.
I remember people complaing about WPW 6.0. More specifically, I remember seeing newsletters printed with it that had text flow fucked up where lines would be missing at column breaks, or it would just suddenly start printing text from a different part of that article. So much for moving forward from WP 5.1. Also, a lot of people liked using WP5 with the bottom half of the screen showing "raw mode", where it showed the hidden formatting in the text, which wasn't so easy to translate to a WYSIWYG GUI environment.
I've seen A/UX in operation, and it indeed was nice, and felt a lot like what would become OS X. Probably one reason they didn't make it a mainstream product was licensing. There just wasn't enough of a free software tradition (including inside Apple, I'm sure) for it to happen like it did with OS X, and I'm sure AT&T Unix[tm] didn't come cheap. Also, back then 4 megabytes of memory was a lot, and people didn't tolerate memory hog operating systems on single-user computers.
But Apple was trying to move away from the classic MacOS environment. They just happened to fail at it multiple times with a bunch of pie-in-the-sky ideas. Pink and Copeland were just two of the attempts. It took NeXT buying them for negative 400 million dollars and bringing in an already working Unix-based system for Apple to get their act together. Steve Jobs liked to say "real artists ship", and when it came to a next-generation operating system, the Steve-less Apple consistently failed to ship.
I remember the bad old days in the '80s when cable TV reception would go to shit on rainy days because they used microwave links to connect their various head ends in a big city. Then they upgraded the whole system to fiber, which turned out to be a good thing years later when cable modems became a thing.
The Senate may vote on a bill that would ban abortion at 20 weeks and later, except to save the life of the mother, in the case of rape, and in the case of incest against a minor.
Use if.then.fund to make a campaign contribution to representatives that vote the way you want them to! Your contribution — for or against — will help shape the future of Congress.
We won’t tell Congress why you are making the contribution (legal background), but every contribution from a regular American shifts power away from the rich and powerful.
if.then.fund is a new website that can help you shape the future of Congress from the creators of GovTrack and Democracy Engine.
Wow, trying to scare up funding using the abortion bogeyman. I find that disgusting from either of the aisle. (Oh noes, they're going to vote on a bill that has no chance of passing! It's the end of the world!)
Anyhow, I particularly love how they managed to put so many vertices out in the hahbah.
One big reason for this is the Electoral College system for electing the US President. If, say, one party had 40%, and there were two parties with a similar platform splitting the remaining 60%, the minority platform will win.
In the 1912 election, Teddy Roosevelt running as the Bull Moose party candidate managed to beat the Republican candidate Taft, and Woodrow Wilson won with 42% of the popular vote. He also got 88 electoral votes to Taft's 8.
In the 1992 election, H. Ross Perot took 18.9% of the popular vote, but failed to get a single electoral vote, and probably didn't affect the election enough to be responsible for the loss by GHW Bush.
At least it isn't as bad as the recent UK election, where UKIP had significant support in terms of individual voters, yet only ended up with two seats. In the US, senate and congressional elections require a 50% majority for a candidate to win. If the majority is not met, a run-off election with the two leading candidates determines the winner.
Think about that for a moment, folks. That's a QUARTER of a fucking CENTURY. Many Slashdotters weren't even born then, and for most of the rest, it's still been more than half of their lifetime.
And he's still not officially gone until they make the first episode with either A) none of his characters or B) a replacement voice.
If they had to take "stranded" astronauts down in an emergency, the launch vehicle wouldn't matter at all. Just fit a Dragon capsule with some Soyuz seats (so that they can use their custom-fitted seat cushions) and some O2 tanks and CO2 scrubbers, and send it up.
I'm not sure if the hatch door can be properly shut from the capsule side, or if it can be un-berthed without using the arm. Maybe they could undock the capsule and have everyone suit up and EVA to it, after docking it first to install seat cushions.
And for what it's worth, F9R is more than good enough to be man-rated, it's the Dragon 1 capsule that isn't man-rated, due to the lack of an escape system, sufficient life support (O2/CO2 management) and most importantly, no seats.
There is one thing that can be repaired without too much trouble: the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors, especially from the 200x's have a bad history of blowing out. For $25 in capacitors and an hour of work, you can fix a broken power supply. I've even done it once myself. Of course the cost of LCD TV sets keeps going down, making it only really worth repairing big TVs, as the falling prices just make them that much less worthwhile to repair.
A TV repair place recently opened up near where I live, but they also do computer repair. These days, with tube sets all but gone, there isn't a lot of difference in the skill sets needed.
I use MythTV as my DVR, and I use the OTA guide data from the broadcast signal. Twice a year I have to delete the entire contents of its guide database, because it doesn't handle the DST change properly. I don't know whether it's the guide data format itself not being able to handle it, or a bug in MythTV, but at least MythTV uses UTC time internally.
Thanks to the math required for date conversion, the 2038 bug may actually show up a couple of years early. How do I know? I tried setting the clock forward in an embedded system I wrote the code for. Its calendar actually seems to fail in 2036. I haven't tried it in a while, but I think I can't even set the date past January 2036. I didn't try to figure out exactly why it failed earlier than it should have, because the library code looks pretty messy.
It's using the standard date library stuff from the IAR compiler, so I'm hoping that sometime within 20 years there will be an option to select a 64-bit compatible time/date library, and it can just be recompiled. At least I used time_t for everything related to Unix date values... I think. Also, the hardware it runs on only has a 32-bit counter for the RTC clock, but I'm sure that it could simply check the high bit, and add 2^32 after the rollover.
Considering that FFXIV began as a project to put a new graphics engine on FFXI, the answer won't just be no, but "they'll start to do it, but end just up making FFXVI with it instead".
You are talking about a company that made two MMOs for aging console platforms on their way out: FFXI on PS2+hard drive and later X360, then FFXIV on PS3, though that time they wisely did it for PC first. Locking themselves into ecosystems is a way of life. Also, someone over there has a hard-on for flashy graphics as a priority over gameplay. All the graphics in the world didn't save them from having to literally re-make FFXIV after it flopped hard.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, that was copypasta from TFA. And they carefully omitted the next sentence: "The manufacturer of the avionics board corrected this glitch in later software revisions. But alas, LightSail’s software version doesn’t include the update."
That still doesn't excuse a problem that would have been found by bench-testing the thing for a few days before sending it up. Nor does it excuse constantly appending one file to store data in an unattended system. Also, anything that JPL sends up has a backup channel that can push that little red button on the main computer. All they can do now is hope for cosmic rays to reboot it randomly. At least it's in LEO and not zipping off into interplanetary space.
In the meantime, the team is looking at several fixes to work around the software vulnerability once contact is reestablished. One is a Linux file redirect that would send the contents of the troublesome beacon.csv file to a null location, a sort-of software black hole. Lab testing on this fix has been promising—over a gigabyte of beacon packets have already been sent into nothingness without a system freeze.
Well, isn't that special. Now they test it. So if they can just link it to /dev/null, did they really even need that data? It's always fun to cause a mission to fail by recording data that wasn't even needed.
Why are you fixated on 12VDC? The only thing special about 12V is 6-cell lead-acid automotive batteries. Data centers use 48VDC, which gives 4 times the wattage over 12VDC (though still less than half of 120VAC), while not needing heavy-duty switches because of arcing. (120VDC is scary with a big knife switch where you can see the arc)
I recommend you go to Youtube and look for videos showing 110 volts AC vs DC with a knife switch to see the important difference. Hint: "zero crossing". You can't just splice your whole house into the same voltage of DC expect anything to work the same. Sure, your incandescent lights would work, but the wall switch wouldn't be able to turn it off, and might even start a fire from the arc. There's a reason that data centers use 48VDC and no higher.
Except that those weren't built into every wall of a house, and so were easy to replace. Good luck trying to rewire your house for anything that requires a larger gauge of wire or extra wires, if the wires are all behind sheetrock and run through studs on a slab house with no basement. And you'll also have to change all your plug outlets, because no electrical code is going to allow a completely different standard to use the same plug.
Sure, things change, but some things also don't change. The compact disc (both audio and data) is still with us, over 30 years later. Despite Blu-Ray, DVD is in no danger of dying off. Whatever new electrical standard you think could possibly happen would need to have good enough reasons to justify the time and expense of rewiring. Knob-and-tube wiring went away because of safety (no ground, fire hazard, you may not even be able to get insurance), and it was cheaper to install cables than to nail up a bunch of knobs.
Windows 3.0 was part of my first venture into the PC platform. I got my first computer, an Atari 800, in 1984. I stayed with the Atari 8-bit platform until 1991, when I was able to purchase my fist PC: an 80386SX-16, running DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0, despite it's repeated UAE errors and other frustrations, was absolutely AWESOME. I was a junior in high school, and using a mouse and icons felt so cutting-edge and... just fun.
Now you know how Mac users felt six or so years earlier. I went from TRS-80 to Mac in 1985. By 1991 I was already moving to the Mac IIci.
Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.
I remember people complaing about WPW 6.0. More specifically, I remember seeing newsletters printed with it that had text flow fucked up where lines would be missing at column breaks, or it would just suddenly start printing text from a different part of that article. So much for moving forward from WP 5.1. Also, a lot of people liked using WP5 with the bottom half of the screen showing "raw mode", where it showed the hidden formatting in the text, which wasn't so easy to translate to a WYSIWYG GUI environment.
I've seen A/UX in operation, and it indeed was nice, and felt a lot like what would become OS X. Probably one reason they didn't make it a mainstream product was licensing. There just wasn't enough of a free software tradition (including inside Apple, I'm sure) for it to happen like it did with OS X, and I'm sure AT&T Unix[tm] didn't come cheap. Also, back then 4 megabytes of memory was a lot, and people didn't tolerate memory hog operating systems on single-user computers.
But Apple was trying to move away from the classic MacOS environment. They just happened to fail at it multiple times with a bunch of pie-in-the-sky ideas. Pink and Copeland were just two of the attempts. It took NeXT buying them for negative 400 million dollars and bringing in an already working Unix-based system for Apple to get their act together. Steve Jobs liked to say "real artists ship", and when it came to a next-generation operating system, the Steve-less Apple consistently failed to ship.
I remember the bad old days in the '80s when cable TV reception would go to shit on rainy days because they used microwave links to connect their various head ends in a big city. Then they upgraded the whole system to fiber, which turned out to be a good thing years later when cable modems became a thing.
I clicked on that link and it gave a pop-up:
Take Action
Abortion at 20 Weeks
The Senate may vote on a bill that would ban abortion at 20 weeks and later, except to save the life of the mother, in the case of rape, and in the case of incest against a minor.
Use if.then.fund to make a campaign contribution to representatives that vote the way you want them to! Your contribution — for or against — will help shape the future of Congress.
We won’t tell Congress why you are making the contribution (legal background), but every contribution from a regular American shifts power away from the rich and powerful.
if.then.fund is a new website that can help you shape the future of Congress from the creators of GovTrack and Democracy Engine.
Wow, trying to scare up funding using the abortion bogeyman. I find that disgusting from either of the aisle. (Oh noes, they're going to vote on a bill that has no chance of passing! It's the end of the world!)
Anyhow, I particularly love how they managed to put so many vertices out in the hahbah.
One big reason for this is the Electoral College system for electing the US President. If, say, one party had 40%, and there were two parties with a similar platform splitting the remaining 60%, the minority platform will win.
In the 1912 election, Teddy Roosevelt running as the Bull Moose party candidate managed to beat the Republican candidate Taft, and Woodrow Wilson won with 42% of the popular vote. He also got 88 electoral votes to Taft's 8.
In the 1992 election, H. Ross Perot took 18.9% of the popular vote, but failed to get a single electoral vote, and probably didn't affect the election enough to be responsible for the loss by GHW Bush.
At least it isn't as bad as the recent UK election, where UKIP had significant support in terms of individual voters, yet only ended up with two seats. In the US, senate and congressional elections require a 50% majority for a candidate to win. If the majority is not met, a run-off election with the two leading candidates determines the winner.
He's been doing this for 26 years
Think about that for a moment, folks. That's a QUARTER of a fucking CENTURY. Many Slashdotters weren't even born then, and for most of the rest, it's still been more than half of their lifetime.
And he's still not officially gone until they make the first episode with either A) none of his characters or B) a replacement voice.
I think WordStar has problems with Unicode support. But then again, so does Slashdot.
Cave paintings certainly have some migration issues.
If they had to take "stranded" astronauts down in an emergency, the launch vehicle wouldn't matter at all. Just fit a Dragon capsule with some Soyuz seats (so that they can use their custom-fitted seat cushions) and some O2 tanks and CO2 scrubbers, and send it up.
I'm not sure if the hatch door can be properly shut from the capsule side, or if it can be un-berthed without using the arm. Maybe they could undock the capsule and have everyone suit up and EVA to it, after docking it first to install seat cushions.
And for what it's worth, F9R is more than good enough to be man-rated, it's the Dragon 1 capsule that isn't man-rated, due to the lack of an escape system, sufficient life support (O2/CO2 management) and most importantly, no seats.
More importantly, what are they going to do about all the DHMO in it? That stuff is dangerous in the quantities we're talking about here!
In other news, 50,000 grandmas will now have to find a new dial-up service.
Also HVAC work, even though you may have been conditioned to think otherwise.
There is one thing that can be repaired without too much trouble: the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors, especially from the 200x's have a bad history of blowing out. For $25 in capacitors and an hour of work, you can fix a broken power supply. I've even done it once myself. Of course the cost of LCD TV sets keeps going down, making it only really worth repairing big TVs, as the falling prices just make them that much less worthwhile to repair.
A TV repair place recently opened up near where I live, but they also do computer repair. These days, with tube sets all but gone, there isn't a lot of difference in the skill sets needed.
Indeed. It only means that C programmers are more likely to know when they've used an ugly hack.
That works as long as there isn't some asshole who hates the smell of popcorn.
This sort of work is clearly worthy of an Ignobel nomination.
I use MythTV as my DVR, and I use the OTA guide data from the broadcast signal. Twice a year I have to delete the entire contents of its guide database, because it doesn't handle the DST change properly. I don't know whether it's the guide data format itself not being able to handle it, or a bug in MythTV, but at least MythTV uses UTC time internally.
Thanks to the math required for date conversion, the 2038 bug may actually show up a couple of years early. How do I know? I tried setting the clock forward in an embedded system I wrote the code for. Its calendar actually seems to fail in 2036. I haven't tried it in a while, but I think I can't even set the date past January 2036. I didn't try to figure out exactly why it failed earlier than it should have, because the library code looks pretty messy.
It's using the standard date library stuff from the IAR compiler, so I'm hoping that sometime within 20 years there will be an option to select a 64-bit compatible time/date library, and it can just be recompiled. At least I used time_t for everything related to Unix date values... I think. Also, the hardware it runs on only has a 32-bit counter for the RTC clock, but I'm sure that it could simply check the high bit, and add 2^32 after the rollover.
Considering that FFXIV began as a project to put a new graphics engine on FFXI, the answer won't just be no, but "they'll start to do it, but end just up making FFXVI with it instead".
You are talking about a company that made two MMOs for aging console platforms on their way out: FFXI on PS2+hard drive and later X360, then FFXIV on PS3, though that time they wisely did it for PC first. Locking themselves into ecosystems is a way of life. Also, someone over there has a hard-on for flashy graphics as a priority over gameplay. All the graphics in the world didn't save them from having to literally re-make FFXIV after it flopped hard.