wait. this is real???
“Hey uh, Mission Control? I’ve got two Outlooks and neither of them are working” A real quote from the mission btw
I program for ships (the water kind) and buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’. I’m talking server infrastructure from 1991. Spaghetti code from the 80’s. I had a program that had to run on a dos box, and we had to replace the whole thing because the original developer fucking DIED and no one could read his shit.
Hire me… a greybeard that does cobol and fortran
So DOSBOX has a place in industrial settings? Glad it’s open source
the original developer fucking DIED and no one could read his shit.
Now that’s how to secure job security
I feel like a lot of people are in the bank of “why change of it ain’t broke?” That’s how you have people working some CNC machines on hardware and software available when the business started.
There are still manual machinists around who have jobs like bore a few individual holes on some weldment.
I worked in medical electronic manufacturing. Changing a single setting for ease of use to the operator was planned as a 2 year project. Literally change a 0 to 1 in one of the files…
I’d imagine that one is because of medical more than anything else. There are all sorts of regulations around medical devices. That slows shit down.
Absolutely. I got well acquainted with the regulations. The sad part is it was so slow to update anything nothing got updated.
This system needs to be operational by next week. It will be a month before its well made. This needs to be operational by next week. Ok, but then we can fix it right?
Not to mention any changes to anything got evaluated as either a notice update, a 90 day submission, or a full submission(6 months - 2 years depending on fda, bsi and severity of change). That’s in addition to the actual work. I could make a change in a afternoon and may see it in production next year.
A friend of mine writes code for the control systems in nuclear power plants. He told me, on average he writes 13 pages of documentation for each line of code.
From working in medical device if that’s all the documentation he is writing I’m jealous.
Your rocket will ignite in fifteen minutes.
Actually, it’s looking more like six days.
No wait, thirty seconds.
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Windows is installing updates. Please don’t turn off your computer.
At this point, I’d feel much safer on a Win10 powered spaceship than a Win11 one. At least it isn’t “30% AI-generated”.
“The trajectory of your ship has changed because a critical windows update rebooted your ship during launch. You are now heading directly into the sun. Press the task bar for a list of AI suggested solutions.”
-Ground control
Look to the right end of the taskbar for the weather in your destination as well as the latest UV index
Opens Windows.
Air escapes. Asphyxiate.
Houston, I’ve dropped the stilus! Noise iiiiii
Eheeeeeh can I go get it? Noise iiiiii
Negative! That’s a negative young man! You shouldn’t have been playing on it during flight, you dad told you to put it away! You’re supposed to be there in the moment and enjoy the flight and to look back at planet earth as the pale blue ball. Now sit there and wait until the engine stops.
could be worse. last year, deutsche bahn put up a job ad looking for a developer familiar with windows 3.1 in a networked environment to work on their fleet of high speed trains.
windows 3.1 in a networked environment
Sorry, what? Is this a thing where they beat the Y2K bug by just moving their clocks back for 30 years?
Industrial embedded software is such a shitshow. Somehow Microsoft convinced companies that Windows is a great solution for controlling heavy machinery.
Tbh there’s no reports of that choice leading to actual accidents, but still you’re stuck with an old version of Windows with no possibility of upgrade.
clippy is too modern for the ICE.
OBSTRUCTION DETECTED Abort, Retry, Fail?
On the plus side, you might also end up maintaining their own Linux distribution Linux4ICE (or the newer one called EULE) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
specifically i think it’s the speedometers that run windows for workgroups. it might be one of those controlled systems you can’t switch out without recertifying everything.
But does it have an XBox controller?
Is this better or worse than macOS?
You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?
Windows 11 is a hot pile of garbage. Windows 10 was a “better” choice TBH
RHEL 7 would have been an even better choice, though.
And Rocky would be an even better choice.
I’m pretty sure you can’t get approval for a community-maintained OS without enterprise support to send people to the moon.
NASA are big fans of FOSS Linux.
I don’t like depending on corporations for anything and I’m not even a government agency or launching rockets.
RHEL 7 is also FOSS Linux, though.
Doesn’t NASA use older tech because it’s more secure? I think I remember reading that somewhere.
I was always told it had to do with how long it took to get things approved. I remember when it was a big deal that the space shuttles were upgraded to 486s… in 2002.
it’s also because the smaller a transistor is, the more sensitive it is to cosmic rays. and there are a lot more cosmic rays in space than on earth. you can “rad-harden” them, but there are physical limits. as a result the most popular cpu architecture in space is the RAD750, based on the PowerPC 750 from 1997. the perseverance rover and the james webb space telescope are basically underclocked gamecubes, or those candy-colored imacs. like, perserverance runs at 133MHz and has 128MB of RAM.
Yes, they used to use Debian Oldoldstable on Thinkpads in the ISS. Don’t know if they still do.
I believe it was the 2006/7 Seattle New Years or 4th of July fireworks that had been rigged up to orchestrate by “the latest microsoft technology” and the thing refused to execute and they rebooted the machine three times before someone just gave up and went and hit the firework triggers manually. Most people are pretty sure it was a wide beta version of Vista.
