• 1 Post
  • 174 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle

  • To some readers, even choosing Outlook as a part of a spacecraft’s communications portfolio would seem to be an anomaly. However, it is a standard part of the “Commercial Off-The-Shelf” (COTS) software astronauts use for their day-to-day operations.

    To be clear, the spacecraft and primary flight systems will run on specialized radiation-hardened hardware and rigorously maintained software. COTS just complements this with a friendly layer, like Windows and Outlook, so astronauts can check schedules, indulge in personal communications, and so on, in a familiar way.

    Kinda wild that we have such an abundance of processing power and memory that even space missions can load up with bloated software for the sake of “friendly” user interfaces.

    As someone who has used Outlook a lot in an enterprise environment, I would not have believed that literal NASA astronauts use it for even the smallest task. Not because it can’t accomplish the task, but because of how slow, buggy, and unreliable it tends to be, even when properly managed by a capable IT team. They have been in space less than a day and they’re already wasting time and energy troubleshooting







  • I think Macklemore did us all a disservice by telling people $50 for a t-shirt means you’re getting swindled. $50 for a nice locally produced merino wool t-shirt is a bargain.

    I imagine Macklemore’s point was that most people buying $50 shirts aren’t buying locally-produced clothes from a mom-and-pop shop; they’re buying overpriced, mass-produced shirts at department stores. I haven’t been to Kohl’s in a while, but I bet if I go to the men’s section at the one up the road from here, there will be an area with basic graphic t-shirts (mostly company logos like Coke) that are nearly $50.

    Now that I’m on the topic, my most overpriced shirt is a Goo Goo Dolls shirt I picked up at a concert a few years ago. I really like the color of the shirt, but the cheap lettering on the front started coming off after a single wash. Very disappointing because it was a $45 shirt.