NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.
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From a programmer standpoint, it's interesting to hear what the problem was and how they had to work around it.
Must be really frustrating for them, having to work with 49-year-old hardware though, with diminishing memory space for running programs.
I would think it would be an interesting programming challenge. It reminds me of the demo scene where incredible works of art in visuals and audio are done with increasingly small resources. The challenge is to eek out as much performance out of the fewest resources (in specific "weight classes" of limits).
I'm simply astounded by what demo coders can do with, for example, only 4k of RAM.
wait until you find out what they didn't do with shit like websites.
49 year old hardware you're running into living memory issues too.
Great point! I hope the training was good on the baton passing.
Frustrating?! Yeah, no.
Although old, you're working on one of the most famous computers in all of computer science.
I'm sure there are challenges and "frustrations" but I would wager none of the involved engineers are displeased on the project. It would be fascinating and fulfilling
I’m sure there are challenges and “frustrations” but I would wager none of the involved engineers are displeased on the project. It would be fascinating and fulfilling
Frustrating, fascinating, and fulfilling are not mutually exclusive. Neither is honored.
You could have a task to do that's fascinating, but then it's frustrating to complete because of external reasons out of your control, but that when you still solve/complete them are fulfilling.
It's not an either/or thing.
When paired with "having to work on" the tone is quite loaded, even if unintended.
When paired with “having to work on” the tone is quite loaded, even if unintended.
Well that's the problem with trying to communicate with text only, human beings really need to see other human beings faces so they can help interpret the words being said with facial gestures that augment the meaning of the words, and we don't get that on online forums.
Emojis are supposed to help with that, but for some reason they seem to be out of vogue these days, and people who use them tend to be mocked for doing so, so we're back to just straight text and interpreting the tone of what's being said the best you can with the other person is saying.
And, if they're paid to do the work, then they 'have to work' on the problem, as I don't think they can just tell their boss they don't feel like doing that today. I don't think those words are loaded with negative intent, just descriptive of the job duties.
Finally, I can't control others people's fanboyness (for lack of a better term) and how it may make them defensive. I can only state my opinion straightforward and clearly, and hope their interpreted properly, for tone.
To be honest, I believe you're loading more into that sentence then what's actually there.
Most (if not all) embedded systems engineers will tell you that they find enjoyment working in tightly constrained systems, first and foremost.
And second, we're talking about the freaking Voyager, man. What an honor and privilege must one feel working on such an incredible machine!
Anyone who signs up to work on the voyager then gets frustrated at working on old tech is too stupid to work on voyager. I would imagine working in voyager is something you have to actively seek out, not something that you get "stuck" doing.
oh come on, you're gonna work on voyager, be pissed off for about a week at a time, after running into a really fucking annoying issue, and then once you solve it, repeat that a few times and when it's shipped to production you've basically married the fucking thing by that point.
Again, you can be very honored to be chosen to fix the problem, and still face frustrations while trying to fix the problem. They're not mutually exclusive.
Oh sure. It's a "good kind" of frustration. But the way you worded sounded differently:
Must be really frustrating for them, having to work with 49-year-old hardware though, with diminishing memory space for running programs.
To me, that sounds like "ugh, why do I have to work with this 49-year-old piece of outdated garbage." But I see what you're saying now.
Personally, I'd be more like "oh shit, oh shit... we're running out of space! How do we fix this?! (God I love my job! 😃)"
To me, that sounds like “ugh, why do I have to work with this 49-year-old piece of outdated garbage.” But I see what you’re saying now.
I said that statement with the glass half full, but you're reading it with the glass half empty. We have different perspectives on the same words on the page.
And as I mentioned, I personally believe we should all be using emojis all the time, but they tend to be shunned upon now these days and people are mocked for using them, so I tend not to.
Finally it was such a trivial sentence, not worth adding emojis to, let alone the conversation we're having about it now.
You could just take someone at good faith, and not think they're just being negative you know. 🙂
All good, friend. Funny - I usually see a glass half-full in online interactions with people I personally know (friends/family/coworkers), and in face-to-face interactions as well.
But unfortunately, social networks, including Lemmy to a lesser extent, seem to be bringing the worst of people as of lately. Pure doom and gloom, rude comments, etc. Now, that has always been the case, and I have thick skin (e.g. youtube comments before upvotes? Geezez christ!!) But now the whole thing is fueled with external disinformation campaign and now we have AI!
Hm, who is shunning emojis on Lemmy? Could it be your instance, or the communities you're visiting? When used effectively, emojis add useful context to the conversations. Of course, some 👏 people 👏 use 👏 them 👏 in 👏 a 👏 very 👏 annoying 👏 way! But fortunately, it's not all the time.
But anyway. You said that we're arguing over such a simple matter - but for me, Lemmy is pure entertainment, so these discussions are, well, entertaining. Like when you're mad at a character in a movie you're enjoying. :)
So, don't take me too seriously, thank you for being graceful and I hope you're having a nice day!
Appreciate the response.
Hm, who is shunning emojis on Lemmy? Could it be your instance, or the communities you’re visiting?
No, it's the impression I've gotten throughout the Internet.
I actually don't agree with the social prohibition on them. I think we should use them more often, in lieu of being able to see another person's facial expression.
But for some its seen as ineffective, for others immature, for others they just don't like how often they're used, etc., etc.
This article from Psychology Today goes into some aspects of what I'm speaking about.
You said that we’re arguing over such a simple matter
I wasn't considering what we were doing as arguing, but just discussing.
But then again, it might be a glass half full perspective thing with me. 🙂