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Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by jacobsimon on Thursday October 31, 2024 @09:48AM (#42006885)
… It somehow just dawned on me that firm is between “hard” and “soft”
Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by UI_at_80x24 on Thursday October 31, 2024 @10:49AM (#42007493)
Mind blown too!
Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by eknkc on Thursday October 31, 2024 @09:52AM (#42006922)
Holy..
Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by K0balt on Thursday October 31, 2024 @11:40AM (#42007982)
Oh, my sweet summer children…

Once you fully internalize that your buggy program is running on a buggy framework, in a buggy language, in a buggy sandbox, on a buggy virtualization, on a buggy file system, scraping along on buggy silicon running buggy microcode, managed by other buggy silicon running buggy firmware, using peripherals with their own buggy silicon and firmwares, with everything happening billions of times per second (a car engine typically doesn’t reach a billion cycles over a 20 year lifespan ), it seems mind bogglingly improbable that anything works at all lol.

The fact that it does work, and can even routinely reach 5 nines, is a testament to the generosity of the universe… and a good argument for making sure that to whatever extent possible, you should write your software to be resistant to random events and erroneous operations. Fail safe/ fail soft, fail and retry, fail and restart. The more resilience we build into our work, the less angst we create in the world.

Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by emchammer on Thursday October 31, 2024 @12:12PM (#42008303)
Coded by buggy primates who wear malfunctioning clothing.
Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by K0balt on Friday November 01, 2024 @03:46PM (#42020803)
All that being said, Holy shit, voyager. A nearly 50 year old robot in continuous operation, on its way out of the solar system into deep space. I would venture to say that this is an engineering accomplishment on par with the catch of the starship booster the other day.

It’s amazing to see both the half hour miracle of engineering and the half century one playing out at the same time. I just hope our accomplishments today will in some way be as durable as those of generations past.

Re:Voyager 1 phones home with transmitter that hasn't been u... by BrandoElFollito on Thursday October 31, 2024 @02:27PM (#42009860)
Pffff, 30 years of IT and I just realized that today (if the name was indeed intended; if not it is a cool coincidence)