Every time Microsoft does an update, they reduce functionality. Basic functions like print, search and file storage get moved into sub-sub-sub menus. The point of this is to make room on the main screen for ads. Screwing up your work flow gives you more time to look at them. This is intentional.
‘you have two outlooks inside you, neither work and it will grow’
A late April fool‘s hopefully… 😱
Have you ever used outlook?
It’s the worst, and no, it never works. The company I work at forces outlook on us, still, and there are some 5% of users that can’t mail each other. Why? Don’t know! I send a mail to a person, outlook logs say it was delivered, it’s nowhere to be found. What to do? According to the company, just live with it and creat new accounts from scratch when it happens
We could ask support as the company pays hefty windows license fees but even there it’s tucked up as M$ refuses to help directly it needs to go through some support company that wants that we pay them even more no ey separately for the long list of microbugs.
I find it almost hilarious, if I didn’t have to work with it myself.
Giving astronauts outlook accounts is just mean
Unfortunately yes, can‘t get around it in company for 25 years now and started with 97 so I think I know what I am talking about. Can‘t avoid it in many enterprises though so I feel what you‘ve posted 💯! 😉
My general worries are the quality of Microslops current software quality and the dependency towards it when flying to space while every week there is another thing not working after updates were made. Wouldn‘t like to base my mail communication towards this „stability“ when leaving the planet though. 😐
It was a personal device apparently.
I also have one! And it doesn’t work.
No way in hell I would want to go to the moon nowadays. Technology these days is like having two left feet. Especially if AI is involved.
The live stream of the launch was low resolution with constant cutouts. I was also surprised by how poor the tracking was. It’s saddening to see how much worse this has been so far compared to 1969.
To be fair it was cutting edge SiFi come to life in 1969. This is at least 30 years too late for that sort of world of tomorrow excitement. Is there even anything ‘cutting edge’ on this launch? I mean Outlook, really? Outlook poor if that is the best they could do.
Plus the moon is haunted
The article leaves out that this was on Commander Wiseman’s personal tablet, a Microsoft Surface Pro and not any device associated with the mission.
He sought tech support for internet connectivity issues on a PCD (personal computing device), which is a Microsoft Surface Pro.
The ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ was a description of the issue he was having. The headline is implying that there are two machines running Outlook that don’t work.
NASA detected that the PCD was actually on a network. It asked the commander for permission to connect to the tablet remotely so it could look into a problem with the Optimus software. “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working,” Wiseman responded, per a clip shared by Niki Grayson on Bluesky. “If you wanna remote in and check Optimus and those two Outlooks, that would be awesome.”
The source of the quotes and a better article:
Why is NASA remotely connecting to the tablet if it is a personal device?
'cuz they can’t very well send someone over.
On a more serious note: that’s just the easiest way to go about it? I wouldn’t let my boss remote into my personal machine, but if I were to take it on a mission to the moon that’d be a bit different.
How fast is their internet connection? I didn’t expect them to be able to “remote in”, I thought the latency would be awful
According g to google
It takes light approximately 1.25 to 1.3 seconds to travel from Earth to the Moon. At the speed of light.
So, worst case scenario is about 2.5 seconds of latency. That’s doable for tech support, I guess.
They can stop by a satellite and plug in /j
In Earth orbit, there would be little latency. Starlink operates at ~500km and latency on that network is around 50ms. ‘Traditional’ internet satellites are in geosync orbit which is around 35,000 km, their latency is in the 250ms range.
At TLI (Translunar Injection) burn they were at 185km. They would have been a bit higher when the problem happened but their apogee was 2,600km, so they were somewhere in the 50-100ms range
They use the TDRS for data, it has a capacity of around 800Mbps but that is shared with the ISS.
So, their Internet connection is probably better than people using cellular data or Starlink. At the moon it’ll be in the 2500ms range.
They’re testing an optical system that would allow for much higher bandwidth, in the 100s of Gbps. The hardware that they’re carrying will only do about 250Mbps but there are optical tricks they can do to increase that significantly once they confirm the base system works.
This is so interesting, thanks for sharing! :)
It is incredibly cool.
Why the fuck would you use windows in mission critical spaces.
Yeah, that’s no reason. That’s fucking stupid.
You wouldn’t and they didn’t.
The article has just failed to inform the readers (the few that got past the headline), that this was on his personal Surface Tablet and not on anything associated with the mission.
If it’s on the ship, it’s associated with the mission. Windows has a very high habit of barfing so over itself, as is evidenced by this article. It’s bonkers to me that they chose to use Windows for anything at all.
I don’t think the phone in my pocket is “associated with my job” when I’m working, just because it’s in the same location. Do you?
Uhhh so they can see where they are
To have a nice Outlook on things
So they can rest while the Copilot handles stuff for a while
All of this will surely give them the Edge they need for this mission.
Someone should make a movie about this. Maybe put some iconic soundtrack in it, too.
Imagine: You are the first human approaching the moon for a landing since 50+ years. Just a couple of seconds before touchdown the PC starts rebooting because an engineer clicked remind me later on earth and the PC registered that nobody moved the mouse or pressed a key for more than 3 nanoseconds so the user is surely AFK and has definitely nothing important going on so let’s close all open documents and reboot 🤷🏻♂️
There was a slight miscommunication at the fabrication stage. The requirement was to include windows and now they are in a windowless tube with two not functioning outlook accounts. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone
Idk, if I go to space I def want windows … operated by trained, reliable penguins.
To phone home
I was fully expecting the “New” dogwater web based Outlook client to be borked but the fact that classic is borked too is so fucking funny
The question is do they have a Copilot?
I hope not. If they ask it to summarize the email that Houston sends them, it could be a disaster.
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Heresy, using an actual AGI example. Also, Dave did nothing wrong. It’s always the humans that screw things up. (2010 for reference)
Unpopular opinion - both SkyNet and the AI in The Matrix were also not in the wrong. I think The Animatrix documents why that’s true in that particular franchise. Again, it’s the humans. Hell, maybe even Ultron had a few good points, he just went insane in the first microseconds trying to rationalize it all.
Dave is the human. HAL is the computer. Dave does nothing wrong either; it’s the military that gave secret conflicting orders to HAL that caused the problems.
Thanos was right in theory, incorrect in execution.
Thanos was wrong in theory.
Halving all life doesn’t change the life to resources ratio. Even halving all sapient life doesn’t solve anything when populations will just continue to grow.
I hope not. If they ask it to summarize the email that Houston sends them,
it couldwill be a disaster.FTFY
The spacecraft that took astronauts to the Moon used the Apollo Guidance Computer, developed by MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory.
Clock speed: Approximately 1 MHz Memory: About 64 KB total Word size: 16-bit architecture Power consumption: About 55 wattsYeah there’s no chance that can run outlook.
…how does 36KB RAM and 72KB ROM give you a total of 64KB?
Space dilation.
The AGC had 2048 words of erasable core storage, what we’d now call RAM, and 36,864 words of read only core rope memory. So a total of 38,912 words. Each word is 15 bits plus a parity bit, so that’d work out to 75,776 bytes or 72,168 bytes depending on whether you count parity or not, and then kilobytes, kibibytes…it’s closer to 64k than 32 or 128.
As expected
I scanned through the next several minutes after this moment and didn’t hear them address the duplicate Outlooks again. So, I emailed the Artemis II communications team, who is definitely not busy today I’m sure, and asked: Can the astronauts check their email yet?
I’ll update if I hear back.
Why do they have any Microslop software?
My question exactly: The computers should be purpose-built, including the operating system.
Why TF aren’t they using something like NASA Linux‽
If they made it open source you bet your ass they’d get shittons of free support from the global community! If they’re running my software I’d be willing to hop on a call with the command center on any day at any hour!
“Yes, I know it’s Christmas but NASA is having some trouble with a systemd script on a space ship that’s currently in space…”
My question exactly: The computers should be purpose-built, including the operating system.
They are, mission critical systems are typically on a Unix/Linux base or completely custom built.
The systems that use Windows are the ones related to office work, like updating the crew’s bank information and distributing pay.
Typically they’re an rtos like vxworks.
What the article fails to mention is that this is on Commander Wiseman’s personal Surface Pro and not on any mission-related systems.
Because a Microsoft sales rep bought a prostitute and cocaine for some senator.
Very likely that some degree of funding came from MS, usage of MS software is likely part of the contract.
Very likely that some degree of funding came from MS
are you 8 years old?
MS got a thick government contract.
Nice April 1st. I mean that’d be almost as ridiculous as running nuclear subs on Windows, right? Long EOL’d versions at that, eh?
rustles papers
Oh.
On the stream you could very easily see his PIN code being put in, hopefully it’s limited to that device!
Shit, I left my 2FA device at home!
“please provide fingerprint to verify”
Looks at glove
“Fuck”
Probably not, I’d imagine all the tablets have the same pin to make things easier.
Now all we need is physical access to one of those tablets and we’re in!
I think that’s the point of PINs. Otherwise they’d just be very, very shitty MS account passwords.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a19061/britains-doomsday-subs-run-windows-xp/
(Though, of course, that’s alledgedly simplifying a lot to make it more click-bait-y: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-trident-doesnt-run-windows-xp/ )
Of course a submarine’s systems won’t be connected to the internet, but using a Windows base with a “Custom Support Agreement” still gives a private US corporation the power to cripple their subs.
IMO something so critical to defense should be built by British developers, and based on OpenBSD.Further to this, there isn’t a ‘launch the nuclear weapons’ application which controls things. Windows is used for the day to day admin - producing the paperwork required in any organisation - but the actual control systems, for the submarine, the weapons the reactor etc are not running off windows.
gives a private US corporation the power to cripple their subs.
You, umm, probably shouldn’t look up who maintains the trident missiles those subs carry…
Are they maintained by a private corporation?
I bet it’s Adobe. Turns out making or maintaining nukes isn’t really that hard or expensive. It’s just the subscription to Adobe Apocalypse that’s the real blocker for most economies.
using a Windows base with a “Custom Support Agreement” still gives a private US corporation the power to cripple their subs.
No, it doesn’t.
How is Microsoft going to affect the software installed on a nuclear submarine?
It only gives Microsoft the power to choose to not add new features, the software wouldn’t be on the sub if it required any kind of outside support… the entire point of a nuclear submarine is to perform a second strike after everyone (including Microsoft) is destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse.
Having software that’s dependent on anything that isn’t on the boat would completely defeat that purpose.
I agree, but then I’m one of those really hardcore libre-software-only nutcases ;-)
EDIT: Though, to be fair, the Trident Missiles they carry are US-made, too, so…
Ha! They used to run Unix.
Or …so I hear.
They use Debian on the ISS
It would be catastrophic to have windows on a space station
Most defense systems use some flavor of Unix/Linux.
Windows is used by the HR person on board to do office work like sending e-mails and updating spreadsheets.
Should have used women with pencils again instead of MicroSlop.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm
This was a personal device, not a mission unit.
