This is cool. Does anybody know how they identified the non-working regions of the chip, without being able to probe the chip?
No, though they should have a real hardware version of the machine here on earth, to test out hypotheses.
NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
311–320 of 330 posts
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
This patronizing phrase should really be scrubbed from the modern lexicon.
Even if you construe this phrase as unequivocally negative, you can't scrub negative emotions and intentions. If you were able to actually scrub some word or phrase from the language, another would take its place, like with all the racial and intellectual disability slurs.
Yes; I'm basically saying one should reconsider before ever using this phrase, as it drips with condescension, and therefore is not conducive to productive discourse.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you construe this phrase as unequivocally negative, you can't scrub negative emotions and intentions. If you were able to actually scrub some word or phrase from the language, another would take its place, like with all the racial and intellectual disability slurs.
Yes; I'm basically saying one should reconsider before ever using this phrase, as it drips with condescension, and therefore is not conducive to productive discourse.
There is a time to be productive and a time to be condescending.
When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect on maybe you deserved it.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Planned obsolescence [1] in the problem. Apple could certainly create modular devices designed to be used and piecemeal modified/updated indefinitely. But it's way more profitable to sell you a brand new phone every couple of years than it is to sell you a modular device that you could update as desired, especially if the parts/connections are standardized meaning you could foster a [normalized] third party market fo…
Modular devices aren't free in terms of engineering tradeoffs. Those interconnects to support modularity add their own unreliability (connectors that can fail more easily), weight (connectors) & increased size. Additionally, the connectors themselves have obsolescence anyway & at some point really expensive components start to be bottlenecks (e.g. upgrading the display uses a new connector or requires processing powe…
Right to Repair is a reasonable proxy for this entire topic, and it's overwhelmingly supported - 74.5% of people being in favor, 1.9% opposing. [1] The reason the government is distrusted is specifically because of issues like this. It's good for society, good for the environment, extremely widely supported, but companies like Apple lobby actively and aggressively against such progress. And they generally win. There's been some glacially slow progress at the state level, but Federal support is unsurprisingly nowhere to be seen.
And you're dramatically understating the benefits of modularity. PCs are indeed the perfect example, and no - people are not replacing them every 5 years. You can see a Steam hardware survey here [2]. And that's for gamers, who are going to iterate their hardware faster than average! Even for video cards, one of the most likely to fail and most likely to be upgraded parts, the GTX 1060 (released in 2016) is the 6th most popular card, making up about 4% of all players (contrasted against 7% for the #1 card)! Without planned obsolescence, most things can last for extremely long periods of time. And those that do have, more or less, inescapably high failure rates (like old hard disk drives) can and should be standardized and able to be replaced/upgraded.
[1] - https://www.waveform.com/pages/right-to-repair-april-2020-re...
[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes; I'm basically saying one should reconsider before ever using this phrase, as it drips with condescension, and therefore is not conducive to productive discourse.
There is a time to be productive and a time to be condescending. When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect on maybe you deserved it.
> When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect
Or just chuckle at and ignore the misinformed idiot doing the condescension and move on with your life if appropriate.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/ Also: Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth. That FAQ covers a lot of interes…
> The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036 It would be quite depressing if it was us failing to receive a fainter signal, rather than Voyager failing to send it.
I think the reverse would be more depressing. There will inevitably come a time when the signal will be indiscernible from the background noise.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modular devices aren't free in terms of engineering tradeoffs. Those interconnects to support modularity add their own unreliability (connectors that can fail more easily), weight (connectors) & increased size. Additionally, the connectors themselves have obsolescence anyway & at some point really expensive components start to be bottlenecks (e.g. upgrading the display uses a new connector or requires processing powe…
Right to Repair is a reasonable proxy for this entire topic, and it's overwhelmingly supported - 74.5% of people being in favor, 1.9% opposing. [1] The reason the government is distrusted is specifically because of issues like this. It's good for society, good for the environment, extremely widely supported, but companies like Apple lobby actively and aggressively against such progress. And they generally win. There'…
I agree, repairability is more interesting requirement than modularity. You can get the former without requiring the latter & you can get the latter without achieving the former (e.g. proprietary connectors for modularity that don't have any broader adoption).
As for luck of trust of government, that's an overbroad generalization as to the root of it. That's one class of reasons for a specific population group. There are others that don't share those reasons (e.g. the Bundy/BLM standoff had nothing to do with the government not implementing common sense ideas & the people involved share ideological 0 in common with those that are skeptical of the government for the reasons you mentioned).
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right to Repair is a reasonable proxy for this entire topic, and it's overwhelmingly supported - 74.5% of people being in favor, 1.9% opposing. [1] The reason the government is distrusted is specifically because of issues like this. It's good for society, good for the environment, extremely widely supported, but companies like Apple lobby actively and aggressively against such progress. And they generally win. There'…
I agree, repairability is more interesting requirement than modularity. You can get the former without requiring the latter & you can get the latter without achieving the former (e.g. proprietary connectors for modularity that don't have any broader adoption). As for luck of trust of government, that's an overbroad generalization as to the root of it. That's one class of reasons for a specific population group. There…
Repair and modularity tend to go together, especially in the face of bad actors. Otherwise you get this scenario where companies work to intentionally create hardware that is likely to be damaged during repair/replacement efforts. The hardware equivalent of Microsoft intentionally trying to 'integrate' Internet Explorer into Windows.
As for government trust, I think it can almost entirely be explained as a result of the government behaving in an ever more opaque fashion, and constantly lying on top of that. Fool me once, and all that. In the Kennedy era, and all the way up to his assassination it remained extremely high - well above 70%. Since then it's been spiraling downward, to its now pitiful levels where we're at today - about to enter the single digits. [1] It's practically an achievement in itself to be that distrusted. I mean can you imagine a time when somebody could say non-ironically, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."? Anyhow, I digress. It's just a topic I feel strongly on.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/public-trust...
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, repairability is more interesting requirement than modularity. You can get the former without requiring the latter & you can get the latter without achieving the former (e.g. proprietary connectors for modularity that don't have any broader adoption). As for luck of trust of government, that's an overbroad generalization as to the root of it. That's one class of reasons for a specific population group. There…
Repair and modularity tend to go together, especially in the face of bad actors. Otherwise you get this scenario where companies work to intentionally create hardware that is likely to be damaged during repair/replacement efforts. The hardware equivalent of Microsoft intentionally trying to 'integrate' Internet Explorer into Windows. As for government trust, I think it can almost entirely be explained as a result of…
I agree about the opaqueness likely being the root motivating factor regardless of idealogical bent.
I'm not sold on modularity - the EU seems to be effectively dealing with malicious compliance. Even the details of repairability are tricky enough because you're internalizing an externality but it can be debated that if the externality is a better tradeoff for society which benefits from a faster pace of innovation because the companies don't have to support those products forever (support costs for older products are very real in engineering & supply chain orgs). Think about how very different phones today are from the 1st gen. That being said, now that things have stabilized, maybe forcing phones to standardize a bit would be OK provided manufacturers are still allowed to innovate (e.g. such requirements wouldn't be relevant to VR which hasn't reached an innovation plateau like phones and laptops have).
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#320There's something very beautiful about Voyager's journey so far. I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.
Wasn't there a Star Trek enemy that was based on Voyager colliding with some kind of doomsday machine?
There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which Voyager finds one of the original Voyager probes on a planet. The episode is called Friendship One [0].
[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_One_(episode...