I need to get my hair cut again. I guess I can kill a few minutes looking for my one true bob.

(I will refrain from making a Bob Bryar joke at this juncture. Almost. THAT One True Bob has long ladyhair!)

CaBill, are you sure the OS was DOS? Or was it just the file system?

Often, computers taken into space are very obsolete, as they need special chips that are hardened against stray radiation. (This is why laptops aboard the shuttle and space station often crash, as they're just off-the-shelf models.)

The article I read seemed to imply the filesystem (a DOS-formatted drive, rather than a DOS computer, IOW. Which really should be FAT, but I don't trust the papers to get the fine points in a world where algorithm and logarithm... well, anyway.)

And all I can think was why they hell they were still using DOS as the main OS even on an system, even if it was being just used for experiments, on the shuttle in 2003? I had figured everyone had tossed DOS out the window pre-Y2K

It's probably because the shuttles were designed and built in the 70s and 80s and there is only so far they can upgrade systems with the existing physical and electrical infrastructure. On top of that, everything has to be tested exhaustively before it's allowed operationally. The tech that flies on them now had its design frozen years ago.

Even for experiments, god only knows how long ago the proposal was accepted and the proposers had to outfit the experiment and went into a design freeze.

Can anyone work out what this site does? It looks like a failure of computers interpreting text--like they're having code decide places books refer to, and plotting those points on a map. But the about page is kind of vague. The number of mishits on the front page is discouraging.

So no one looked at the Isabella Rosselllini video? I'm disappointed. It was very informative.

I need to get my hair cut again. I guess I can kill a few minutes looking for my one true bob.

Aww, Hec is going to be so sad about being stuck at his internetless temp job. Christina Ricci is rocking a nice bob in Speed Racer.

Yeah, but the shuttle's electronics supposedly underwent a major upgrade/redesign in the late 90s, early oughts. I remember at the time that they said Columbia had been refitted with the new computers and such...

The specific line was...

Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.

Huh. You read a more thorough article than I did. But now I'm terribly amused at "an ancient operating system, DOS". I believe the hub was running it (in emulation, that is) just this morning, although I gather Wasteland had something to do with that.

I think (all I'm finding seems to imply) that the most recent computer upgrade was in 1990. So that design and code had to be frozen years before that. (eta: that's for the main computer, at least.)

I am so far past ready for this week to be over, but it just won't die.

HATE THAT