https://www.npr.org/2010/10/09/130451369/the-zombie-network-...

Hams already talk to the ISS on the 144-148 MHz band (which is close to the FM radio in your car). They have about a 15 minute window to talk to the ISS. They have a 90 minute orbit, too, so I would bet similar window to talk as Artemis II.

The ISS is much closer to the earth than Artemis. Quick google tells me the Artemis is 184 times the distance as the ISS (dang!), bit inside the Van Allen belt. Our atmosphere is transparent to 2.4 Ghz, so there probably won't be too much attenuation. You would need to account for scattering of the signal - maybe use a yagi directional antenna?

In conclusion: I bet you could interfere with their wifi, but might not be able to hear their signal

I'm recalling this from my memory of "The Space Above Us" podcast: There were various bespoke teleprinters sent up on early shuttle flights that had exciting failure modes (if I remember correctly one of them started smoking) and in at least a couple of cases they had to stow the new hardware and pull out the old backup hardware because the new stuff didn't work.

And if you are going with some local server, the Exchange/Outlook family is just the worst possible option. Those people already have enough stuff to maintain up there, they don't need something that require in-house expert admins.

To me that's probably much more interesting. We assume they have all this fancy NASA tech, probably some special communication protocols, but nope, email is fine. Still not sure why they'd use Outlook, but I guess it's easier than retraining astronauts on Alpine or Mutt.

How long did the US military rely on mIRC... decades, maybe they still do?

There's no way that outlook is the best tool for the job though, and it's no surprise at all that they're having problems with it. It's a complete mess with insane amounts of overhead and bloat if all you want to do is send text. Even the message headers it sends/mangles are trash. It's a pain to work with on the end user side too. I can't imagine that they couldn't have written a basic email client that would do the job better with far fewer problems/resources or used/built off of any number of decades old open source projects.

IMAP probably not so much, It depends too much on having a good network. unless the imap server is on the spaceship(heh, spaceSHIP, that is an optimistic term, but it is all we have, so going with it), I would not expect it to work all that well.

I am not very familiar with outlooks game, Historically my beef with with it and thunderbird was their local data store, I mean it was not strictly speaking bad, but I was like "we have this great Maildir spec, why are you using this propriety database that is prone to corruption, even if you don't like Maildir million files approach at least use sqlite"

Claws-mail (https://claws-mail.org) has a good working Windows version. Native desktop app, lightweight, extremely fast, able to handle multigigabyte inboxes for breakfast. The only drawback for some would be that it does not compose (although it can display them just fine) HTML mail, only text-only mail. This is an architectural decision.

With local cache for an Exchange server, or with purely local mail (i.e., using .pst files). The latter is mediocre IME. Outlook is an Exchange client; other uses are not in its wheelhouse.

2026: lol we just realized there's a few million lines of extra code running but we can't figure out why

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

Source for this running on the GN&C (guidance and nav) computer? Isn’t that built by the ESA?

How many KB is the flight controller?

"... preparing for re-entry, adjusting azimuth, ... APPLY UPDATES AND REBOOT? APPLY UPDATES AND SHUT DOWN? QUEEN? UPDATES?"

Once or twice a month, I have to RDP (now "Microsoft Windows App!") into a Windows XP machine on the other side of the continent through a jump box and a dialup connection.

Latency is bad, but not as terrible as you might think. The worst part is moving files between localhost and remote.

But these things aren't running the guidance computers -- they're laptops.

Do you also worry when you are flying on an airplane where some other passengers carry a laptop running windows? Just because it is a computer and it is on a spacecraft doesnt mean it will harm human beings if it goes down.

Considering this is a spacecraft, that explains everything.

Wifi connection settings in Windows have a "metered connection" setting, which disables automatically downloading updates. I don't recall exactly when this was introduced, but I had to use it for a year while I was stuck on satellite internet. You can even set data caps and such.

Of course, it's always off by default, and I have no idea if there's any way to provision the connection via enterprise admin to default to on for a particular network (I would assume not) so you'd be stuck hoping everyone that comes in does the right thing.

Before everyone gets all up in arms about it, Windows/Linux UI & database with external microcontrollers handling real-time control is a very common architectural choice for medical and industrial equipment. To the point where many Systems-on-Module (SoMs) come with a Linux-capable ARM processor and a separate, smaller processor for real-time, linked via shared memory.

Anyway, a customer called to report a weird bug that we couldn't resolve. After remoting into the instrument, we discovered that one of the lab technicians had attempted to install Excel on it. At some point the install must have failed, but it left a .dll behind that was causing a conflict with something in our code and keeping the UI from starting properly.

No, we did not learn anything from this incident...

Wow, very cool and lot's of respect!

But... why not use linux, unix, custom OS, iPad, Android, Nintendo SNES, Atari, Commodore 64... anything BUT Microsoft?

(Seriously though, why not Linux? I'd really appreciate if you could answer, thank you! )

SpaceX Crew Dragon console interfaces are entirely React apps

Most UK government excuse: "The programme undertaken by the Royal Navy and BAE Systems to equip the fleet with a Windows-based command system was completed in just 18 days."

Translated: "You couldn't do better in 18 days, so you don't have a right to worry or criticize. Also, don't ask why this was pushed off until the last 18 days of the project."

I think it was the same ship which shot down a passenger airliner.