Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work
3 months ago by shish_mish to c/technology
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Heresy, using an actual AGI example. Also, HAL 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.
Uhhh so they can see where they are
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.
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.
False equivalency.
If you were going on a 10 day hike to the most remote location on earth, would you bring the most unreliable device you could find, or something you can count on?
The tablets are a convenience, not a requirement and so being commercial off the shelf means it's cheaper and it works well enough than what purpose-built hardware and software.
If every tablet died, the mission would proceed without pause. Except the astronauts would be checking gauges instead of looking at a system monitor on their tablet and not sending as many e-mails.
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
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 🤷🏻♂️
Idk, if I go to space I def want windows ... operated by trained, reliable penguins.
To phone home
Yeah, that's no reason. That's fucking stupid.
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.
Very likely that some degree of funding came from MS
are you 8 years old?
MS got a thick government contract.
What the article fails to mention is that this is on Commander Wiseman's personal Surface Pro and not on any mission-related systems.
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:
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.
It is incredibly cool.
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.
And being that it's a personal device that they can't get either version of their own personal outlook to work, the fix will likely be having their spouse reset the password here on earth and tell them the new password because they likely forgot it. Otherwise you'd just tell them to use webmail until they got back, no point in fucking around with a locally installed product on a personal device when they will be back in less than 10 days
They can stop by a satellite and plug in /j
'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.
I guess I should have said 'and not on any device required for the mission'. The PCDs are personal devices for the individual's business and convenience.
They are for things like e-mailing, looking at mission manuals and accessing the Internet. They're not involved in the operation of the Integrity. All of the mission-critical systems that operate the ship are purpose-built.
But NASA doesn't need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to e-mail and PDF reading, so they buy commercial hardware because it's way cheaper, it works well enough and if it fails it doesn't compromise the mission.
That makes a lot more sense. When I was reading PCD I was thinking about a private device, even if they don't have much space and even less time I was thinking that they might bring a few small private things. Like a photo of their family, maybe a book etc.
On the ISS missions the astronauts have a weight allowance that they're allowed to take. It may be the same case here.
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!
Probably not, I'd imagine all the tablets have the same pin to make things easier.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/...
(Though, of course, that's alledgedly simplifying a lot to make it more click-bait-y: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/... )
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.
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...
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.
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.
Ha! They used to run Unix.
Or ..so I hear.
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.
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.
They updated onenote today on my work PC and changed all my checkBOXES to CIRCLES. WHO THE FUCK APPROVED THAT as you can see I'm still pissed. Fuck microslop
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.
Yeah, I rewatched the launch from Everyday Astronaut's livestream and he actually had better footage, he had a tracking camera showing the booster separation
Outside of the launch part, I think it's mostly because SpaceX has set the standard so high, with tons of high resolution cameras streaming over Starlink even during reentry
SpaceX does a good job, but it didn't exist in 1969. My own take on this is that as a society we simply don't care and are generally worse at our jobs.
It's always assumed that things are constantly getting better, but I'm reminded at moments like this that over the course of nearly 60 years, we've not progressed as much as we'd like to think.
It's clear that several people in charge of the youtube livestream have no idea about how to do that correctly. I think the difference is just effort. Viewership was tiny compared to Apollo 11, as was the hype leading up to it. It's clear that NASA could provide a whole lot better footage if even some random youtuber (Everyday Astronaut) can beat them. So that aspect is, as you said, because as a society we don't really care about the Artemis launch. SpaceX does put a fair amount of effort into their livestreams, and you can easily tell by watching them.
For the recorded footage, film often has a lot higher dynamic range than digital cameras and usually looks a whole lot better when recording a launch up close.
Far shots are limited by atmospheric distortion and physical limits from diffraction for a given aperture size. None of that can change.
IDK anything about the quality of the original live broadcast of Apollo 11, so i don't have anything to compare in that regard
Plus the moon is haunted
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 watts
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.
Yeah there's no chance that can run outlook. No wonder.
'you have two outlooks inside you, neither work and it will grow'
Outlooks, is that what’s inside of me?
See, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What am I? What aren’t I? Am I composite or irreducible? These are hard fucking questions.
I think about why I care in the first place… unlike dogs, cats, kangaroos… the behavior of these animals don’t demonstrate contemplation. It’s as though they exist in a sort of “spotlight” consciousness—aware and responding to the spotlight of qualia in their field of awareness. Why are we different?
Psychedelics are rather interesting because they have this profound capacity for instigating the feeling of deep insight. How is it that some mushrooms can make me feel like everything suddenly makes sense, when I have not actually learned anything during my trip?
I get the feeling that the quality of an insight can be approximated somehow, and the brain likely uses this to make me feel the “aha” moment I know from true insights. That’s to say, insight is a feeling—and it can be triggered independent of actual insights having occurred. Fascinating idea, no?
How might my brain approximate the quality of an insight? Well, if I’m not full of shit about this, then I think the answer here is an architectural one. Something about the structure of concepts should, perhaps necessarily, allow for related concepts to be graded by the quality of their relationship. For example as when you learn a new form of mathematics, as your brain realizes the strength of connection to prior learned forms of mathematics, it can make you feel “aha.”
The “aha” feeling is tethered to my reward incentive, which helps structure my self-prescribed purpose. I want to learn, understand, grow… these are all endeavors that help mankind, because it is in mankind’s personal interest to levy control over nature. It makes sense, in this way, that I am how I am.
But outlooks inside me? Hmm… I need to think on your theory more.
WHY is gamora?
Go•mor rah I ga'môra l
a town in ancient Palestine, probably south of the Dead Sea. According to Gen. 19:24 it was destroyed by fire from heaven, along with Sodom, for the wickedness of its inhabitants.
noun a wicked or depraved place: the city has always been more than a tawdry Sodom and Gomorrah.
Probably not…
Gamora
Marvel Comics fictional character
Still doesn’t seem right…
What do you mean?
*Microslop Outlook
Should have used women with pencils again instead of MicroSlop.
This was a personal device, not a mission unit.
As expected
They didn't pay their subscription fees, obviously. Duh.
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. 😐
Recently started a new job and for the first time I'm fully emersed in the Microslop software suite. Somehow Outlook and Teams haven't failed critically but I still hate them. Someone emails me a PDF, so I open it. No, I don't want to open PDFs inside Outlook, so I download the PDF. Where is it? Is it on my Onedrive or does the file actually exist on my computer? Does anything exist on my computer?
In my personal life I haven't touched Windows in about 4 months now and I don't want to go back, although I'll probably be booting up Windows 10 because I just downloaded the pre-alpha version of Kitten Space Agency. Planning to try Bazzite soon, we'll see how that goes, I've heard good things.
Outlook is just impressively bad. When I came back to work from the weekend, there was this attack on one of our sites that sent out a notification for each attack it detected and I came to work to 20K new emails.
Ever tried, to delete 20K emails from outlook? Its amazingly stupid! First of all, you can't just bulk select. Search won't help either (Search half the time returns nothing anyways) so you have to kind of select one, scroll 2387942 times down until you are a few thousand mails in. Now, this is important: Click correctly! If you click wrong, all the mails you've selected so far will be unselected again and you have to start over. Press shift, and select a mail. Now you have a few thousand mails selected. Press delete.
And now go for a coffee because you won't be able to use your outlook for the next 30 minutes. You can't open mails, can't refresh the page (you'll get a crash page if you do). Half an hour later, outlook reloads again, and you'll see that it successfully deleted about 80% of your selected mails. The other 20%, I hear you ask? Yeah, those were just not deleted. Why? I don't know? Why are you asking me?!
I would constantly see "There are 6K mails" and then the table where the mail headers are shown shows 7 mails... Load more? Nope, nothing, need to reload the page.
Try copy paste! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccckkk if they don't crash, they will just piss you off.. Now pasting gets you this weirdo paste box. You can't type anymore, there is this stupid paste thing floating, and you need to press ESC to continue.
Half the time I'm writing an email and the text formatting options just disappear, and I can't do any formatting anymore. I can fix this, I just have to get out, to go drafts, reopen the mail I was writing because fuck you, that's why.
How about outlook365? Its awesome and amazing! I write text and I can see bits and pieces of the text I wrote previously just disappear, like its high on Alzheimer. You literally just see parts of paragraphs disappear while you are writing below. Best part of this? Then you change your useragent to say that you're not on linux, but on windows, and the problem magically resolves itself!
Microsoft is the worst software company ever
I swear to God that Word exists to make us feel better about Outlook.
Imagine if microslop used their so called ai bullshit to make outlook search actually fucking work.
This is a common issue. I've only ever solved it by deleting registry keys.
I’m guessing it’s one of two things:
It could be two shortcuts to outlook. One might actually be Outlook classic.
Another issue could be a dreaded dual mailbox scenario that occurs when an hybrid on-premises user account gets a mailbox in exchange online before their on-prem account has its attributes created. It’s annoying to deal with and fix.
I’m curious as to what the issue is and how they fix it. I would assume that latency and bandwidth are a big problem and they have WAN acceleration going on, which can cause some apps to bug out.
I actually helped Riberbed identify and fix a bug with Exchange optimization that took 4 years to fix. The tech I worked with for about a year when we identified it called me up 3 years later to tell me himself that they fixed and closed it.
Judging by the two Outlooks installed on my cooperate machine I'm guessing Outlook and Outlook (classic) are the two installed... Though they could have "Outlook for Windows" installed too as I see it offering it to me via the Windows store.
Store Outlook should be the same as Outlook, just with ads if not using a licensed account. I’m not sure how they are handling that, but I know they are trying to kill off all but one of the Outlook versions.
So, just like here on Earth then.
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.
Vibe coding, baby.
Legit endangering our brave spacefarers.
I've worked for a lot of companies throughout my life and admittedly I've never worked in the space industry, but practically everywhere just hosts our own damn email, why are they using Microsoft accounts?
They're not, it was his personal tablet.
Download Winhance. Fixed.
The capsule isn't. It's the mission commander's personal device.
(I only read the title) So that is within the allowed tolerance of working parameters bcs they never performed better during testing either.
In fairness I don't think Microsoft designed them to work in space. Maybe it's their internet connection?
Imagine trying to play Multiplayer games! I wonder if they would work at all?
Yeah that makes sense that they have a workaround to fix it but I guess people gotta use a clickbait title to hate on MS.
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The question is do they have a Copilot?
save