Posts by etudiant

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

How did the program get any successful installs with this bug? It seems we're not getting the whole story.

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: Early 80's database still alive

Iirc, the anomalous velocity and location data that puzzled the Voyager team was eventually found to be due to an unaccounted for imbalance in the heat radiation from the probes.

See: https://www.space.com/16648-pioneer-anomaly-spacecraft-mystery-solved.html

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

A miss is pretty obvious, no matter the apparatus

Just because the Italians had a make shift test rig does not mean the German system actually worked.

My guess is that a nail on a broomstick could be quite adequate to tell whether a bomb hit its target or not.

Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

A sensible way to fund public projects

There are lots of worth while projects such as SETI or 'Folding at Home' that use the idle computer cycles of participants.

I'd think that if perhaps half the cycles were used for mining and the rest for the main effort, people would be just as willing to participate.

Maybe pay out 10% of any winnings to the lucky participant whose computer struck paydirt, use the balance to fund the overhead.