Right! I wonder how did the probe send an entire memory dump back without them realizing. Was it programmed to do that when a system failed or something?
Good question. Makes me wonder if it’s part of a system debug programmed into it that was forgotten or something. The guy that put it in could be long gone and didn’t document it?
It’s insane to me how many government agencies simply forget about things because nobody thought a certain file or document was important enough to update, and the only ways to access the information is to find the person who wrote it, find where it’s being stored and dig through millions of unrelated files, or spend a ton of money to reverse engineer the thing you once made.
Just look at the US nuclear arsenal. Some of the warheads they began updating back in the day no longer had any documentation due to how many times the files changed hands. Things got lost. People moved to other projects or left the line of work altogether. There was no way to get the full process to make a other one, so they threw money at it until they figured out how to make it.
How many files have accidentally fallen into a box that got shredded? How many times has something been lost to the entirety of Mankind because it fell behind a shelf (and who wants to spend the afternoon moving the entire shelf for a single file)?
Somebody who was twenty years old when Voyager 1 launched is now 67. Even the junior members of the team are retired now. The senior members are way beyond the average life expectancy.
Could also be the thing had a buffer overflow kind of fault. Instead of just sending its intended buffer the check for the end has broken and its continuously sending the entire contents of its memory.
There’s a little bit more context (although not a lot) at the NASA blog which seems to be the source for this article. Basically it looks like they instructed it to go to different memory addresses and run whatever code was there in order to try to bypass any corrupted sections. One result was this memory dump. The reason they didn’t immediately identify it was that it wasn’t properly formatted in the normal way.
Right! I wonder how did the probe send an entire memory dump back without them realizing. Was it programmed to do that when a system failed or something?
That person who enabled the debug flag on their last command is shitting their pants at the moment
Good question. Makes me wonder if it’s part of a system debug programmed into it that was forgotten or something. The guy that put it in could be long gone and didn’t document it?
It’s very well documented, just 4-8 documentation systems ago and never migrated because no one thought it was important.
It’s insane to me how many government agencies simply forget about things because nobody thought a certain file or document was important enough to update, and the only ways to access the information is to find the person who wrote it, find where it’s being stored and dig through millions of unrelated files, or spend a ton of money to reverse engineer the thing you once made.
Just look at the US nuclear arsenal. Some of the warheads they began updating back in the day no longer had any documentation due to how many times the files changed hands. Things got lost. People moved to other projects or left the line of work altogether. There was no way to get the full process to make a other one, so they threw money at it until they figured out how to make it.
How many files have accidentally fallen into a box that got shredded? How many times has something been lost to the entirety of Mankind because it fell behind a shelf (and who wants to spend the afternoon moving the entire shelf for a single file)?
Somebody who was twenty years old when Voyager 1 launched is now 67. Even the junior members of the team are retired now. The senior members are way beyond the average life expectancy.
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Is that true, or are you making a joke? Because the documentation is probably a big binder of paper.
It was a joke, it’s how I tend to find most documentation at work, no matter where I am working.
Could also be the thing had a buffer overflow kind of fault. Instead of just sending its intended buffer the check for the end has broken and its continuously sending the entire contents of its memory.
There’s a little bit more context (although not a lot) at the NASA blog which seems to be the source for this article. Basically it looks like they instructed it to go to different memory addresses and run whatever code was there in order to try to bypass any corrupted sections. One result was this memory dump. The reason they didn’t immediately identify it was that it wasn’t properly formatted in the normal way.