And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs

Finally I can put some take into this. I've worked in memory testing for years and I'll tell you that it's actually pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time. So much so that what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells. We add more memory cells than we might activate at any given time. When shit goes awry, we can reprogram the memory controller to remap the used memory cells so that the bad cells are mapped out and unused ones are mapped in. We don't probe memory cells typically unless we're doing some type of in depth failure analysis. usually we just run a series of algorithms that test each cell and identify which ones aren't responding correctly, then map those out.

None of this is to diminish the engineering challenges that they faced, just to help give an appreciation for the technical mechanisms we've improved over the last few decades

Is there a Voyager 1, uh...emulator or something? Like something NASA would use to test the new programming on before hitting send?

Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

They don't use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

That means "written in assembly" means "written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn't document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke".

I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?

Or do they have a simulator of it today - we're talking about early 70's hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I've read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).

I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I'm surely not saying I have better ideas - they've probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they're doing.

More stable, too.

NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!

Heh. Years ago during an interview I was explaining how important it is to verify a system before putting it into orbit. If one found problems in orbit, you usually can’t fix it. My interviewer said, “Why not just send up the space shuttle to fix it?”

Well…

I understand your point and completely agree that NASA has produced some amazing technological feats, but we could probably use a different example than the SLS to highlight their accomplishments. Even with supposedly repurposed rocket engines and technology from the Shuttle era, that project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. If you want to highlight how amazing it is that SLS has actually flown with all the political manipulations associated with it, then I'd probably agree with you in that sense. This is no criticism of the engineers, but to completely ignore the issues of this project as a whole, not just financially related, seems to be a bit disingenuous.

Here’s a good article from Berger talking about what the Government Accountability Office thinks of the project: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable

No yeah, it's like that plus the thing is a light day away, and on top of that malfunctioning on a hardware level. Incredible

Sony has agreed to remove psn requirements for pc users now

they almost certainly have a hardware spare, or at the very least, an accurately simulated version of it, because again, this is 50 year old hardware. So it's pretty easy to just simulate it.

But yeah they are almost certainly pulling some really fucked QA on this shit.

I think the security is adequately managed by the need for a massive transmitter as well as the question "what is there to gain via a hostile takeover and re-programming the probe?"

I bet there's actual security of some kind going on, but those two points seem like a massive hurdle to clear just to mess with a deep space probe.