... article that circulated as a memo in the company becomes relevant: http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

Every single time my Mac, Excel or Jira are doing something simple and it takes them ages, I recall that one article.

I remember OS X 10.4 used to be blazing fast on my white macbook, core 2 duo and 1 gb ram. I used office, photoshop, indesign and final cut to edit videos smoothly. Nowadays OS X won't even boot with 1 gb ram. we are doing something wrong.

... this coffee plant, that just wouldn't die: https://www.npr.org/templates/...

By mid-century, it was presumed to be extinct.

Then in 1979, a biology teacher on Rodrigues handed out copies of that 1877 drawing to a group of 12-year-olds, and one of the boys raised his hand and said, "Please, sir, I've got one near my house."

The teacher was dubious, but he took a sample branch, sent it to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, in London, where it was identified. It was wild coffee. In fact, it was the last wild Rodriguan coffee plant in the world.

A friend of mine, developer of the spreadsheet SW back in the days of DOS a Norton Commander, had one customer who would keep complaining about the SW crashing from time to time. These kind of crashes would only happen to this customer and no other.

He installed a debug build on the customer's site and and waited... and fair enough, the SW would crash, and crash again and again... at completely random places in the code. In some cases there was literally no way those lines of code could make the program crash under any circumstances.

Well, he spent days trying to debug it and came up empty handed. Until it struck him to look at the time when the SW is crashing. And fair enough, it was crashing on one particular day in a week usually in the time-span of few hours during that day. Now comes the interesting part -- the customer's site was actually a railway station on the Slovakia-Ukraine border (in town called Uzghorod). So he called the customer to ask if there was a train in the station regularly on that day and hour every week and voila, there was one train coming from Ukraine to Slovakia with some goods. So he asked the customer to take Geiger counter and see if there was anything going on in the air.

They found out one of the train cars was radiating like hell. It was used for transferring spent nuclear fuel before. And Ukrainians thought they would save some money by using it for regular cargo after EOL. I wouldn't like to be a person living near those railway tracks...

tl;dr
Spreadsheet SW was crashing on the computers in the train station and thanks to customer complaints they found out the crashes were caused by radioactive train coming regularly to the station.

here is a memo that circulated in SGI in 1993, about how IRIX got bloated and unusable because of exact same reasons as mentioned in the original post:

http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

This is mandatory reading for every new IT employee in my company.

Even though I'm a huge fan of space and astronomy, I must say TFA certainly doesn't reach qualities to be posted on slashdot. The approver must have been drunk or what

The same thing happened to SGI back in the days of their glory. http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

I suggest they fix crashes first (happens regularly to me on iOS, Android and OS X), and just then they start adding features. I can't help it, but before microsoft bought the Skype, I barely seen it crash in years. But now, a longer call hardly goes by without crashing either on my or the other end. As much as I hate sharing my camera and microphone with google, I slowly migrate to hangouts -- not because I like, but because it doesn't crash.

From all the hardware that was sent to space, on which you participated, which one is personally the most valuable to you?

In few words, could you sum up what is the biggest difference between space engineering in 1970s and now?

What was the most nerve-wrecking experience during your whole career at NASA?

If you could add one more scientific experiment hardware to Voyager, in retrospective, what would it be?

As a member of management you must have come across many programming languages used in different missions. Which language was the most easily maneagable within larger groups of programmers?

This is most likely a promo for galaxy. Aperture and focus were intentionally set wrong so that 5D mkIII looks just a bit worse. marketing at its best.

Is it just me or is there no reference to launch date whatsoever?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSTVkkDv30k&feature=player_embedded