20159850
submission
jamax writes:
From TFA: "A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film."
Apparently the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image)..
And it was a clever hack too — if ever an attempt was made of writing a file that's too large it got sort of cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!
19737070
submission
jamax writes:
NASA has announced that it has bought 12 seats on Soyuz flights to be flown in the period 2014- june 2016.
16950476
submission
jamax writes:
From the TFA:
"The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations..."
But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb — actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature...
And they have ballistic missiles among these inflatables, too!
Just imagine buying half a dozen of these toys and inflating them during a vacation in, say, Cuba... Just for lolz of course!
4602087
submission
jamax writes:
According to this BBC article "Russia is making plans to detach and fly away its parts of the International Space Station when the time comes to de-orbit the rest of the outpost."
From the article: "To facilitate the plan, RKK Energia, the country's main ISS contractor, has already started developing a special node module for the Russian segment, which will double as the cornerstone of the future station."
"...Unlike many Nasa and European space officials, Russian engineers are confident that even after two decades in orbit, their modules would be in good enough shape to form the basis of a new space station.
'We flew on Mir for 15 years and accumulated colossal experience in extending the service life (of such a vehicle),' said a senior Russian official at RKK Energia, Russia's main contractor on the ISS. ..."
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionaly produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires?
There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever — old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days..
Oh, what the world is coming to... GET OFF MY LAWN!!
622406
submission
jamax writes:
According to this (link is in Russian) Russia is to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft that are too big to build planetside (or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built).
Supposedly these would be the ships we intend to fly to Mars and Moon — plans seem to be rather sketchy at the moment, with tentative construction date set to 2020 (after ISS is supposed to expire).
