Items tagged with fail
Image of the Japanese Section of the International Space Station from NASADisintegrating spaceships are not something that just happen in Kerbal Space Program. The Japanese X-Ray telescope Hitomi was declared lost after it spun out of control, was torn apart, and disintegrated on March 26th, 2016. The exact causes are unknown, however, it is suspected that the accident was due to a software failure. A quarter billion dollar satellite burning up in the atmosphere is not the kind of “hot hardware” we normally want to see.The Hitomi was originally launched to study hard X-ray sources in the galaxy. Japan’s first successful X-ray satellite, Hakucho, was launched in 1979. Other successful launches...
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For the past few months, Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum. All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8 -- no more security updates, no more fixes. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP? The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft...
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Three days ago, EA launched the latest version of SimCity. Opinions of the game itself have varied widely. Pre-launch reviews were generally positive, though a number of publications criticized the heavy reliance on multiplayer, small city sizes, and the fact that other players can deliberately sabotage hours of careful work. All other characteristics, however, have been overshadowed by the game's disastrous launch performance. How bad is it? Bad enough to make Diablo 3's launch look good. To date, EA has disabled online features, forced the game to run slowly, and implemented login queues. It hasn't delayed plans to launch the game in more areas, and sure enough, gamers in those countries are...
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Apple's latest incarnation of OS X, Leopard, apparently has had a hard time making the grade when it comes to accessing the New York City Department of Education's WiFi network."Apple is scrambling to address the WiFi connectivity issue within its Leopard operating system. The fix appears set to be included in the bug fixes of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5.3 release, as noted in the report Successive Mac OS X 10.5.3 builds continue."Until the WiFi connectivity is fixed the orders remain on hold....
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Conventional wisdom says that solid state drives (SSDs) should have lower failure rates than their mechanical counterparts simply because SSDs lack moving parts. Sadly, it seems that theory and reality have clashed once again:“A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations, the firm stated in a report on Monday. Avian gathered this information on a recent swing through Asia.Approximately 10 percent to 20 percent of the flash notebooks shipping from the large manufacturer are coming back because of technical failure, (Avi)...
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We think it's a bit early to declare Amazon's new Star-Trek-esque reader as a flop just yet. Sure it may not be the prettiest thing we've ever seen, and the price is a bit higher than what we were expecting, but all in all it could just be a glimpse of things yet to come.Not everybody shares our optimistic outlook on new hardware, especially Don Reisinger of CNet, who writes:“When bookstores are within driving distance and Amazon.com is a click away of most people, what's the impetus to use one of these?Everything I've heard from the proponents of this device attempt to glorify it as the "21st century's book." What a crock. E-book Readers provide few valuable experiences. And out of that...
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Engineers at Google have published a PDF concerning hard drives and what factors are most likely to cause them to fail. They studied 100,000 hard drives over the course of five years and had some pretty interesting findings. "It is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disk drives. Despite their importance, there is relatively little published work on the failure patterns of disk drives, and the key factors that affect their lifetime. Most available data are either based on extrapolation from accelerated aging experiments or from relatively modest sized field...
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