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This is great!

Curious about the choice of toolkit: what led you to wxPython?


When you want to develop cross platform apps which use the native widgets, there are not so many options. The two big players are qt and wx.

Does anyone have pointers to some real information about this system? CPUs, RAM, storage, the networking, what OS, what language used for the software, etc etc?

I’d love to know how often one of the FCMs has “failed silent”, and where they were in the route and so on too, but it’s probably a little soon for that.


Nasa CFS, is written is plain C (trying to follow MISRA C, etc). It's open on girhub abd used by many companies. It's typically run over freertos or RTEMS, not sure here.

Personally I find the project extremely messy, and kinda hate working with it.


It's most likely using vxworks for it's OS, since I believe it's one of the only fully certified ARINC653 OS's for human flight. It's used in most Aircraft and space missions.

Yeah, that was my guess too but the comment about separate implementation for the backup system made me wonder if there was a different OS, and the which was running where.

Not sure about the primary FSW but the BFS uses cFS[0]. As the sibling comment mentions, you can check it out on GitHub. Sadly I believe NASA keeps most of their best code private, probably siloed into mission-specific codebases. Still, the cFS repo is an awesome crash course on old-school Flight Software techniques.

[0] https://youtu.be/4doI2iQe4Jk?si=ucMoIdw7x_QgZR32


Helpful video, thanks!

At about 1:20, the presenter says the BFS uses a different OS and hardware (not sure if that means a different instance, or a different class, so to speak).


What is the purist’s solution to eg. polluting rivers or air or soil in pursuit of one’s own enrichment?


It’s a daily event now in Australia. Very low prices during the middle of the day, and higher in the morning and evening. Anyone with a battery or an EV they don’t need to drive far can play the market, usually with scripted sell/buy trigger points.

There’s enough profit to make the payback period for a decent battery quite short.


Yes, I see energy-intensive industry moving away from extreme latitudes in the long run. Most of Europe is at an unfortunate latitude and has surprising levels of cloud cover.


Yes. Europe has far more wind than Australia, I imagine for that reason.


They would find it hard to compete with negative prices too.


Not at all. The prices aren't negative during the night or on overcast days.


Every hour you don't run your nuclear power plant at full capacity you lose money. Nuclear power is mostly capex. You need to maximize utilization if you want to be profitable.


It's far worse not to have sufficient electricity during the night or on overcast days. You can just increase nuclear electricity prices during that time to make up for the lost revenue from sunny days.

Or you can burn some hydrogen or synthetic methane and get your energy for less money.

One difference to something like email is that you can change search providers with minimal effort. There’s no server-side context to back up or migrate, no third parties involved: you just use a different URL.


I’m not an expert here, but …

CRTs needed to be refreshed to keep the phosphors glowing. But all screens are now digital: why is there a refresh rate at all?

Can’t we memory-map the actual hardware bits behind each pixel and just draw directly (using PCIe or whatever)?


I think you're assuming that LCDs all have framebuffers, but this is not the case. A basic/cheap LCD does not store the state of its pixels anywhere. It electrically refreshes them as the signal comes in, much like a CRT. The pixels are blocking light instead of emitting it, but they will still fade out if left unrefreshed for long. So, the simple answer is, you can't get direct access to something when it doesn't even exist in the first place.


> What will the UK do when 4chan tells its online regulator to go suck a d**, send in James Bond?

Let's say they did. Would you be saying "So what?" then too?


The people living there might struggle to identify the difference?


Are you calling them stupid?


Mauritius and La Réunion are doing much better than say Madagascar.


I've been hearing that since the 1990's when it first started to become apparent that their economy was on track to overtake the rest of the world within a few decades.

It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?


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