IcedRaktajino

Because his qwack was showing.

If you’ve been even casually following NASA’s return to the Moon, you’re likely aware of the recent Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission. You probably also heard that things didn’t go quite to plan: although the test was ultimately completed and the towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was fully loaded with propellant, a persistent liquid hydrogen leak and a few other incidental issues lead the space agency to delay further testing for at least a month while engineers make adjustments to the vehicle.

This constitutes a minor disappointment for fans of spaceflight, but when you’re strapping four astronauts onto more than five million pounds of propellants, there’s no such thing as being too cautious. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says if a WDR doesn’t shake loose some gremlins, you probably weren’t trying hard enough. Simulations and estimates only get you so far, the real thing is always more complex, and there’s bound to be something you didn’t account for ahead of time.

So what exactly is a Wet Dress Rehearsal? In the most basic of terms, its a practice launch where everyone involved does everything exactly the way they would on a real launch, except when the countdown hits zero, nothing actually happens.

It’s the final test of the vehicle and the ground support systems, the last check of fit and function before launch. But there’a also a logistical element. In other words, it’s not just a test of whether or not the vehicle can be fully fueled, it’s also a verification of how long that process takes. Many of the operations that are performed in the WDR would have already been tested in isolation, but this may be the first, and only, time to practice running them concurrently with all of the other elements of the countdown.

Today, we take office software suites for granted. But in the 1970s, you were lucky to have a typewriter and access to a photocopier. But in the early 1980s, IBM rolled out PROFS — the Professional Office System — to try to revolutionize the office. It was an offshoot of an earlier internal system. The system would hardly qualify as an office suite today, but for the time it was very advanced.

The key component was an editor you could use to input notes and e-mail messages. PROFS also kept your calendar and could provide databases like phonebooks. There were several key features of PROFS that would make it hard to recognize as productivity software today. For one thing, IBM terminals were screen-oriented. The central computer would load a form into your terminal, which you could fill out. Then you’d press send to transmit it back to the mainframe. That makes text editing, for example, a very different proposition since you work on a screen of data at any one time. In addition, while you could coordinate calendars and send e-mail, you could only do that with certain people.

In general, PROFS connected everyone using your mainframe or, perhaps, a group of mainframes. In some cases, there might be gateways to other systems, but it wasn’t universal. However, it did have most of the major functions you’d expect from an e-mail system that was text-only, as you can see in the screenshot from a 1986 manual. PF keys, by the way, are what we would now call function keys.

The calendar was good, too. You could grant different users different access to your calendar. It was possible to just let people see when you were busy or mark events as confidential or personal.

You could actually operate PROFS using a command-line interface, and the PF keys were simply shorthand. That was a good thing, too. If you wanted to erase a file named Hackaday, for example, you had to type: ERASE Hackaday AUT$PROF.

Styles

PROFS messages were short and were essentially ephemeral chat messages. Of course, because of the block-mode terminals, you could only get messages after you sent something to the mainframe, or you were idle in a menu. A note was different. Notes were what we could call e-mail. They went into your inbox, and you could file them in “logs”, which were similar to folders.

If you wanted something with more gravitas, you could create documents. Documents could have templates and be merged with profiles to get information for a particular author. For example, a secretary might prepare a letter to print and mail using different profiles for different senders that had unique addresses, titles, and phone numbers.

Documents could be marked draft or final. You had your own personal data storage area, and there was also a shared storage. Draft documents could be automatically versioned. Documents also received unique ID numbers and were encoded with their creation date. Of course, you could also restrict certain documents to certain users or make them read-only for particular users.

More Features

PROFS could remind you of things or calendar appointments. It could also let you look up things like phone numbers or work with other databases. The calendar could help you find times when all participants were available. PROFS could tie into DisplayWrite (at least, by version 2) so it could spell check using custom or stock dictionaries. It also looked for problematic words such as effect vs. affect and wordy phrases or clichés.

The real game changer, though, was the ability to find documents without searching through a physical filing cabinet. The amount of time spent maintaining and searching files in a typical pre-automation business was staggering.

You could ask PROFS to suggest rewrites for a certain grade level or access a thesaurus. This all sounds ordinary now, but it was a big innovation in the 1980s.

Of course, in those days, documents were likely to be printed on a computer-controlled typewriter or, perhaps, an ordinary line printer. But how could you format using text? This all hinged on IBM’s DisplayWriter word processor.

Markup

Today we use HTML or Markdown to give hints about rendering our text. PROFS and DisplayWriter wasn’t much different, although it had its own language. The :p. tag started a paragraph. You could set off a quotation between :q. and :eq. Unnumbered lists would start with :ul., continue with :li., and end with :eul. Sounds almost familiar, right? Of course, programs like roff and WordStar had similar kinds of commands, and, truthfully, the markup is almost like strange HTML.

The Whole Office

IBM wanted to show people that this wasn’t just wordprocessing for the secretarial pool. Advanced users could customize templates and profiles. Administrators could tailor menus and add features. There were applications you could add to provide a spreadsheet capability, access different databases, and gateway to other systems like TWX or Telex.

History and Future

Supposedly, the original system was built in the late 1970s in conjunction with Amoco Research. However, we’re a little suspicious of that claim. We know of at least three other companies that were very proud of “helping IBM design PROFS.” As far as we could ever tell, that was a line IBM sales fed people when they helped them design a sign-in screen with their company name on it, and that was about it.

The system would go through several releases until it morphed into OfficeVision. As PCs started to take over, OfficeVision/2 and OS/2 were the IBM answer that few wanted. Eventually, IBM would suggest using Lotus Notes or Domino and would eventually buy Lotus in 1995 to own the products.

Scandal

One place that PROFS got a lot of public attention was during the Iran-Contra affair. Oliver North and others exchanged PROFS notes about their activities and deleted them. However, deleting a note in PROFS isn’t always a true deletion. If you send a note to several people, they all have to delete it before the system may delete it. If you send a document, deleting the message only deletes the notification that the document is ready, not the document.

Investigators recovered many “deleted” e-mails from PROFS that provided key details about the case. Oddly, around the same time, IBM offered an add-on to PROFS to ensure things you wanted to delete were really gone. Maybe a coincidence. Maybe not.

Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains.

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries.

The move is “one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades,” according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. “It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines.”

Carmakers will need to attest to the U.S. government that, as of March 17, core elements of their products don’t contain code that was written in China or by a Chinese company. The rule also covers software for advanced autonomous driving and will be extended to connectivity hardware starting in 2029. Connected cars made by Chinese or China-controlled companies are also banned, wherever their software comes from.

Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a "self‑growing city" on the moon, which could be achieved in less than 10 years.

SpaceX still intends to start on Musk's long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, "but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster".

Musk's comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, which said SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. This marks a shift from Musk's long-standing focus on Mars as SpaceX's primary destination. As recently as last year, he said the company aimed to launch an uncrewed Mars mission by the end of 2026.

"No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction," he said in January last year in response to a post on X.

Musk has a long record of setting ambitious timelines for projects such as electric vehicles and self-driving technology that have repeatedly failed to materialize on schedule.

Have been thinking it over for a few weeks and finally decided I wanted to go ahead and get in on the first batch.

Not sure if the receipt number is PII, but better safe than sorry.

A hydrogen leak during the wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 2 has forced NASA to forego the February launch window and work toward March instead.

Well, at least it won't be competing with the Olympics and Super Bowl now, so silver lining I suppose.

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

Texture resolution had to be reduced for the N64 port.

In the video you can see the side by side comparisons of the PS and N64 RE2 cutscenes, with differences clearly visible, but not necessarily for the worse. Uncompressed, the about fifteen minutes of FMVs in the game with a resolution of 320×160 pixels at 24 bits take up 4 GB. For the PS this was solved with some video compression and a dedicated video decoder, since its relatively weak hardware needed all the help it could get.

On the N64 port, however, only 24 MB was left on a 64 MB cartridge after the game’s code and in-game assets had been allocated. The first solution was chroma subsampling, counting on the human eye’s sensitivity to brightness rather than color. One complication was that the N64 didn’t implement color clamping, requiring brightness to be multiplied rather than simply added up before the result was passed on to the video hardware in RGB format.

Very helpful here was that the N64 relied heavily on DMA transfers, allowing the framebuffer to be filled without a lot of marshaling which would have tanked performance. In addition to this the RSP was used with custom microcode to enable upscaling as well as interpolation between frames and audio, with about half the frames of the original dropped and instead interpolated. All of this helped to reduce the FMVs to fit in 24 MB rather than many hundreds of MBs.

For the audio side of things the Angel Studios developers got a break, as the Factor 5 developers – famous for Star Wars titles on the N64 – had already done the heavy lifting here with their MusyX audio tools. This enables sample-based playback, saving a lot of memory for music, while for speech very strong compression was used.

Video

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.

"Since the beginning of this administration, CISA has made significant progress in returning to our statutory, core mission and focusing on President Trump's policies for maximum security for all Americans," CISA spokesperson Marci McCarthy told us. "CISA has reviewed and determined that we will not participate in the RSA Conference since we regularly review all stakeholder engagements, to ensure maximum impact and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars."

McCarthy declined to comment on whether the decision had anything to do with former CISA director Jen Easterly being named chief executive of RSAC last week.

Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports:

The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now but nope. Every. Time.