"The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule."
That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of pressure for it to do well.
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
Is there more to that quote that makes it make sense? Otherwise both the human and the dog are redundant as a pair as their purposes are circular and don't benefit the factory.
I heard it originally in reference to planes getting automated. The idea is that nobody would be comfortable riding a pilotless plane, so the pilot is hired on to assuage people's fears, but assigned a dog to keep him from messing with the automation.
I assume the same dynamic is at play, but I find the entire thing to be riddled with hubris, and projective of industry for industry sake.
A friend of mine wrote a paper on the effects of cosmic rays on memory errors in data centers a few years ago[1]. He also posited they had effects on hard drive reliability.
The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware.
In a more dramatic example, Virginia Tech strung together over a thousand PowerMac G5s in a cluster they called the “Big Mac”, and it was one of the fastest (and cheapest) supercomputers of the world at the time. Unfortunately its lack of ECC RAM made its failure rate so high it would have trouble even booting. They dismantled it and sold the machines away one at a time and replaced the entire thing with an Xserve array instead, which had ECC.
I've always wondered whether the orientation of the memory chips in your computer made a difference for cosmic ray errors. That is to say, if their face is to the sky vs. their edge, will it affect the error rate?
Cosmic rays can come from any angle, and even pass through the entire earth without impacting anything. (millions of them are zipping through you and your RAM, right now! electrons barely dodging out of the way in time.)
I think (but have no reference) that the amount of cosmic rays the planet blocks by being in the way is dwarfed by the effects of the magnetosphere and solar rays.
Slight nit-pick: Neutrinos are the ones that are zipping through you and the Earth. They interact with things very rarely and have no real charge anyway. The rays you'd worry about with computer hardware are photons (gamma rays) with high energy enough to create new charged particles. Also other charged particles like muons and their decay cascades.
I think there is something to this I used to have a radio that would pickup this type of interference and days when it was heavy I would have more than usual amount hardware failures even powersupplies.
Back when I worked at a supercomputing center, we had "operators" on duty, who were supposed to visit the machine room every 2-3h or so and check several things.
It turned out that they were the major cause of hangs and reboots of our SunSITE server (a large FTP archive) — walking on the lifted datacenter floor caused vibrations which were enough to disturb the (terrible) external SCSI connectors to multiple drive arrays.
That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of pressure for it to do well.
Edit: Unrelated, but this picture is funny to me. I don't think there's enough room to slide that server out, so I'm not sure what he's doing. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/...