Some things I agree with
(or not as the case may be)
Wednesday, July 27 Official: The Space Shuttle Uses Windows 98
I kid you not on this one. I was just listening to the live stream from NASA CAPCOM, and they were talking to the Shuttle.. Normally they uplink any changes to the day's schedule and flight plan to the Shuttle, and the crew in the Shuttle then print them off. However, due to the flight plan being such a large file (they don't have the high data-rate antenna up yet, so they're having to use S-Band for all their communications) they didn't send any of the cover pages... One of the shuttle members then said (slightly paraphrased),
"I've been having problems printing off the schedule on the printer up top - it ran fine on the machine when I was using Windows NT, but when I tried to run it off on the laptop using Windows 98 and [what sounded like something called FX or similar] software, I've not been able to."
CAPCOM responds,
"Yeah, you'll have this problem due to the 98 laptop not being on the same network as the Windows NT machine, I'll see what I can do about it down here and get back to you."
... Anybody else slightly unnerved by the fact that the PCs on the shuttle USE WINDOWS! AND SOME USE WINDOWS 98! Oh dear. (I'm absolutely telling the truth about this, too). Ah well... So long as they didn't pay for their copies, that's ok I suppose... (Does anybody actually pay for Windows?)
If you want to catch any more good little nuggets, then the NASA Multimedia page has some good stuff (including, at this time, the WB57 chase plane video of the Shuttle takeoff). Also, you can watch STS-114's progress 24/7 on NASA TV. If you're living in America, you can pick it up on satellite, or you can watch over the web (as I'm doing)... I had problems with the RealPlayer stream earlier in the day around the time of the launch, so I've been tuned into the Windows Media feed for (at this precise moment) 14hrs, 33mins and 42secs.