You also (though they stopped showing the actual karma scores years ago) can't go beyond -10 or +50 karma. And recovering from -10 karma is not easy because once you go negative, your posts start at 0 or -1, and you need to get people to mod you up (except for Funny which doesn't count). And -1 rated posts still show some of their text when collapsed. Also, I have never heard of someone being banned from Slashdot, and hadn't even thought about it until today.
But I do think they ought to implement shadowbans in the submission queue for the SEO spammers, who actually bother to log in. That thing is a mess before noon-ish UTC. Accounts that repeatedly submit SEO spam articles are an entirely different class of abuse, and are almost guaranteed to never ever produce good content. I'm specifically talking about the "BUY (whatever) IN INDIA" and "mycrappyshitepage.blogspot.in" type of spam, not the "here's my latest mediocre medium.com article" type of spam. It's amazing to think that/. is keeping all that crap around in their database forever.
Slashdot may be slow to respond, but it gets around to it. And I certainly can't remember Slashdot ever having anything that could be remotely referred to as a "purge". Have you ever been to Reddit or are you just posting here to whine about Slashdot?
The key is to be utterly immune to the opinions of truly stupid people.
The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to be immune to the opinions of truly stupid people if they can down-vote each and every one of your posts with no limits. This plus the same with up-votes is where the Reddit circle-jerks come from. Slashdot's system where you get 5 or 15 votes every few weeks only if you're a regular reader works so much better it's like night and day.
I bet you believe that oil reserves are a hard number, too, and they don't vary with oil price. By reducing the cost of launches, it becomes affordable to launch things that weren't previously affordable, thus increasing the potential business by lowering the price point.
Iridium has been up for years at ~780km, and they've only lost 17, counting the one that smacked into a dead Russian satellite. These satellites will be higher.
With Geosynch satellites that adds up to roughly 45 milliseconds at a minimum for the signal to get from the base station to the satellite and back down to you.
Your math is wrong. It's 240ms round trip straight-on from the equator, directly below the bird, up to 280ms with both ends at extreme angles. (Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.) GEO is around 35,000 km, or 70,000km round trip, and the speed of light is about 300,000kps. So that's 7km divided by 30km/sec, or around 233ms, which is pretty close for rounded numbers.
This is exactly why LEO is the holy grail for satellite internet: latency. The downside is they keep moving around and you need a lot of them. Iridium uses 65-70 satellites, but with low, analog bandwidth. Iridium is at 781km, so SpaceX-net will be higher, so a little more delay, but that should improve the view angle a little bit.
Many years ago (mid 2Ks or so), I found that a highway rest area had wifi available. Suspecting that it was geosat-based, I pinged my home server. Yep, just over 1000ms. GEO is about 250ms away as the photon flies, times two for the outbound round trip, and times two again for the response round trip.
The phone uplink for DirectPC was basically a cheat to get rid of one of those round trip delays. Not all satellite internet systems did that, and I can recall seeing pairs of junked interface boxes where the uplink and downlink units were stacked together.
If they can make it work, I'd buy some. But I will not indiekickfund it. The magic is not the boost converter, it's making it that small and thin. I don't feel confident enough about that to place a bet on it until it's already worked for other people.
And there's math behind it, too. To raise the volts, you have to lower the amps. It'll work until it can't provide enough current for the device that it's powering. The form factor is the tricky part, because you need to fit a boost coil and a capacitor in there somehow, and they might have to custom-wind the coil to make it fit, making it more costly to manufacture than it would be with off-the-shelf parts.
It would also have to know when the device is turned off. I think the Joule Thief design puts its power switch before the boost converter. You can't do that when wrapped around a single cell.
Another "too good too be true" is if you have a "pipe"-style battery compartment and the batteries leak, it could be harder to extract them. Tray-style battery compartments should be no problem.
But if they really work like they ought to work, I want some. Even if it's only a 2x lifetime, I want to use them in an IR remote control. One big problem with IR remotes is as the batteries get weaker, contact resistance becomes a problem. You can make batteries last longer by rotating them in place a little, which I guess cleans the contacts a tiny bit. Just boosting the voltage should help things right there.
GPL covers the rights to use and distribute code. I was not aware that it also included the right to use of trademarks. (Assuming GIMP was even properly trademarked.) See also "Iceweasel".
...Or, they will (rightly) conclude that there is no intelligent life worth exploiting on this planet, and that is is therfore ok to destroy the planet to make room for an interstellar bypass.
They're waiting for reboot because it froze the system completely. TFA says that the manufacturer of their "avionics board" had fixed this bug but it wasn't in the one that went up. So most likely it was a driver bug. A crash or lock-up in kernel space is a lot more problematic than just filling up a filesystem. And apparently they had scheduled an upload of the fix, but the satellite crashed right before the comms window. So now instead of a solar sail, they have a solar brick.
Oh, but that's the best part. There apparently is a watchdog, but it only trips after four or five weeks by (presumably unchanged) default, and it's completely independent (rather than being reset regularly by a signal from a properly-operating system). This for a mission that wasn't even supposed to last two weeks. The good news is that the orbit could last for as long as six months with the sail un-deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
I should make a hairspray-fueled Raspberry Pi launcher out of PVC pipe, controlled by an Ardunio. The folks at Hackaday will just go nuts over that.
You also (though they stopped showing the actual karma scores years ago) can't go beyond -10 or +50 karma. And recovering from -10 karma is not easy because once you go negative, your posts start at 0 or -1, and you need to get people to mod you up (except for Funny which doesn't count). And -1 rated posts still show some of their text when collapsed. Also, I have never heard of someone being banned from Slashdot, and hadn't even thought about it until today.
But I do think they ought to implement shadowbans in the submission queue for the SEO spammers, who actually bother to log in. That thing is a mess before noon-ish UTC. Accounts that repeatedly submit SEO spam articles are an entirely different class of abuse, and are almost guaranteed to never ever produce good content. I'm specifically talking about the "BUY (whatever) IN INDIA" and "mycrappyshitepage.blogspot.in" type of spam, not the "here's my latest mediocre medium.com article" type of spam. It's amazing to think that /. is keeping all that crap around in their database forever.
Slashdot may be slow to respond, but it gets around to it. And I certainly can't remember Slashdot ever having anything that could be remotely referred to as a "purge". Have you ever been to Reddit or are you just posting here to whine about Slashdot?
The key is to be utterly immune to the opinions of truly stupid people.
The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to be immune to the opinions of truly stupid people if they can down-vote each and every one of your posts with no limits. This plus the same with up-votes is where the Reddit circle-jerks come from. Slashdot's system where you get 5 or 15 votes every few weeks only if you're a regular reader works so much better it's like night and day.
Thankfully, my mouth was empty when I read that. Caaaaaaarlos!
I bet you believe that oil reserves are a hard number, too, and they don't vary with oil price. By reducing the cost of launches, it becomes affordable to launch things that weren't previously affordable, thus increasing the potential business by lowering the price point.
Iridium has been up for years at ~780km, and they've only lost 17, counting the one that smacked into a dead Russian satellite. These satellites will be higher.
Did you miss reading the bit about "hit with latency issues?" A 1000ms ping time is no fun.
With Geosynch satellites that adds up to roughly 45 milliseconds at a minimum for the signal to get from the base station to the satellite and back down to you.
Your math is wrong. It's 240ms round trip straight-on from the equator, directly below the bird, up to 280ms with both ends at extreme angles. (Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.) GEO is around 35,000 km, or 70,000km round trip, and the speed of light is about 300,000kps. So that's 7km divided by 30km/sec, or around 233ms, which is pretty close for rounded numbers.
This is exactly why LEO is the holy grail for satellite internet: latency. The downside is they keep moving around and you need a lot of them. Iridium uses 65-70 satellites, but with low, analog bandwidth. Iridium is at 781km, so SpaceX-net will be higher, so a little more delay, but that should improve the view angle a little bit.
Many years ago (mid 2Ks or so), I found that a highway rest area had wifi available. Suspecting that it was geosat-based, I pinged my home server. Yep, just over 1000ms. GEO is about 250ms away as the photon flies, times two for the outbound round trip, and times two again for the response round trip.
The phone uplink for DirectPC was basically a cheat to get rid of one of those round trip delays. Not all satellite internet systems did that, and I can recall seeing pairs of junked interface boxes where the uplink and downlink units were stacked together.
To get to the other side?
If they can make it work, I'd buy some. But I will not indiekickfund it. The magic is not the boost converter, it's making it that small and thin. I don't feel confident enough about that to place a bet on it until it's already worked for other people.
And there's math behind it, too. To raise the volts, you have to lower the amps. It'll work until it can't provide enough current for the device that it's powering. The form factor is the tricky part, because you need to fit a boost coil and a capacitor in there somehow, and they might have to custom-wind the coil to make it fit, making it more costly to manufacture than it would be with off-the-shelf parts.
It would also have to know when the device is turned off. I think the Joule Thief design puts its power switch before the boost converter. You can't do that when wrapped around a single cell.
Another "too good too be true" is if you have a "pipe"-style battery compartment and the batteries leak, it could be harder to extract them. Tray-style battery compartments should be no problem.
But if they really work like they ought to work, I want some. Even if it's only a 2x lifetime, I want to use them in an IR remote control. One big problem with IR remotes is as the batteries get weaker, contact resistance becomes a problem. You can make batteries last longer by rotating them in place a little, which I guess cleans the contacts a tiny bit. Just boosting the voltage should help things right there.
Really! You can't even buy a good audiophile volume knob for less than $500!
But they sure can't be beat... sss.
GPL covers the rights to use and distribute code. I was not aware that it also included the right to use of trademarks. (Assuming GIMP was even properly trademarked.) See also "Iceweasel".
What's really depressing is what that intelligence in an artificial form will actually be.
Why do they need to, now that they've found a finger long enough to push the button again?
That's nothing, I can show you how to switch careers from a sales job in big box retail to billionaire playboy super-spy in just five years!
And nobody has yet mentioned John Fogerty? Slashdot, I am disappoint.
And a fish right in the middle of it all to remind everybody that this is an OPEN FLOOR PLAN DAMMIT!
...Or, they will (rightly) conclude that there is no intelligent life worth exploiting on this planet, and that is is therfore ok to destroy the planet to make room for an interstellar bypass.
FTFY.
They're waiting for reboot because it froze the system completely. TFA says that the manufacturer of their "avionics board" had fixed this bug but it wasn't in the one that went up. So most likely it was a driver bug. A crash or lock-up in kernel space is a lot more problematic than just filling up a filesystem. And apparently they had scheduled an upload of the fix, but the satellite crashed right before the comms window. So now instead of a solar sail, they have a solar brick.
But what about that movie?
Oh, but that's the best part. There apparently is a watchdog, but it only trips after four or five weeks by (presumably unchanged) default, and it's completely independent (rather than being reset regularly by a signal from a properly-operating system). This for a mission that wasn't even supposed to last two weeks. The good news is that the orbit could last for as long as six months with the sail un-deployed.