SpaceX wants to use phased array antennas (so no moving parts) and while these ARE expensive I guess this will change quickly as soon as you start to build them in the millions... They're actually quite suitable for cheap mass production.
And this is NOT necessarily about individual users to buy their own satellite link. It is mainly meant to replace running cables all over the place. Supplying an LTE tower with data is a much more likely scenario for that than you putting such a beast on your roof. And for that it won't be expensive compared to running cables or radio links to the middle of nowhere.
Or to use a car analogy: Many people seem to think that this is like replacing cars with flying cars. But it isn't. It is about replacing trains and railways with airplanes and airports. The railway barons hate that idea of course.
1200 km is not really Low Earth Orbit anymore. There is very little drag there, this is stable for hundreds or thousands of years.
SpaceX wants to lower the orbit of satellites that are near the end of their service life, so that they decay within a year or so, but failing satellites will stay up there for a very long time. With such huge numbers of satellites they WILL have duds and they WILL have to care for this one way or another.
SpaceX doesn't want to become an ISP. In China they would just sell their service to local ISPs to replace cables with satellite links. Think airplanes against railways. You can sell airplanes without having to run them and it's still cheaper for the customer than putting tracks down to every town.
It's actually a quite good idea and the fact that many people out there don't understand it doesn't matter because they won't have to buy it anyway (others will buy it and resell the service to them in much easier to understand terms).
Iridium was/is about satellite phones. This isn't. You will need a rather big phased array antenna and this is not a mobile setup.
It's about replacing the last mile (or the last 10/100/1000 miles) with satellite links. It's about getting WiFi/LTE backhaul everywhere with just a small device to buy and set up instead of digging in cables or whatever.
It's like the airplane eating railways and the airplane ate railways. Cables and everything you have set up on the ground is expensive because it's different everywhere and you have to buy real estate and do research and actually get your hands dirty. Setting up a satellite terminal is convenient and easy and it's just the same everywhere.
I mean, this does not mean that it will work out as a business, but the logic behind it is quite convincing.
You can try to define "Personal Computer" this way, but historically the name "Personal Computer" just meant a computer that you use alone, instead of being one user of a computer at the university or the company you're working for. Which then was not your PERSONAL computer. That was the major reason for calling a computer you use as the only user (and that sits on or under YOUR desk) a Personal Computer.
ChromeBooks are mostly Terminals, even if you own them the applications run elsewhere. Surely not dumb terminals, but still terminals, just personal terminals that you can own and carry with you instead of going to where there are.
But people easily forget that once computers were something you had to go to to use them as one user among others. You didn't own them and you could not carry them home (or to your office) and use them just for yourself. Both the "Personal Computer" and the "Home Computer" changed that in this way ChromeBooks are a kind of Personal Computer.
Of course then the IBM Personal Computer (PC) became the standard Personal Computer and then what once was a description became nothing but a name ("PC") for a certain kind of computer (a computer with an Intel CPU running Windows or Linux that is and has to be fully cared for by the sole user). Since then people think a "PC" is exactly that. And they're somewhat right, because meanings of words change over time.
An iPad is a "Personal Computer" (you can carry it home and use it as the sole user), but it certainly is not a "PC". A ChromeBook also is a Personal Computer but maybe not what people came to think of a PC (some people not even call a laptop a "PC", they call only desktop PCs "PC").
It's murky, but quite easy to get to the bottom of. Fighting about "is a ChromeBook a PC?" is pointless though when everyone uses a different definition of what the name or description of a "PC" or a "Personal Computer" is supposed to mean. Most people who fight over words only do that because this is often the first time they even thought about what the word means at all and then they're already invested in having to win an argument they started without even knowing what the word they are fighting about actually means and where it came from.
(And actually a "computer" once was something you used to compute things with. The name "computer" was a descriptive name like "screwdriver". Even earlier "computer" was a job description before robots started to do the job... But just as "PC" it became a name instead over time and is not a description anymore because most people don't use them to compute anything. As a name it immediately loses any sense as soon as you start to wring any meaning from it because it has long stopped to be used in the form of a description for what you do with that thing. So don't fight about names, it's useless. It's like asking someone to mill your wheat just because his name happens to be "Frank Miller". At some point in the past one of his forebears certainly did that, but now it has just become a name attached to him through inheritance and is not a description of what he does anymore. Maybe he's a butcher and then people use the name "Miller" as an argument on/. to claim that meat actually is a cereal...)
It's not a bad definition. The Personal Computer was named as opposed to non-personal computers you used as one users among others. As ChromeBooks are hardly more than terminals to a server (with software running out there at Google) it's pretty much similar to working at a terminal connected to a server back then.
It's just that you own the terminal and can use it elsewhere. "Personal Terminal" would be a better name than "Personal Computer" here.
(But of course you CAN run local software on ChromeBooks if you really want to.)
we will sit in the basement of a burned down house gnawing on the rotten leg of a dog, while wars and civil wars are ravaging the world. At least if things continue the way they do now.
This is about orbital satellite launches. I'm wondering if people have stopped reading at least the article they're commenting on?
BO is developing an orbital heavy lift launcher and they have sold their first payload. They're also developing the engines for ULA's new lancher with first full-scale tests later this year.
Blue Origin are slower than SpaceX, but they're not just toying around.
It's not reusable and much too expensive to be flown more often than a few times. It never was anything than a gift to the companies that built the shuttle, so they could continue to supply tanks and solid boosters and hideously expensive engines. The point of it never was getting anything into space, but to keep the same old rivers of money flowing.
Going to Mars from the moon would NOT be simpler and cheaper. To go to the Moon you have to land things there, which is very expensive in terms of delta-V since there is no atmosphere to brake. Then you have to launch out of this gravity well again. And in the meantime you have to have everything you need on the Moon launched from Earth and land on the Moon.
That requires the design of bits that are dockable, which greatly restricts your design freedom, as well as add extra mass for the docking ports.
Not only the docking ports. Every piece would need to be a fully independent spacecraft to rendezvous with the other bits, with propulsion, RCS, avionics, communication, antennas, power and thermal management, RADAR or LIDAR...
They only need fins because they have to steer a lot due to the inconsistencies of the atmosphere (wind and unknown pressure details). On the moon you need no fins, you can just aim a precise trajectory all the way down to the landing point.
Well, I think there is still some "action" going on in the rings. Even if everything in there would be totally synchronized with no relative motion (especially then) you would get mass clumps of particles slowly being drawn toward each other by their own mass/gravity. Basically the same thing that led to planets forming from rings of particles in the early solar system. But then this would be extremely interesting to research, because it would be the nearest thing to look at for such processes.
It would be wise to use a somewhat rugged probe with nuclear power (no fragile solar panels) with some shielding, retractable instruments and an ion drive... Anyway, there are lots of cool things to explore left in the solar system and the closer you look the more interesting things you find!
I would love to see a probe going into an orbit that is synchronized to the rings. And then slowly dives into the rings, between all the small and bigger particles that make up the ring. Must be like a somewhat dense cloud of debris moving along in parallel without much motion between them.
This was exactly how this worked up until now. You got a semi-accurate time of battery life. But the remaining time depends on what you do and the dynamic range between "hardly any load at all" and "full throttle" gets bigger and bigger. Which makes the time more and more pointless: If you just sit there and type you get a very long remaining time which will shrink down to a fraction of that as soon as you start to do more demanding things.
This is true for all modern computers with some decent power management, they all only sip power if the load is small and gulp it down as soon as you do something harder, making the remaining time totally unreliable.
The US totally lacks the industrial infrastructure for that. OK, you could import all components and build a robot factory assembling iPhone from these, but where's the difference then?
All of this became how it is because people buy cheaper goods over more expensive ones, just as companies make their products where it's cheaper to make them. This goes all the way back to people trading foodstuff against other things, because it was cheaper this way than to make them themselves. Global trade has been used by some people to enrich themselves, but without that there would have been less competition and the rich would be even richer. Look at your ISP. Much competition? No. Good prices? No. Start a trade war and everything will go this way. You will have one or two companies making smartphones and they will rake in money while screwing you over. But of course, try it. I'm all for it. Better try and fail than always talking and never doing. Some of you people are so angry that I'm all for handing the wheel to you.
And a cup of coffee costs less than $0.1 to make. Don't pay more or you're being gouged.
Also, if you're serious don't take more money for your work than what you need not to starve and freeze to death until the next day. Everything above this is evil profit. So give if back to your employer. Or even better: Start a company that makes and sells something like the iPhone with no or little profits, even if you could sell it for more.
Things don't work this way. Everybody sells what he has for the best price he can get for it. It's called a "market". It sucks, but all other ways to deal with this that have been tried suck even more. I agree that this is sad, but it is how it is. And you don't need to buy an iPhone. You can buy one, if you want to though. It's just an option and freedom is not about having no options.
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SpaceX wants to use phased array antennas (so no moving parts) and while these ARE expensive I guess this will change quickly as soon as you start to build them in the millions... They're actually quite suitable for cheap mass production.
And this is NOT necessarily about individual users to buy their own satellite link. It is mainly meant to replace running cables all over the place. Supplying an LTE tower with data is a much more likely scenario for that than you putting such a beast on your roof. And for that it won't be expensive compared to running cables or radio links to the middle of nowhere.
Or to use a car analogy: Many people seem to think that this is like replacing cars with flying cars. But it isn't. It is about replacing trains and railways with airplanes and airports. The railway barons hate that idea of course.
1200 km is not really Low Earth Orbit anymore. There is very little drag there, this is stable for hundreds or thousands of years.
SpaceX wants to lower the orbit of satellites that are near the end of their service life, so that they decay within a year or so, but failing satellites will stay up there for a very long time. With such huge numbers of satellites they WILL have duds and they WILL have to care for this one way or another.
SpaceX doesn't want to become an ISP. In China they would just sell their service to local ISPs to replace cables with satellite links. Think airplanes against railways. You can sell airplanes without having to run them and it's still cheaper for the customer than putting tracks down to every town.
It's actually a quite good idea and the fact that many people out there don't understand it doesn't matter because they won't have to buy it anyway (others will buy it and resell the service to them in much easier to understand terms).
Iridium was/is about satellite phones. This isn't. You will need a rather big phased array antenna and this is not a mobile setup.
It's about replacing the last mile (or the last 10/100/1000 miles) with satellite links. It's about getting WiFi/LTE backhaul everywhere with just a small device to buy and set up instead of digging in cables or whatever.
It's like the airplane eating railways and the airplane ate railways. Cables and everything you have set up on the ground is expensive because it's different everywhere and you have to buy real estate and do research and actually get your hands dirty. Setting up a satellite terminal is convenient and easy and it's just the same everywhere.
I mean, this does not mean that it will work out as a business, but the logic behind it is quite convincing.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
You can try to define "Personal Computer" this way, but historically the name "Personal Computer" just meant a computer that you use alone, instead of being one user of a computer at the university or the company you're working for. Which then was not your PERSONAL computer. That was the major reason for calling a computer you use as the only user (and that sits on or under YOUR desk) a Personal Computer.
ChromeBooks are mostly Terminals, even if you own them the applications run elsewhere. Surely not dumb terminals, but still terminals, just personal terminals that you can own and carry with you instead of going to where there are.
But people easily forget that once computers were something you had to go to to use them as one user among others. You didn't own them and you could not carry them home (or to your office) and use them just for yourself. Both the "Personal Computer" and the "Home Computer" changed that in this way ChromeBooks are a kind of Personal Computer.
Of course then the IBM Personal Computer (PC) became the standard Personal Computer and then what once was a description became nothing but a name ("PC") for a certain kind of computer (a computer with an Intel CPU running Windows or Linux that is and has to be fully cared for by the sole user). Since then people think a "PC" is exactly that. And they're somewhat right, because meanings of words change over time.
An iPad is a "Personal Computer" (you can carry it home and use it as the sole user), but it certainly is not a "PC". A ChromeBook also is a Personal Computer but maybe not what people came to think of a PC (some people not even call a laptop a "PC", they call only desktop PCs "PC").
It's murky, but quite easy to get to the bottom of. Fighting about "is a ChromeBook a PC?" is pointless though when everyone uses a different definition of what the name or description of a "PC" or a "Personal Computer" is supposed to mean. Most people who fight over words only do that because this is often the first time they even thought about what the word means at all and then they're already invested in having to win an argument they started without even knowing what the word they are fighting about actually means and where it came from.
(And actually a "computer" once was something you used to compute things with. The name "computer" was a descriptive name like "screwdriver". Even earlier "computer" was a job description before robots started to do the job... But just as "PC" it became a name instead over time and is not a description anymore because most people don't use them to compute anything. As a name it immediately loses any sense as soon as you start to wring any meaning from it because it has long stopped to be used in the form of a description for what you do with that thing. So don't fight about names, it's useless. It's like asking someone to mill your wheat just because his name happens to be "Frank Miller". At some point in the past one of his forebears certainly did that, but now it has just become a name attached to him through inheritance and is not a description of what he does anymore. Maybe he's a butcher and then people use the name "Miller" as an argument on /. to claim that meat actually is a cereal...)
It's not a bad definition. The Personal Computer was named as opposed to non-personal computers you used as one users among others. As ChromeBooks are hardly more than terminals to a server (with software running out there at Google) it's pretty much similar to working at a terminal connected to a server back then.
It's just that you own the terminal and can use it elsewhere. "Personal Terminal" would be a better name than "Personal Computer" here.
(But of course you CAN run local software on ChromeBooks if you really want to.)
In a former job I worked with OS/2 and even then you'd need a very special kind of intuition to find it to be intuitive.
NASA shall go to Mars, just with less money than before without going to Mars? Or do I get this wrong?
we will sit in the basement of a burned down house gnawing on the rotten leg of a dog, while wars and civil wars are ravaging the world. At least if things continue the way they do now.
This is about orbital satellite launches. I'm wondering if people have stopped reading at least the article they're commenting on?
BO is developing an orbital heavy lift launcher and they have sold their first payload. They're also developing the engines for ULA's new lancher with first full-scale tests later this year.
Blue Origin are slower than SpaceX, but they're not just toying around.
Fuck. Replace STS with SLS in what I wrote. I'm acronym challenged sometimes.
It's not reusable and much too expensive to be flown more often than a few times. It never was anything than a gift to the companies that built the shuttle, so they could continue to supply tanks and solid boosters and hideously expensive engines. The point of it never was getting anything into space, but to keep the same old rivers of money flowing.
Going to Mars from the moon would NOT be simpler and cheaper. To go to the Moon you have to land things there, which is very expensive in terms of delta-V since there is no atmosphere to brake. Then you have to launch out of this gravity well again. And in the meantime you have to have everything you need on the Moon launched from Earth and land on the Moon.
That requires the design of bits that are dockable, which greatly restricts your design freedom, as well as add extra mass for the docking ports.
Not only the docking ports. Every piece would need to be a fully independent spacecraft to rendezvous with the other bits, with propulsion, RCS, avionics, communication, antennas, power and thermal management, RADAR or LIDAR...
They only need fins because they have to steer a lot due to the inconsistencies of the atmosphere (wind and unknown pressure details). On the moon you need no fins, you can just aim a precise trajectory all the way down to the landing point.
The white guy got only shot when he tried to go after the shooter.
Well, I think there is still some "action" going on in the rings. Even if everything in there would be totally synchronized with no relative motion (especially then) you would get mass clumps of particles slowly being drawn toward each other by their own mass/gravity. Basically the same thing that led to planets forming from rings of particles in the early solar system. But then this would be extremely interesting to research, because it would be the nearest thing to look at for such processes.
It would be wise to use a somewhat rugged probe with nuclear power (no fragile solar panels) with some shielding, retractable instruments and an ion drive... Anyway, there are lots of cool things to explore left in the solar system and the closer you look the more interesting things you find!
I would love to see a probe going into an orbit that is synchronized to the rings. And then slowly dives into the rings, between all the small and bigger particles that make up the ring. Must be like a somewhat dense cloud of debris moving along in parallel without much motion between them.
This would be actually a neat design even for more harmless (and fun) uses. Compact and sturdy in stowed configuration too.
This was exactly how this worked up until now. You got a semi-accurate time of battery life. But the remaining time depends on what you do and the dynamic range between "hardly any load at all" and "full throttle" gets bigger and bigger. Which makes the time more and more pointless: If you just sit there and type you get a very long remaining time which will shrink down to a fraction of that as soon as you start to do more demanding things.
This is true for all modern computers with some decent power management, they all only sip power if the load is small and gulp it down as soon as you do something harder, making the remaining time totally unreliable.
These metals still are much more abundant than fossile fuels.
The US totally lacks the industrial infrastructure for that. OK, you could import all components and build a robot factory assembling iPhone from these, but where's the difference then?
All of this became how it is because people buy cheaper goods over more expensive ones, just as companies make their products where it's cheaper to make them. This goes all the way back to people trading foodstuff against other things, because it was cheaper this way than to make them themselves. Global trade has been used by some people to enrich themselves, but without that there would have been less competition and the rich would be even richer. Look at your ISP. Much competition? No. Good prices? No. Start a trade war and everything will go this way. You will have one or two companies making smartphones and they will rake in money while screwing you over. But of course, try it. I'm all for it. Better try and fail than always talking and never doing. Some of you people are so angry that I'm all for handing the wheel to you.
And a cup of coffee costs less than $0.1 to make. Don't pay more or you're being gouged.
Also, if you're serious don't take more money for your work than what you need not to starve and freeze to death until the next day. Everything above this is evil profit. So give if back to your employer. Or even better: Start a company that makes and sells something like the iPhone with no or little profits, even if you could sell it for more.
Things don't work this way. Everybody sells what he has for the best price he can get for it. It's called a "market". It sucks, but all other ways to deal with this that have been tried suck even more. I agree that this is sad, but it is how it is. And you don't need to buy an iPhone. You can buy one, if you want to though. It's just an option and freedom is not about having no options.
The German word for "autopilot" is "Autopilot". Same meaning too.