What bullshit about not flying drones near people or airports?
The rules have been there for years for a reason.
A drone on the head will complete make a mess of your face, blades spinning or not. And that can happen whether its in your control, just failed or is going loopy because of a faulty component or low battery. These things can get up to 30mph or more horizontally, what do you think they can do in a crap operator's hands in a park full of kids?
A drone hitting a light aircraft coming into land can easily damage a propeller or damage a wing worth tens of thousands, not to mention interfere with control surfaces. Factor out to helicopters and you can bring the aircraft down. They only fly that low near airports and airstrips, otherwise you're way out of their danger zone anyway.
A drone hovering over your back yard and peering into your private dwelling with it's HD camera is likely to cause you offence, no?
A drone hitting a pylon or telephone line can bring down comms or power for a town.
Don't fly these things near people, houses, or airports. Don't take your eyes off it as you're then not in control.
Cannot stream console games (without significant lag).
Nice toy, but it's not proper VR.
Don't get me wrong, our office spent a day with the simplest of Cardboard setups going "Wow" around the room and enticing others to join in.
But VR has to have games, and games have to have serious hardware. Anything based on a phone or streaming isn't going to cut it, except with grandma (who is a significant customer, the Wii proved that, but isn't the primary market).
It's also cost of a smartphone + cost of a Gear = majority of the cost of a Vive for the most part.
I agree. VR is the "next big thing". That doesn't mean it will stay around permanently afterwards but it stands a good chance this time round (after the 80's VRML debacle which was basically a large, expensive flop).
But the kit is still too expensive. And I was hoping the new Nintendo console came with VR at least as an option at launch. And the smartphone / Google Cardboard thing is cool, but it's not really VR.
You need HTC Vive's level of hardware in the couple-of-hundred price range to make it work properly.
I wouldn't pay $24.95 for a solitaire app if it wasn't even my money.
That kind of game is freebie territory unless they put a lot of extraneous effort in. Compare and contrast to, say the Hoyle's Card Game series (crap, but has hundreds of card games) or things like Dead Man's Draw (not solitaire, but is just a card game).
Fancy card backs or not, a computer card game is a dollar item nowadays, and has been since the days of the ZX Spectrum.
"To celebrate our World Wide launch, we are giving our players FREE PREMIUM for one month! * NO ADS! GAME BOOSTS! DOUBLE COINS for ALL DAILY CHALLENGES!"
Yep. Microsoft is now Yet Another Ad-support App Outfit.
Well done, MS. From market monopoly to fake-coin social media in a matter of years.
To do that, it would have to do AC->DC conversion and push 600A-ish to the battery at something just over the battery voltage, though.
You're still talking about huge, dangerous current, it just wouldn't be exposed to the wall-circuit.
And, an everyday analog for that sort of current? You're looking at things like welding stations. Which can melt solid metal. Or car batteries, that can turn over an 1 tonne engine that you wouldn't be able to, faster than you can ever hope to move it by yourself.
Just about every device you have contains a Wheatstone bridge and a transformer or other power circuitry to come down to 3, 5, 9, 12v or whatever. The kinds of size that fit into a plug itself, most of the time.
110V or 240V. Large or small. Powerful or not. Pretty much everything has that kind of voltage conversion going on already.
Sure, you won't find one in your mobile phone just yet, but that's no different - batteries are often 3.7V and then pushed up to 5V for USB etc. and even laptops push their 19V higher for screen displays in even the cheapest of devices.
The question is not how do you convert the voltage, but how big is the battery already, how much power is in it, and what kind of current can it pump out. Past that, voltage is really at the bottom of the list of things to worry about.
Literally, until it's available in the shops, why would you care, bother or have any interest except if you were a chemist or similar.
So many battery advances have come and gone and either a) never been available or b) knocked out of the market so quickly by a superior competitor, that I gave up long ago.
Make one. Build it into a standard size / voltage cell. Sell it on Amazon or similar. Then you can worry about it. Until then, it's all pipe-dream stuff that I can neither purchase, use, or spent time worrying about.
Churches make record amounts of profit. De Beers makes record amounts of profit. Microsoft made records amounts of profit before they were sued for anti-monopoly practices. Perfume manufacturers make record amounts of profit. I'm sure Dr Dre makes record amounts of profit from his Beats.
It doesn't follow that they offer a superior product to their competitors. What it tells you is they are deliberately over-priced and under-delivered. And what you've bought into is snake-oil.
In terms of VALUE for money, you've deliberately picked the worst, in effect. For show, for credentials, for a designer brand, but not for a superior product.
Millions of people give the church money enough for them to have multiple numbered Swiss bank accounts to hold it all in, to own an entire city, and to own vast portions of the ancient buildings in most of Europe. Their "customers" being happy with that doesn't mean it's the sensible thing, or that they are the best, or that they even provide a better product.
Similarly, it doesn't mean that De Beers diamonds are "better" than synthetic. In fact, probably much worse, if you have any kind of moral conscience.
Profit is a perfect indicator of how much you are OVERPAYING for what you've bought, that's all. Whether people want that or not is a nonsense to do with trends, image and designer brands. Demand influencing price is entirely different to the consumer getting a fair deal.
You DO NOT want the company you are buying things from to make record profits.
It means that they are taking a higher percentage of your money than any of their competitors.
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple), or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple), or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple).
But, like walking through Las Vegas... all that show and money to blow on things comes from one source... people like you paying over the odds for their products.
At $2.50 a gallon (seems to be current US price?), 300 gallons a day costs $750.
Which means that THE BATTERY for that system that runs for 3 days only without solar would cost the equivalent of 10 years of diesel.
Sure, there's a lot of losses, shipping, conversion, other equipment on the diesel side, but there's also a lot of solar etc. required on the Tesla side that's unaccounted for above. And it would take 10 years to break even just on the battery storage alone, let alone the solar + battery.
Sure, it's not linked to oil prices, but it's still only just verging on "viable" assuming nothing ever goes wrong. Same as every "green" project I've ever done the numbers for.
Not ashamed of anything I do professionally, as if I'm made to do something I don't like, I air my objections and go full "I told you so" if it fails, and make sure the responsibility lies in the direction of the people who overruled me.
Anything more shameful, I wouldn't be doing it. The people who code malicious junk just because their company wants it? Those people might well have something to be ashamed of. Even if they "moved on soon after" or whatever. You should have just not done it if you were that close to leaving anyway.
There's a line - for instance if you work at a firm that makes DRM for a living, and you have some not-unreasonable DRM, I see that as okay. There are uses and nobody is being forced to use your product over any other.
If you work at a software firm that sucks in that DRM product, I see that as more dubious. And if you work at either at are installing overreaching DRM into your software, then I see that as very dubious.
But once you get into life-critical systems, you're not just a coder, and anyone who employs, utilises or fails to hold such coders to the relevant standards (by specifying, testing, etc.) is inexcusable. The VW is an example - you have pumped pollution into the air deliberately bypassing air quality standards, in order to sell a few more units. You knew you were doing it, it was quite obvious what you were doing, why you were doing it (your engines are shit and can't compete with others that didn't need to cheat), and that you'd GONE OUT OF YOUR WAY to do it. No excuse. And the coders there must have known what they were being asked to do (nobody "accidentally" codes a routine to detect the official testing procedure) and should take responsibility for that.
And if you get sacked for failing to code something that's illegal or hugely damaging, well then you REALLY don't want to be working for that company in the first place. First, you can then sue them into oblivion and cause them a lot more problems than they can cause you, and secondly they're scumbags who will drop you in it later if you don't do it to them first.
Apathy, ignorance and laziness are the biggest problems, though. "Do we need to test this? Nah." has probably led to more deaths in more industries than anything else.
But personally? My conscience is clear, not just because I can gloss over things I've done. I've either objected, vocally, and then held people responsible when it's gone wrong, or I've refused or got out of there.
I had stood, in front of the top-boss, and point-blank refused to perform an action they were demanding. It was illegal. It was unnecessary. And I refused to do it. To their face. Despite their threats. It's just not going to happen. I'm sure someone else would do it for them, but that's tricky after I reported them for doing exactly that, quite publicly, and documented my response to them.
Now try and deny you weren't trying to get me to do something I shouldn't, or that the next guy "didn't know" that he shouldn't. Because for damn sure I made sure he would, and stopped you continuing down that line of thought to make him responsible for it too. I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't been the most petty and worthless course of action ever anyway, at least then you could see who would have profited from my doing it.
But there is no way I'm going to break the law for you, break the rules for you, or - if you act like that - do you any favours that might help your cause.
I am surprisingly alone in such things, I've watched any number of people keep their head down, stay quiet, and just do things they should never have been doing. They wouldn't ever back you up (except in the over-a-cup-of-tea kind of way), take a stance, or fight your corner. I know that much. But I'm always shocked at quite how many people that applies to.
Me? Just try it. There's a line, a bit of flexibility and freedom where you can say "Look, does it matter, are we hurting anyone at all, is it important, etc."
Sorry Dyn. I was a customer of yours. But everything that Oracle touches is to eliminate competition and kill the products that existed.
It was nice knowing you.
Anyone know of a way to set up your own Dyn-compatible dynamic DNS system? I have a remote server, and a way to change the dyndns.org URLs in use but I think the protocol is undocumented or certain without available SERVER software (client software is another matter).
And most of the things I want to change that use it are hardcoded into the Dyn protocols, so I can't just "use something else", even if the devices allow the end-address to be changed to my own server.
Which means not just three around the equator, but three around orbiting on several planes through the center of Earth.
And three is the minimum VISIBLE to get some vague idea of location but if you want the 1cm accuracy they are offering (yep, encrypted service is down to 1cm), then you need more than the bare minimum, especially if you're going to be under a cloud, or in a city with tall buildings. So that's at least 4 on each plane you cut through the Earth, and probably 4-5 planes to ensure globality.
Fact is, it's not your car satnav that's paying for the satellite constellation - at best it pays a minimal licence on the technology.
It's military, shipping, search-and-rescue and even emergency-message-relay (read: every airline on the planet) and other commercial uses that pay for it, and those don't have upper limits on their budgets and they are also willing to pay for a superior system.
And Galileo is quite superior to anything in the GPS constellation.
Otherwise, to the average person, Galileo is just another GPS satellite in the sky.
Yeah, because I don't specify networks for a living, or tie in leased lines, or pay for broadband.
Shipping, aviation, etc. all have satellite data where necessary.
We're not talking about those areas - at best their things get cheaper, at worst they make no changes to what they are using.
We're talking about 20,000 people (on average, likely more), operating on a limited bandwidth in a licensed channel, simultaneously, with something they expect comparable to a basic broadband connection (Let's say 10Mbps, but that's wishful thinking even in first-world countries in many places).
Ku band starts at something like 15GHz, Ka band is up to 40GHz. The useful data in a 15-40GHz frequency, with timeslicing, etc. shared over a significant number of people like this is not anywhere on this kind of order of magnitude.
Thus the cost has to be dirt cheap, or the service severely limited, or even both.
It will also be highly asymmetric, have latency (LEO is minimum 20ms, but this is between LEO and current data satellites which easily can add up to 800-1000ms of latency each trip), and require specialist customer equipment. It's not going to be in the $5 bargain bin. It also blows up a number of use cases from telephony to video streaming and ends up offering only the bare basics of service - already available via well-established satellite data providers who aren't blowing up rockets on launchpads with no idea what happened.
Add to that the paradox - if it's cheap and readily available and better or even comparable to landline broadband, for instance, then it will quickly overwhelm the capacity. If it's not, nobody will end up using it in preference except where options are severely limited (read: current situation for satellite data).
4000 satellites is A LOT. Galileo, GLONASS and GPS constellations number only a hundred or so satellites combined. Viasat - one of the largest and oldest the arena of satellite data - has THREE satellites. It's has 650,000 customers and has been doing NOTHING else since the 80's.
90m customers? It's a pipedream. Please do prove me wrong. And then, when Sir Ledow of Slashdot is right, consider what those "experts" working at these companies are telling you, which is blown out or proven correct by some random Internet troll...
When SpaceX get past the numbers for Viasat, I'll consider it "feasible". Until then, it's literally just Elon Musk mouthing off about how he'll take over another industry again.
Compared to a $20 a month ISP connection across most of the first world, and no access to computers - let alone Internet - across most of the third-world?
Er... I think they're going to struggle.
And I think a bigger point is that then share's one satellite across - at least - 20,000+ people. Good luck managing the bandwidth on that one...
Because full-speed M2 -> PCI-e cards are literally in the bargain bin price range as they pretty much just join the pins to the bus.
M2 works in laptops, other devices, and as a PCI-e with a cheap $10 adaptor. Hell, I've even seen some short M2 cards that fit inside a 2.5" drive adaptor to connect to SATA.
Technically, I'm at least two of the above. It all matters about whether you bother to fill out the survey and - if you have once on Windows - would you bother again on Linux?
But 1/3rd of my 1000 game Steam library runs on Linux. It's not a negligible percentage.
And, same as last year, make one Linux / Steambox exclusive title (even for a month) and those numbers could flip rapidly.
Gosh, I wonder which franchise the owners of Steam could release a long-awaited, hotly-anticipated, cross-platform titles for, with VR-capabilities?
Slashdot Mirror
What bullshit about not flying drones near people or airports?
The rules have been there for years for a reason.
A drone on the head will complete make a mess of your face, blades spinning or not. And that can happen whether its in your control, just failed or is going loopy because of a faulty component or low battery. These things can get up to 30mph or more horizontally, what do you think they can do in a crap operator's hands in a park full of kids?
A drone hitting a light aircraft coming into land can easily damage a propeller or damage a wing worth tens of thousands, not to mention interfere with control surfaces. Factor out to helicopters and you can bring the aircraft down. They only fly that low near airports and airstrips, otherwise you're way out of their danger zone anyway.
A drone hovering over your back yard and peering into your private dwelling with it's HD camera is likely to cause you offence, no?
A drone hitting a pylon or telephone line can bring down comms or power for a town.
Don't fly these things near people, houses, or airports. Don't take your eyes off it as you're then not in control.
How hard is that?
How to make next year's census even more expensive, no matter who supplies it.
Lesson 1.
AR is a massive privacy invasion waiting to happen.
VR isn't.
AR requires cameras in public places.
VR doesn't.
AR pretends you can navigate in the real world while being distracted by a game.
VR doesn't.
AR can be spoiled / interrupted by other people's pissing about in front of the idiot with the headset.
VR cannot.
AR requires high-end computer vision, equipment and processing to operate properly.
VR doesn't.
Cannot run PC games.
Cannot stream console games (without significant lag).
Nice toy, but it's not proper VR.
Don't get me wrong, our office spent a day with the simplest of Cardboard setups going "Wow" around the room and enticing others to join in.
But VR has to have games, and games have to have serious hardware. Anything based on a phone or streaming isn't going to cut it, except with grandma (who is a significant customer, the Wii proved that, but isn't the primary market).
It's also cost of a smartphone + cost of a Gear = majority of the cost of a Vive for the most part.
I agree. VR is the "next big thing". That doesn't mean it will stay around permanently afterwards but it stands a good chance this time round (after the 80's VRML debacle which was basically a large, expensive flop).
But the kit is still too expensive.
And I was hoping the new Nintendo console came with VR at least as an option at launch.
And the smartphone / Google Cardboard thing is cool, but it's not really VR.
You need HTC Vive's level of hardware in the couple-of-hundred price range to make it work properly.
I wouldn't pay $24.95 for a solitaire app if it wasn't even my money.
That kind of game is freebie territory unless they put a lot of extraneous effort in. Compare and contrast to, say the Hoyle's Card Game series (crap, but has hundreds of card games) or things like Dead Man's Draw (not solitaire, but is just a card game).
Fancy card backs or not, a computer card game is a dollar item nowadays, and has been since the days of the ZX Spectrum.
"To celebrate our World Wide launch, we are giving our players FREE PREMIUM for one month!
* NO ADS! GAME BOOSTS! DOUBLE COINS for ALL DAILY CHALLENGES!"
Yep. Microsoft is now Yet Another Ad-support App Outfit.
Well done, MS. From market monopoly to fake-coin social media in a matter of years.
To do that, it would have to do AC->DC conversion and push 600A-ish to the battery at something just over the battery voltage, though.
You're still talking about huge, dangerous current, it just wouldn't be exposed to the wall-circuit.
And, an everyday analog for that sort of current? You're looking at things like welding stations. Which can melt solid metal. Or car batteries, that can turn over an 1 tonne engine that you wouldn't be able to, faster than you can ever hope to move it by yourself.
It's still a concern.
Just about every device you have contains a Wheatstone bridge and a transformer or other power circuitry to come down to 3, 5, 9, 12v or whatever. The kinds of size that fit into a plug itself, most of the time.
110V or 240V. Large or small. Powerful or not. Pretty much everything has that kind of voltage conversion going on already.
Sure, you won't find one in your mobile phone just yet, but that's no different - batteries are often 3.7V and then pushed up to 5V for USB etc. and even laptops push their 19V higher for screen displays in even the cheapest of devices.
The question is not how do you convert the voltage, but how big is the battery already, how much power is in it, and what kind of current can it pump out. Past that, voltage is really at the bottom of the list of things to worry about.
Literally, until it's available in the shops, why would you care, bother or have any interest except if you were a chemist or similar.
So many battery advances have come and gone and either a) never been available or b) knocked out of the market so quickly by a superior competitor, that I gave up long ago.
Make one. Build it into a standard size / voltage cell. Sell it on Amazon or similar. Then you can worry about it. Until then, it's all pipe-dream stuff that I can neither purchase, use, or spent time worrying about.
Churches make record amounts of profit.
De Beers makes record amounts of profit.
Microsoft made records amounts of profit before they were sued for anti-monopoly practices.
Perfume manufacturers make record amounts of profit.
I'm sure Dr Dre makes record amounts of profit from his Beats.
It doesn't follow that they offer a superior product to their competitors. What it tells you is they are deliberately over-priced and under-delivered. And what you've bought into is snake-oil.
In terms of VALUE for money, you've deliberately picked the worst, in effect. For show, for credentials, for a designer brand, but not for a superior product.
Millions of people give the church money enough for them to have multiple numbered Swiss bank accounts to hold it all in, to own an entire city, and to own vast portions of the ancient buildings in most of Europe. Their "customers" being happy with that doesn't mean it's the sensible thing, or that they are the best, or that they even provide a better product.
Similarly, it doesn't mean that De Beers diamonds are "better" than synthetic. In fact, probably much worse, if you have any kind of moral conscience.
Profit is a perfect indicator of how much you are OVERPAYING for what you've bought, that's all. Whether people want that or not is a nonsense to do with trends, image and designer brands. Demand influencing price is entirely different to the consumer getting a fair deal.
You DO NOT want the company you are buying things from to make record profits.
It means that they are taking a higher percentage of your money than any of their competitors.
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple), or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple), or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple).
But, like walking through Las Vegas... all that show and money to blow on things comes from one source... people like you paying over the odds for their products.
At $2.50 a gallon (seems to be current US price?), 300 gallons a day costs $750.
Which means that THE BATTERY for that system that runs for 3 days only without solar would cost the equivalent of 10 years of diesel.
Sure, there's a lot of losses, shipping, conversion, other equipment on the diesel side, but there's also a lot of solar etc. required on the Tesla side that's unaccounted for above. And it would take 10 years to break even just on the battery storage alone, let alone the solar + battery.
Sure, it's not linked to oil prices, but it's still only just verging on "viable" assuming nothing ever goes wrong. Same as every "green" project I've ever done the numbers for.
https://www.tesla.com/powerpac...
It tops if you do certain things but at 2000 KW for 3 hours (should be 6 MW hours of total storage?):
Roughly $2,751,100.
"We don't know who struck first, but we know it was us that scorched the skies..."
Not ashamed of anything I do professionally, as if I'm made to do something I don't like, I air my objections and go full "I told you so" if it fails, and make sure the responsibility lies in the direction of the people who overruled me.
Anything more shameful, I wouldn't be doing it. The people who code malicious junk just because their company wants it? Those people might well have something to be ashamed of. Even if they "moved on soon after" or whatever. You should have just not done it if you were that close to leaving anyway.
There's a line - for instance if you work at a firm that makes DRM for a living, and you have some not-unreasonable DRM, I see that as okay. There are uses and nobody is being forced to use your product over any other.
If you work at a software firm that sucks in that DRM product, I see that as more dubious. And if you work at either at are installing overreaching DRM into your software, then I see that as very dubious.
But once you get into life-critical systems, you're not just a coder, and anyone who employs, utilises or fails to hold such coders to the relevant standards (by specifying, testing, etc.) is inexcusable. The VW is an example - you have pumped pollution into the air deliberately bypassing air quality standards, in order to sell a few more units. You knew you were doing it, it was quite obvious what you were doing, why you were doing it (your engines are shit and can't compete with others that didn't need to cheat), and that you'd GONE OUT OF YOUR WAY to do it. No excuse. And the coders there must have known what they were being asked to do (nobody "accidentally" codes a routine to detect the official testing procedure) and should take responsibility for that.
And if you get sacked for failing to code something that's illegal or hugely damaging, well then you REALLY don't want to be working for that company in the first place. First, you can then sue them into oblivion and cause them a lot more problems than they can cause you, and secondly they're scumbags who will drop you in it later if you don't do it to them first.
Apathy, ignorance and laziness are the biggest problems, though. "Do we need to test this? Nah." has probably led to more deaths in more industries than anything else.
But personally? My conscience is clear, not just because I can gloss over things I've done. I've either objected, vocally, and then held people responsible when it's gone wrong, or I've refused or got out of there.
I had stood, in front of the top-boss, and point-blank refused to perform an action they were demanding. It was illegal. It was unnecessary. And I refused to do it. To their face. Despite their threats. It's just not going to happen. I'm sure someone else would do it for them, but that's tricky after I reported them for doing exactly that, quite publicly, and documented my response to them.
Now try and deny you weren't trying to get me to do something I shouldn't, or that the next guy "didn't know" that he shouldn't. Because for damn sure I made sure he would, and stopped you continuing down that line of thought to make him responsible for it too. I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't been the most petty and worthless course of action ever anyway, at least then you could see who would have profited from my doing it.
But there is no way I'm going to break the law for you, break the rules for you, or - if you act like that - do you any favours that might help your cause.
I am surprisingly alone in such things, I've watched any number of people keep their head down, stay quiet, and just do things they should never have been doing. They wouldn't ever back you up (except in the over-a-cup-of-tea kind of way), take a stance, or fight your corner. I know that much. But I'm always shocked at quite how many people that applies to.
Me? Just try it. There's a line, a bit of flexibility and freedom where you can say "Look, does it matter, are we hurting anyone at all, is it important, etc."
Ba-da dum-dum-dum. Another one bites the dust...
Sorry Dyn. I was a customer of yours. But everything that Oracle touches is to eliminate competition and kill the products that existed.
It was nice knowing you.
Anyone know of a way to set up your own Dyn-compatible dynamic DNS system? I have a remote server, and a way to change the dyndns.org URLs in use but I think the protocol is undocumented or certain without available SERVER software (client software is another matter).
And most of the things I want to change that use it are hardcoded into the Dyn protocols, so I can't just "use something else", even if the devices allow the end-address to be changed to my own server.
Welcome to about 10 years ago:
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/h...
(That's the official UK health service site, by the way... the free NHS service open to all...)
Have you started warning about tarot reader, psychics and other frauds yet? We've been doing that for years too.
Because "global" also includes the poles.
Which means not just three around the equator, but three around orbiting on several planes through the center of Earth.
And three is the minimum VISIBLE to get some vague idea of location but if you want the 1cm accuracy they are offering (yep, encrypted service is down to 1cm), then you need more than the bare minimum, especially if you're going to be under a cloud, or in a city with tall buildings. So that's at least 4 on each plane you cut through the Earth, and probably 4-5 planes to ensure globality.
Plus spares. Plus more for better accuracy.
Galileo base consumer functionality is free too.
Like GPS and GLONASS.
Fact is, it's not your car satnav that's paying for the satellite constellation - at best it pays a minimal licence on the technology.
It's military, shipping, search-and-rescue and even emergency-message-relay (read: every airline on the planet) and other commercial uses that pay for it, and those don't have upper limits on their budgets and they are also willing to pay for a superior system.
And Galileo is quite superior to anything in the GPS constellation.
Otherwise, to the average person, Galileo is just another GPS satellite in the sky.
Yeah, because I don't specify networks for a living, or tie in leased lines, or pay for broadband.
Shipping, aviation, etc. all have satellite data where necessary.
We're not talking about those areas - at best their things get cheaper, at worst they make no changes to what they are using.
We're talking about 20,000 people (on average, likely more), operating on a limited bandwidth in a licensed channel, simultaneously, with something they expect comparable to a basic broadband connection (Let's say 10Mbps, but that's wishful thinking even in first-world countries in many places).
Ku band starts at something like 15GHz, Ka band is up to 40GHz. The useful data in a 15-40GHz frequency, with timeslicing, etc. shared over a significant number of people like this is not anywhere on this kind of order of magnitude.
Thus the cost has to be dirt cheap, or the service severely limited, or even both.
It will also be highly asymmetric, have latency (LEO is minimum 20ms, but this is between LEO and current data satellites which easily can add up to 800-1000ms of latency each trip), and require specialist customer equipment. It's not going to be in the $5 bargain bin. It also blows up a number of use cases from telephony to video streaming and ends up offering only the bare basics of service - already available via well-established satellite data providers who aren't blowing up rockets on launchpads with no idea what happened.
Add to that the paradox - if it's cheap and readily available and better or even comparable to landline broadband, for instance, then it will quickly overwhelm the capacity. If it's not, nobody will end up using it in preference except where options are severely limited (read: current situation for satellite data).
4000 satellites is A LOT. Galileo, GLONASS and GPS constellations number only a hundred or so satellites combined. Viasat - one of the largest and oldest the arena of satellite data - has THREE satellites. It's has 650,000 customers and has been doing NOTHING else since the 80's.
90m customers? It's a pipedream. Please do prove me wrong. And then, when Sir Ledow of Slashdot is right, consider what those "experts" working at these companies are telling you, which is blown out or proven correct by some random Internet troll...
When SpaceX get past the numbers for Viasat, I'll consider it "feasible". Until then, it's literally just Elon Musk mouthing off about how he'll take over another industry again.
Compared to a $20 a month ISP connection across most of the first world, and no access to computers - let alone Internet - across most of the third-world?
Er... I think they're going to struggle.
And I think a bigger point is that then share's one satellite across - at least - 20,000+ people. Good luck managing the bandwidth on that one...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarT...
https://www.scan.co.uk/product...
Two seconds of Googling and I solved all your problems.
P.S. Literally the first hits on Google - many alternate, better quality, cheaper, etc. products exist.
Because full-speed M2 -> PCI-e cards are literally in the bargain bin price range as they pretty much just join the pins to the bus.
M2 works in laptops, other devices, and as a PCI-e with a cheap $10 adaptor. Hell, I've even seen some short M2 cards that fit inside a 2.5" drive adaptor to connect to SATA.
That's why.
Technically, I'm at least two of the above. It all matters about whether you bother to fill out the survey and - if you have once on Windows - would you bother again on Linux?
But 1/3rd of my 1000 game Steam library runs on Linux. It's not a negligible percentage.
And, same as last year, make one Linux / Steambox exclusive title (even for a month) and those numbers could flip rapidly.
Gosh, I wonder which franchise the owners of Steam could release a long-awaited, hotly-anticipated, cross-platform titles for, with VR-capabilities?