LEO is 0 to 2000 kilometers, beyond which it's MEO. You're right that these things won't be de-orbiting due to drag, although it's not like failed satellites won't be in a predictable location. If it does become a problem, they could always work on a vehicle for doing cleanup.
Refueling the satellites doesn't make sense, since their 5-7 year lifespan is based on technological obsolescence rather than the limitations of the fuel supply for their electric propulsion. They're planning to de-orbit a few hundred satellites a year and replace them with newer and faster ones. Refurbishment doesn't make sense either, as the cost of the satellites is likely to be pretty small in comparison to the cost of launch.
> Yes and no. While the first couple of hops are quite straightforward, most of the Internet, and especially all the big server farms, is still connected to the major fiber backbones, and therefore still subject to the vagaries of whatever whacky peering agreements the MBAs can dream up. No longer being subjected to the wankeries of routing Comcast indulges in will certainly help, but the other end isn't exactly pristine.
SpaceX intends to do as much of the backhaul in space as possible, meaning they can still avoid many of the routing shenanigans by putting uplinks at major peering points. Not all, but many.
The bandwidth limitations are, as you said, the sticking point. Musk has already said that they're not going to be able to replace Comcast in a big city, as the bandwidth density would simply be too high. That said, there are a rather lot of people outside of downtown cores who have poor broadband options and are below the threshold of customer densities where congestion would be an issue. HughesNet has a million subscribers on their GEO service in the US alone, despite their high prices and even higher latency. Xplornet has an even bigger market share, with a quarter million subscribers in Canada (roughly one percent of the population). SpaceX's constellation, if it were to happen, would probably capture just about every single residential satellite broadband customer in the world (at least where SpaceX gets spectrum licenses), since they'd likely end up being moderately cheaper and enormously faster.
> Still, with a fleet of 4K satellites and 5- to 7-year lifespans, they will need to replace hundreds of satellites annually. They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
They're pretty small satellites (I don't remember the exact dimensions, but it was something vaguely like a cubic meter), so they're going to be putting quite a few of them on each rocket. If they replace 600 a year, that could potentially be doable with nothing more than monthly launches using maybe 3-4 new rockets a year.
Somebody on/r/spacex did a mockup showing 40 satellites on a reasonably sized dispenser and there was still quite a lot of room left in the fairing. Mass will be the question: for RTLS on a 40-satellite launch, assuming the dispenser is 10% of the payload mass, you've got 225 kg per satellite to play with.
They licensed GPUs from Imagination for more than a decade, you make it sound like this was a hit-and-run. Business relationships don't last forever, and it wasn't exactly abrubt considering they've been gradually replacing chunks of the GPUs with in-house designs for some time now: at this point only the fixed-function hardware is still designed by Imagination. Is it any surprise that they now want to move the last chunk over to an in-house design, like they did with their CPUs years ago?
Not really, 25-35ms round trip. Not super amazing, but not all that bad. Remember, these are LEO satellites, not GEO. The round trip distance will be roughly 1/30th that of a geostationary satellite.
I'm not sure how deciding to stop buying somebody's product makes you "not to be trusted". It sucks for PowerVR, but why should Apple be obligated to only ever buy mobile GPUs from one company?
Qualcomm was one of a bunch of companies that co-developed the technology behind LTE, but the question is, should companies who did that development work and own the patents on standards be allowed to hoard the standards-essential patents and refuse to licence them in a FRAND manner?
Nobody is arguing that Qualcomm shouldn't reap the rewards of their hard work, only that they shouldn't use those patents to enforce monopolistic control of the market.
It seems like everybody is suing or has sued Qualcomm these days, directly or indirectly. Apple, Korean anti-trust regulators on behalf of Samsung, BlackBerry, the FTC (anti-trust violations), Meizu, Broadcom...
Basically, Qualcomm managed to get a bunch of standard-essential patents, and then used those to build a near monopoly by refusing FRAND licensing like they're required to. There is a reason why Samsung phones use Samsung chips in most countries, but Qualcomm chips in North America, and that's Qualcomm's patent abuse.
So, say what you will about Apple, but they're just the most visible victim.
Well, they didn't exactly do too bad for themselves. IBM is roughly 30% larger today than they were in 1975, accounting for inflation (~6x the size by pure dollars). Maybe they didn't rule the playground, but they grew even larger and more profitable.
I'm not sure you can even compare a country to itself, since tax can vary wildly from region to region.
For example, compare the total tax paid (including income and sales taxes) between Quebec and Alberta. A software developer in Quebec is going to pay up to 42% combined average income tax and sles tax, while somebody making the same amount in Alberta would be paying 27%. That's a pretty huge difference despite both people making the same amount of money in the same country.
Did anybody actually think that US taxes were high? They're pretty low, I pay way more income tax and sales tax than an American would, so I always assumed that Americans knew that their taxes were really low.
It's kind of an uneven comparison, because the pricepoint of the Leaf and the Model S are so different. It's not unusual for a $35,000 car to outsell a $75,000 car regardless of if they're EVs or not. As you lower the pricepoint, exponentially more people are willing and able to pay that much for the vehicle. A more direct comparison would be to come back in a few years and compare the model 3 to the Leaf, since they're much closer in price. I suspect that Nissan will be shipping the Leaf with a much larger battery by then in order to compete. There is obviously a much larger potential market for the model 3, although I suspect that there will be some consumer pushback to the radical departure in user interface design as compared to a traditional vehicle. I think it was a mistake for Tesla to go all-in on the center touchscreen, resulting in there being no user interface (not even a speedometer) directly in front of the driver.
The Volt and ELR are plug-in hybrids, not EVs: the gasoline engine is still mechanically linked to the drive train. Tesla's valuation is nuts because their revenue is far smaller than GM, not because GM sells almost as many hybrids as Tesla does EVs.
Still, the valuation reflects the market's expectations for future revenue, not current revenue. Tesla is seen as having more potential for revenue growth than GM.
The EV1 might have been well loved, but it had many of the same shortcomings of other electric cars of the day which caused electric cars to fail to get any mainstream adoption: poor battery technology (lead acid in the first set of EV1s) and ugly vehicles. It's not a coincidence that the first electric vehicles to find widespread success looked like normal cars and not wierd pod-cars like the EV1.
If GM hadn't killed the EV1, it would have continued on as a niche product.
If you improve a feature that nobody uses, one possible outcome is that more people will use it, justifying the effort. Another possible outcome is that nobody benefits from the effort. I would rather Microsoft put their effort into improving things that would benefit larger numbers of people.
Sure, but implementing always-on-top is trivial from a developer standpoint, and then the user can just stick the window in the corner of the screen, so it's still not a big deal. I can see people using it, even if it's not for me, but people can get the same thing now in most of the apps it'd be useful for.
> So just because you use Chrome, everyone does? I don't, for my use cases Chrome sucks donkey balls, so I use Firefox (and Edge in edge cases).
No, but with roughly 96% of people using browers other than Edge, I definitely do represent the vast majority of users in this particular case. New features for a browser that barely anybody uses is not a big new exciting feature.
> Good for you. Some people surely do. You are most certainly not a shining paragon of computer usage.
I really doubt that the typical Windows user cares about doign 3D modeling in mspaint, even if they *do* use mspaint.
> So? Is any given software allowed to exist only once in that little universe of yours? Is the purpose of an application used a primary key in the data base in your head?
If free apps have provided the functionality for ages, then it's not worth touting as a big new important feature.
> You forget all the environments where real security is not a must, but locking the computer when away for lunch/making tea/going for a piss still makes sense and avoids pranks by coworkers.
30 seconds after the bluetooth signal dies (so let's say 60 seconds after you physically walk away from your computer) is plenty of time for a coworker to play their pranks.
> Depends. Maybe this update brings a real time Dolby Surround encoder or something like that.
Give us built-in support for heapdhone surround and I'll be excited. With the exception of home theater use, surroundsound on PC is pretty much completely dead. Klipsch even discontinued the ProMedia 5.1 in favour of just the 2.1. I suspect that this is because everybody who cared about surroundsound on PCs either moved to headphones (gamers, mostly) or home theatres (where you're feeding a receiver over HDMI or spdif), so bringing surround back for headphone users would be pretty nice. There don't seem to really be any existing apps or drivers that offer a good universally compatible headphone surround experience.
General Dolby Surround encoding may not be very useful. Any device that supports dolby is going to support PCM surround (excepting over toslink due to bandwidth limitations) which is what Windows currently outputs, and you can already bitstream Dolby Surround for media playback.
> Speak for yourself, kiddo. I use Bing Maps because it is 10 times faster than Google Maps.
Bing Maps has sub-par address matching capabilities, and a market share that rounds off to 0%, although that's for share of site embedding since it's a lot harder to measure user usage share. New features that benefit Bing Maps aren't likely to excite users when few of them use Bing Maps.
> Windows XP is still widely used, even though it was released over 15 years ago. Windows 7 is the most used version of Windows and is over 7 years old. Mixed reality can become a thing in a few years, and this way Microsoft avoids the chicken and egg problem.
WinXP has a ~2% share in North America (and not much higher if you include the whole world), but I understand what you're getting at. The problem is that mixed reality is very far from being practical, let alone mass market. That isn't going to happen by the time Win10 is as old as 7 is today. I'm skeptical it will even happen by the time Win10 is as old as XP is today. VR? Sure, that's a much easier problem to solve.
> 1. Visual previews of tabs in Microsoft Edge. > 2. Edge now has built-in support for ebooks.
I use Chrome. I don't have any plans to switch.
> 3. Microsoft Paint now lets people create models in 3D.
I don't use Microsoft Paint (paint.net or photoshop works fine), and I don't create 3D models.
> 4. Picture-in-Picture mode for videos. Essentially you can now have a small window with video playing on it placed on top of any other application.
This was first possible in Windows 3.0 (I don't think there were any video players for Windows 2.0?). In modern Windows, right click on your media player and select "Always on top".
> 5. Night Light: A baked in feature in Windows that will allow you to change the color and tone of display so that it doesn't pain your eyes to look at the screen at night.
There have been apps to do this for as long as I can remember.
> 6. Dynamic Lock: The feature first requires you to pair your phone or tablet with the computer. Once done, it will automatically log you out everytime you're away from desk (or technically speaking, the device is out of the computer's proximity).
I don't tend to lock my computer at home, and the large delay (30 seconds after the bluetooth signal drops) before it locks after you walk around the computer makes it useless for any environment that actually requirse real security.
> 7. Native support for surround sound.
Windows has had native support for surround sound (without any custom software) since, what, Vista?
> 8. Ability to scribble and make notes on Microsoft's Maps app.
Nobody uses Bing Maps. People use Google Maps, or Transit, or even Apple Maps. But not Bing Maps.
> 9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience.
It's still not clear if it works with the games that people actually own, or if it only works with Windows Store games that have a tiny market share. Also, the only benchmarks we've seen from beta versions show that game mode actually reduces performance by 2-5%.
> 10. Built-in support for mixed reality handsets.
I'm sure that all three people who mortgaged their houses to buy the HoloLens will be thrilled. For most people, headset (I presume you meant headset) based mixed reality is far enough away that Windows 10 won't be relevant by the time it's a thing.
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LEO is 0 to 2000 kilometers, beyond which it's MEO. You're right that these things won't be de-orbiting due to drag, although it's not like failed satellites won't be in a predictable location. If it does become a problem, they could always work on a vehicle for doing cleanup.
Refueling the satellites doesn't make sense, since their 5-7 year lifespan is based on technological obsolescence rather than the limitations of the fuel supply for their electric propulsion. They're planning to de-orbit a few hundred satellites a year and replace them with newer and faster ones. Refurbishment doesn't make sense either, as the cost of the satellites is likely to be pretty small in comparison to the cost of launch.
> Yes and no. While the first couple of hops are quite straightforward, most of the Internet, and especially all the big server farms, is still connected to the major fiber backbones, and therefore still subject to the vagaries of whatever whacky peering agreements the MBAs can dream up. No longer being subjected to the wankeries of routing Comcast indulges in will certainly help, but the other end isn't exactly pristine.
SpaceX intends to do as much of the backhaul in space as possible, meaning they can still avoid many of the routing shenanigans by putting uplinks at major peering points. Not all, but many.
The bandwidth limitations are, as you said, the sticking point. Musk has already said that they're not going to be able to replace Comcast in a big city, as the bandwidth density would simply be too high. That said, there are a rather lot of people outside of downtown cores who have poor broadband options and are below the threshold of customer densities where congestion would be an issue. HughesNet has a million subscribers on their GEO service in the US alone, despite their high prices and even higher latency. Xplornet has an even bigger market share, with a quarter million subscribers in Canada (roughly one percent of the population). SpaceX's constellation, if it were to happen, would probably capture just about every single residential satellite broadband customer in the world (at least where SpaceX gets spectrum licenses), since they'd likely end up being moderately cheaper and enormously faster.
> Still, with a fleet of 4K satellites and 5- to 7-year lifespans, they will need to replace hundreds of satellites annually. They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
They're pretty small satellites (I don't remember the exact dimensions, but it was something vaguely like a cubic meter), so they're going to be putting quite a few of them on each rocket. If they replace 600 a year, that could potentially be doable with nothing more than monthly launches using maybe 3-4 new rockets a year.
Somebody on /r/spacex did a mockup showing 40 satellites on a reasonably sized dispenser and there was still quite a lot of room left in the fairing. Mass will be the question: for RTLS on a 40-satellite launch, assuming the dispenser is 10% of the payload mass, you've got 225 kg per satellite to play with.
They licensed GPUs from Imagination for more than a decade, you make it sound like this was a hit-and-run. Business relationships don't last forever, and it wasn't exactly abrubt considering they've been gradually replacing chunks of the GPUs with in-house designs for some time now: at this point only the fixed-function hardware is still designed by Imagination. Is it any surprise that they now want to move the last chunk over to an in-house design, like they did with their CPUs years ago?
Not really, 25-35ms round trip. Not super amazing, but not all that bad. Remember, these are LEO satellites, not GEO. The round trip distance will be roughly 1/30th that of a geostationary satellite.
I'm not sure how deciding to stop buying somebody's product makes you "not to be trusted". It sucks for PowerVR, but why should Apple be obligated to only ever buy mobile GPUs from one company?
Qualcomm was one of a bunch of companies that co-developed the technology behind LTE, but the question is, should companies who did that development work and own the patents on standards be allowed to hoard the standards-essential patents and refuse to licence them in a FRAND manner?
Nobody is arguing that Qualcomm shouldn't reap the rewards of their hard work, only that they shouldn't use those patents to enforce monopolistic control of the market.
It seems like everybody is suing or has sued Qualcomm these days, directly or indirectly. Apple, Korean anti-trust regulators on behalf of Samsung, BlackBerry, the FTC (anti-trust violations), Meizu, Broadcom...
Basically, Qualcomm managed to get a bunch of standard-essential patents, and then used those to build a near monopoly by refusing FRAND licensing like they're required to. There is a reason why Samsung phones use Samsung chips in most countries, but Qualcomm chips in North America, and that's Qualcomm's patent abuse.
So, say what you will about Apple, but they're just the most visible victim.
I wasn't aware that Project Fi, TMobile, or Sprint offered fibre fixed broadband services.
1975 revenue in 2017 dollars: $65.39 billion
2017 revenue in 2017 dollars: $79.92 billion
1975 net income in 2017 dollars: $9.02 billion
2017 net income in 2017 dollars: $11.87 billion
1975 headcount: 288,647
2017 headcount: 380,300
I measure corporate revenue in dollars, not hamburgers.
Well, they didn't exactly do too bad for themselves. IBM is roughly 30% larger today than they were in 1975, accounting for inflation (~6x the size by pure dollars). Maybe they didn't rule the playground, but they grew even larger and more profitable.
You realize what the "secure" in "secure digital" means, right?
IMFT and Hynix stuff isn't bad, although IMFT's future is in doubt.
Sunde may have founded The Pirate Bay, but he hasn't had anything to do with the site in roughly a decade.
I'm not sure you can even compare a country to itself, since tax can vary wildly from region to region.
For example, compare the total tax paid (including income and sales taxes) between Quebec and Alberta. A software developer in Quebec is going to pay up to 42% combined average income tax and sles tax, while somebody making the same amount in Alberta would be paying 27%. That's a pretty huge difference despite both people making the same amount of money in the same country.
Did anybody actually think that US taxes were high? They're pretty low, I pay way more income tax and sales tax than an American would, so I always assumed that Americans knew that their taxes were really low.
It's kind of an uneven comparison, because the pricepoint of the Leaf and the Model S are so different. It's not unusual for a $35,000 car to outsell a $75,000 car regardless of if they're EVs or not. As you lower the pricepoint, exponentially more people are willing and able to pay that much for the vehicle. A more direct comparison would be to come back in a few years and compare the model 3 to the Leaf, since they're much closer in price. I suspect that Nissan will be shipping the Leaf with a much larger battery by then in order to compete. There is obviously a much larger potential market for the model 3, although I suspect that there will be some consumer pushback to the radical departure in user interface design as compared to a traditional vehicle. I think it was a mistake for Tesla to go all-in on the center touchscreen, resulting in there being no user interface (not even a speedometer) directly in front of the driver.
The Volt and ELR are plug-in hybrids, not EVs: the gasoline engine is still mechanically linked to the drive train. Tesla's valuation is nuts because their revenue is far smaller than GM, not because GM sells almost as many hybrids as Tesla does EVs.
Still, the valuation reflects the market's expectations for future revenue, not current revenue. Tesla is seen as having more potential for revenue growth than GM.
The EV1 might have been well loved, but it had many of the same shortcomings of other electric cars of the day which caused electric cars to fail to get any mainstream adoption: poor battery technology (lead acid in the first set of EV1s) and ugly vehicles. It's not a coincidence that the first electric vehicles to find widespread success looked like normal cars and not wierd pod-cars like the EV1.
If GM hadn't killed the EV1, it would have continued on as a niche product.
If you improve a feature that nobody uses, one possible outcome is that more people will use it, justifying the effort. Another possible outcome is that nobody benefits from the effort. I would rather Microsoft put their effort into improving things that would benefit larger numbers of people.
Sure, but implementing always-on-top is trivial from a developer standpoint, and then the user can just stick the window in the corner of the screen, so it's still not a big deal. I can see people using it, even if it's not for me, but people can get the same thing now in most of the apps it'd be useful for.
> So just because you use Chrome, everyone does? I don't, for my use cases Chrome sucks donkey balls, so I use Firefox (and Edge in edge cases).
No, but with roughly 96% of people using browers other than Edge, I definitely do represent the vast majority of users in this particular case. New features for a browser that barely anybody uses is not a big new exciting feature.
> Good for you. Some people surely do. You are most certainly not a shining paragon of computer usage.
I really doubt that the typical Windows user cares about doign 3D modeling in mspaint, even if they *do* use mspaint.
> So? Is any given software allowed to exist only once in that little universe of yours? Is the purpose of an application used a primary key in the data base in your head?
If free apps have provided the functionality for ages, then it's not worth touting as a big new important feature.
> You forget all the environments where real security is not a must, but locking the computer when away for lunch/making tea/going for a piss still makes sense and avoids pranks by coworkers.
30 seconds after the bluetooth signal dies (so let's say 60 seconds after you physically walk away from your computer) is plenty of time for a coworker to play their pranks.
> Depends. Maybe this update brings a real time Dolby Surround encoder or something like that.
Give us built-in support for heapdhone surround and I'll be excited. With the exception of home theater use, surroundsound on PC is pretty much completely dead. Klipsch even discontinued the ProMedia 5.1 in favour of just the 2.1. I suspect that this is because everybody who cared about surroundsound on PCs either moved to headphones (gamers, mostly) or home theatres (where you're feeding a receiver over HDMI or spdif), so bringing surround back for headphone users would be pretty nice. There don't seem to really be any existing apps or drivers that offer a good universally compatible headphone surround experience.
General Dolby Surround encoding may not be very useful. Any device that supports dolby is going to support PCM surround (excepting over toslink due to bandwidth limitations) which is what Windows currently outputs, and you can already bitstream Dolby Surround for media playback.
> Speak for yourself, kiddo. I use Bing Maps because it is 10 times faster than Google Maps.
Bing Maps has sub-par address matching capabilities, and a market share that rounds off to 0%, although that's for share of site embedding since it's a lot harder to measure user usage share. New features that benefit Bing Maps aren't likely to excite users when few of them use Bing Maps.
> Windows XP is still widely used, even though it was released over 15 years ago. Windows 7 is the most used version of Windows and is over 7 years old. Mixed reality can become a thing in a few years, and this way Microsoft avoids the chicken and egg problem.
WinXP has a ~2% share in North America (and not much higher if you include the whole world), but I understand what you're getting at. The problem is that mixed reality is very far from being practical, let alone mass market. That isn't going to happen by the time Win10 is as old as 7 is today. I'm skeptical it will even happen by the time Win10 is as old as XP is today. VR? Sure, that's a much easier problem to solve.
> 1. Visual previews of tabs in Microsoft Edge.
> 2. Edge now has built-in support for ebooks.
I use Chrome. I don't have any plans to switch.
> 3. Microsoft Paint now lets people create models in 3D.
I don't use Microsoft Paint (paint.net or photoshop works fine), and I don't create 3D models.
> 4. Picture-in-Picture mode for videos. Essentially you can now have a small window with video playing on it placed on top of any other application.
This was first possible in Windows 3.0 (I don't think there were any video players for Windows 2.0?). In modern Windows, right click on your media player and select "Always on top".
> 5. Night Light: A baked in feature in Windows that will allow you to change the color and tone of display so that it doesn't pain your eyes to look at the screen at night.
There have been apps to do this for as long as I can remember.
> 6. Dynamic Lock: The feature first requires you to pair your phone or tablet with the computer. Once done, it will automatically log you out everytime you're away from desk (or technically speaking, the device is out of the computer's proximity).
I don't tend to lock my computer at home, and the large delay (30 seconds after the bluetooth signal drops) before it locks after you walk around the computer makes it useless for any environment that actually requirse real security.
> 7. Native support for surround sound.
Windows has had native support for surround sound (without any custom software) since, what, Vista?
> 8. Ability to scribble and make notes on Microsoft's Maps app.
Nobody uses Bing Maps. People use Google Maps, or Transit, or even Apple Maps. But not Bing Maps.
> 9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience.
It's still not clear if it works with the games that people actually own, or if it only works with Windows Store games that have a tiny market share. Also, the only benchmarks we've seen from beta versions show that game mode actually reduces performance by 2-5%.
> 10. Built-in support for mixed reality handsets.
I'm sure that all three people who mortgaged their houses to buy the HoloLens will be thrilled. For most people, headset (I presume you meant headset) based mixed reality is far enough away that Windows 10 won't be relevant by the time it's a thing.
Per quarter. Multiply roughly by four to get annual. For Q2 2017, Motley Fool reports $636 million in membership fees and $515 million in net income.