That's a pretty questionable definition, since air-breathing aircraft like the SR-71 can sustain altitudes where the sky is black. That "looks" like space, but since you're still talking about atmospheric flight, it obviously isn't.
Here's a photo from 83k feet with a black sky: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... The aircraft's altitude record for sustained flight was roughly 2k feet higher than that, and it's reached higher in climbs. Baumgartner jumped from 128k feet from a balloon, where there an even sharper transition from the haze on the horizon to deep black in the sky.
This is a nine-passenger aircraft. No matter how cheap it is, it can't replace a common turboprop commuter aircraft like the Q400, which seats 80-90 people.
Below a certain capacity, the cost-per-seat doesn't matter because airlines can only get so many landing and gate slots, and general aviation airports aren't equipped to deal with the sort of volume that would be needed to replace them... not to mention that general aviation airports are usually MUCH worse accessible in terms of public transit and distance from population centers.
There aren't a ton of people living above the 70th parallel, so this still seems like a better solution than trying to cover eight million square kilometers of sparsely populated areas with fixed broadband. And if Canada wants 24 hour coverage north of the 70th parallel, presumably they could pay SpaceX to provide that additional coverage, and I'd bet it'd still be a better investment.
What is the best way to get broadband coverage for people living in extremely sparsely populated ultra-rural areas?
1) Spend enormous amounts of money building fiber to remote communities and households 2) Spend a smaller but still large amount of money investing in SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which can potentially benefit all Canadians, not just ultra-rural ones
> Not a bad strategy either. And it could backfire on them as whe some users get enough experience in WSL, it's easier for them to try the real thing at some point because it will be familiar to them. Especially the command-line aspects of Linux, which the WSL focuses on.
Would that really be a backfire? Windows doesn't represent that much of their revenue any more, a huge portion of their revenue comes from subscriptions. They get revenue from people running Linux on Azure. They get revenue from the sale of Android devices. They've released versions of Microsoft Office to run on Android and ChromeOS, two Linux platforms.
> But that was to the detriment of Windows, which held the monopoly because "it's the only thing that runs Office" (in effect).
This has never been true, though. Office basically started out as Macintosh exclusive software that was ported to Windows years later. This was the case for Excel and PowerPoint, and for a span of four years, Word existed only for DOS and Macintosh. Office has always been available on the Mac,
I'm referring to Apple's list of obsolete hardware that this article links to, which includes the Apple II and the Apple III under the headline "Mac desktops". The Lisa didn't get any love, however.
Some people want that, some people don't. There are compromises in either case: a removable battery adds to the volume and weight, and probably makes hitting ip68 a heck of a lot harder (probably a large increase in bulk if you want both a removable battery and ip68). Personally, even having owned some smartphones for up to four years, I've never worn out a battery. For me, personally, I wouldn't get any value out of a removable battery, so I'd rather not make those sacrifices. It's good for people to have options, but do we really need one company to be covering every option and market segment? There are lots of smartphone companies to cater to different needs.
Don't like it? Turn it off. If your battery is old and has trouble providing current, Apple gives you the choice between throttling or unexpected shutdowns. I'm not sure what more people could want them to do on this subject.
The counter-point is that after Iridium's debt was erased, they became a profitable company and have launched their new "NEXT" constellation to replace the old one (65 launched to date, the final 10 launching next month). The new constellation cost them ~$2.9 billion USD (2.1 for the satellites, 0.8 for the launches), which is something like half or two thirds of the cost of their original constellation adjusted for inflation. The new constellation can also probably serve a much broader market due to higher capacity allowing more scale.
They have two up there for testing right now. Apart from the more technical tests they've obviously done, they've specifically called out YouTube playback at 4K and Counter-Strike: Go as two use cases they specifically tested. That might sound a bit silly, but they demonstrate high throughput and low latency in applications that the general public can understand. Reportedly, the cause of the dispute is that the manager(s) wanted three more generations of test satellite before the initial launch, while Musk wanted just one more generation before the initial launch. Considering they wanted to start launching the final satellites in 2019 in order to hit the FCC deadline of having half of them (~2,200) launched by 2024, his desire to get stuff up there, even if it's not perfect, is understandable. Even if there turn out to be issues with the first generation of satellites, SpaceX is planning a very short lifespan (replacing them every 5-7 years with de-orbit within a year after that), and would have the opportunity to make improvements in subsequent satellites of the initial constellation.
SpaceX has said that they will be de-orbiting satellites within one year of their ending operating, rather than the 25-year recommendation. This obviously doesn't help if the satellite suffers from a failure that prevents it from de-orbiting, though the same is true with the 25-year figure.
Considering they plan to put up more than ten thousand satellites (with IIRC 4,000+ in the initial constellation), and that they plan to frequently replace them with updated versions over time, it's probably as much about freeing up space for themselves as it is anything else.
CAES can only be cost-effective when built on top of an existing disused mine in the appropriate type of rock. We still need better batteries for all the places where you might need electricity and don't have a convenient abandoned mine to convert. Mobile applications come to mind.
That's possible (even if Qi itself does go up to 15), but if you've got products on the market like Anker's chargers that aren't necessarily having to license things and still support both "Qi" 5W mode, and "Samsung" 10W mode, and "Apple" 7.5W mode, that's still not as bad as Google actively blocking anybody who doesn't pay them money, no?
Ironically, Apple seems to be the one supporting > 5 W Qi charging here, as the iPhones will do up to 7.5 W from any Qi charger that supports that target.
That list may not be complete (or there are just lots of phones out there that support 10 watt charging without being certified). There are no Samsung phones on that list, and they're shipping 12w Qi chargers for their latest phones. Previous models used 9w Qi chargers.
But why do 5W Qi and 10W proprietary when most other phones do 5W Qi and 10W Qi?
Qi already goes up to 15W (though I'd imagine there are thermal concerns), so why do we need a proprietary Google standard for 10W when everybody else is just using 10W Qi pads?
I have a hard acknowledging a six-hour drive (which takes you from the southern coast of Finland to a city halfway to its northern point) as "serious distance". You can drive across the entire country's width at its widest point in only eight hours, and from the southern coast to the northern tip in under fifteen... That's the extent of the whole country... The entire country alone is only one fifth the size of my province alone! It's in between the size of Montana and New Mexico. Just because central Europe has lots of little micro-countries doesn't mean that you can start attributing major societal attributes to the modest distance between cities.
Montreal to Toronto is roughly the same distance as Helsinki to Oulu... which is already like half the maximum possible distance to drive in Finland. I don't think they can use the excuse of "distance between cities" in such a small country.
VR motion smoothing and asynchronous spacewarp don't really work like that. What they do is they take the last known frame produced by the graphics card and then warp it to match the user's current position in space. This actually reduces latency because it means the user's view is being updated by their position more often than if it was just using the less frequent frames from the graphics card. They aren't interpolating between two frames (well, maybe Valve's new thing does that, Oculus asynchronous spacewarp doesn't), they're warping the image to reflect more recent positional data.
In fact, one strategy to reduce latency even when the GPU is putting out the full HMD framerate is to sample the positional data after the frame is rendered but right before the frame is sent to the HMD and use asynchronous spacewarp to update the rendered frame. This means the position displayed to the user is more recent than when the game engine sampled the position in its gameplay loop (and before anything was rendered), which can potentially remove most of the rendering latency.
The Switch's sales have been steady since the holiday surge ended... and it's basically tied with the PS4 for first place in global sales. I'm not seeing the problem here.
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That's a pretty questionable definition, since air-breathing aircraft like the SR-71 can sustain altitudes where the sky is black. That "looks" like space, but since you're still talking about atmospheric flight, it obviously isn't.
Here's a photo from 83k feet with a black sky: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
The aircraft's altitude record for sustained flight was roughly 2k feet higher than that, and it's reached higher in climbs. Baumgartner jumped from 128k feet from a balloon, where there an even sharper transition from the haze on the horizon to deep black in the sky.
This is a nine-passenger aircraft. No matter how cheap it is, it can't replace a common turboprop commuter aircraft like the Q400, which seats 80-90 people.
Below a certain capacity, the cost-per-seat doesn't matter because airlines can only get so many landing and gate slots, and general aviation airports aren't equipped to deal with the sort of volume that would be needed to replace them... not to mention that general aviation airports are usually MUCH worse accessible in terms of public transit and distance from population centers.
They're planning at least 18 hours of coverage a day at the 70th parallel, which is pretty far north:
https://licensing.fcc.gov/myib...
There aren't a ton of people living above the 70th parallel, so this still seems like a better solution than trying to cover eight million square kilometers of sparsely populated areas with fixed broadband. And if Canada wants 24 hour coverage north of the 70th parallel, presumably they could pay SpaceX to provide that additional coverage, and I'd bet it'd still be a better investment.
What is the best way to get broadband coverage for people living in extremely sparsely populated ultra-rural areas?
1) Spend enormous amounts of money building fiber to remote communities and households
2) Spend a smaller but still large amount of money investing in SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which can potentially benefit all Canadians, not just ultra-rural ones
> Not a bad strategy either. And it could backfire on them as whe some users get enough experience in WSL, it's easier for them to try the real thing at some point because it will be familiar to them. Especially the command-line aspects of Linux, which the WSL focuses on.
Would that really be a backfire? Windows doesn't represent that much of their revenue any more, a huge portion of their revenue comes from subscriptions. They get revenue from people running Linux on Azure. They get revenue from the sale of Android devices. They've released versions of Microsoft Office to run on Android and ChromeOS, two Linux platforms.
> But that was to the detriment of Windows, which held the monopoly because "it's the only thing that runs Office" (in effect).
This has never been true, though. Office basically started out as Macintosh exclusive software that was ported to Windows years later. This was the case for Excel and PowerPoint, and for a span of four years, Word existed only for DOS and Macintosh. Office has always been available on the Mac,
I'm referring to Apple's list of obsolete hardware that this article links to, which includes the Apple II and the Apple III under the headline "Mac desktops". The Lisa didn't get any love, however.
The link was https://support.apple.com/en-c...
Uh... The last time I checked, the Apple II was not a "Mac desktop"...
Some people want that, some people don't. There are compromises in either case: a removable battery adds to the volume and weight, and probably makes hitting ip68 a heck of a lot harder (probably a large increase in bulk if you want both a removable battery and ip68). Personally, even having owned some smartphones for up to four years, I've never worn out a battery. For me, personally, I wouldn't get any value out of a removable battery, so I'd rather not make those sacrifices. It's good for people to have options, but do we really need one company to be covering every option and market segment? There are lots of smartphone companies to cater to different needs.
Don't like it? Turn it off. If your battery is old and has trouble providing current, Apple gives you the choice between throttling or unexpected shutdowns. I'm not sure what more people could want them to do on this subject.
The counter-point is that after Iridium's debt was erased, they became a profitable company and have launched their new "NEXT" constellation to replace the old one (65 launched to date, the final 10 launching next month). The new constellation cost them ~$2.9 billion USD (2.1 for the satellites, 0.8 for the launches), which is something like half or two thirds of the cost of their original constellation adjusted for inflation. The new constellation can also probably serve a much broader market due to higher capacity allowing more scale.
They have two up there for testing right now. Apart from the more technical tests they've obviously done, they've specifically called out YouTube playback at 4K and Counter-Strike: Go as two use cases they specifically tested. That might sound a bit silly, but they demonstrate high throughput and low latency in applications that the general public can understand. Reportedly, the cause of the dispute is that the manager(s) wanted three more generations of test satellite before the initial launch, while Musk wanted just one more generation before the initial launch. Considering they wanted to start launching the final satellites in 2019 in order to hit the FCC deadline of having half of them (~2,200) launched by 2024, his desire to get stuff up there, even if it's not perfect, is understandable. Even if there turn out to be issues with the first generation of satellites, SpaceX is planning a very short lifespan (replacing them every 5-7 years with de-orbit within a year after that), and would have the opportunity to make improvements in subsequent satellites of the initial constellation.
SpaceX has said that they will be de-orbiting satellites within one year of their ending operating, rather than the 25-year recommendation. This obviously doesn't help if the satellite suffers from a failure that prevents it from de-orbiting, though the same is true with the 25-year figure.
Considering they plan to put up more than ten thousand satellites (with IIRC 4,000+ in the initial constellation), and that they plan to frequently replace them with updated versions over time, it's probably as much about freeing up space for themselves as it is anything else.
Quake has been available natively on Linux for 22 years now.
CAES can only be cost-effective when built on top of an existing disused mine in the appropriate type of rock. We still need better batteries for all the places where you might need electricity and don't have a convenient abandoned mine to convert. Mobile applications come to mind.
That's possible (even if Qi itself does go up to 15), but if you've got products on the market like Anker's chargers that aren't necessarily having to license things and still support both "Qi" 5W mode, and "Samsung" 10W mode, and "Apple" 7.5W mode, that's still not as bad as Google actively blocking anybody who doesn't pay them money, no?
Ironically, Apple seems to be the one supporting > 5 W Qi charging here, as the iPhones will do up to 7.5 W from any Qi charger that supports that target.
That list may not be complete (or there are just lots of phones out there that support 10 watt charging without being certified). There are no Samsung phones on that list, and they're shipping 12w Qi chargers for their latest phones. Previous models used 9w Qi chargers.
But why do 5W Qi and 10W proprietary when most other phones do 5W Qi and 10W Qi?
Qi already goes up to 15W (though I'd imagine there are thermal concerns), so why do we need a proprietary Google standard for 10W when everybody else is just using 10W Qi pads?
I have a hard acknowledging a six-hour drive (which takes you from the southern coast of Finland to a city halfway to its northern point) as "serious distance". You can drive across the entire country's width at its widest point in only eight hours, and from the southern coast to the northern tip in under fifteen... That's the extent of the whole country... The entire country alone is only one fifth the size of my province alone! It's in between the size of Montana and New Mexico. Just because central Europe has lots of little micro-countries doesn't mean that you can start attributing major societal attributes to the modest distance between cities.
Montreal to Toronto is roughly the same distance as Helsinki to Oulu... which is already like half the maximum possible distance to drive in Finland. I don't think they can use the excuse of "distance between cities" in such a small country.
VR motion smoothing and asynchronous spacewarp don't really work like that. What they do is they take the last known frame produced by the graphics card and then warp it to match the user's current position in space. This actually reduces latency because it means the user's view is being updated by their position more often than if it was just using the less frequent frames from the graphics card. They aren't interpolating between two frames (well, maybe Valve's new thing does that, Oculus asynchronous spacewarp doesn't), they're warping the image to reflect more recent positional data.
In fact, one strategy to reduce latency even when the GPU is putting out the full HMD framerate is to sample the positional data after the frame is rendered but right before the frame is sent to the HMD and use asynchronous spacewarp to update the rendered frame. This means the position displayed to the user is more recent than when the game engine sampled the position in its gameplay loop (and before anything was rendered), which can potentially remove most of the rendering latency.
The Switch's sales have been steady since the holiday surge ended... and it's basically tied with the PS4 for first place in global sales. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Two days of battery life under normal use is less than the Apple Watch, though.
It lasts around two and a half days for me, and I charge it every night. I'm not sure why I'd need more battery life from a smartwatch.