Musk has always been honest about this. He claims Tesla is "cash-flow positive" rather than say that the company is profitable. He also claims they earn money with every Tesla sold. The problem is their vast investments on infrastructure like the Gigafactory or the Freemont expansion for Model 3. If there's anything you can accuse him for being less than honest was with the SolarCity acquisition which clearly seems to have been done to bail that company out at the expense of Tesla.
As for SpaceX it was through a rough spot with all the Falcon 1 launch failures before they got the NASA CRS contract. But that's way behind them. They claim to make a profit with each Falcon 9 flight and I believe them. They also claim the company itself is profitable. They have a really healthy amount of space launch contracts right now. If they can deliver on those they should have significant profit. Enough to design their next generation launch vehicle. In addition they also have Commercial Crew lined up.
SpaceX launches are not at a loss. It is just that they perform a lot of the manufacturing in house so they have a lot less overhead than, say, ULA with their network of contractors and subcontractors, etc, piling on extra cost, which ULA is fine with since the government basically pays them on a cost plus basis (i.e. the government pays them for all their expenses + a fixed percentage profit margin). So the more cost there is, the more total profits ULA will have, plus without having in-house employees they need to feed thanks to the subcontractor structure. You get the idea.
The $422m figure is for a Delta Heavy launch, which makes the comparison with the Falcon 9 laughable - it should be compared with a Falcon Heavy launch, which SpaceX ain't giving launch cost figures for yet.
Actually, no. Those $422m are the average cost for a launch. Most launches are done with Atlas Vs. The current Falcon 9 FT can launch up to 8.3t to GTO while an Atlas V can launch 8.9t. Once Falcon 9 Block 5 comes out later this year then Falcon 9 will have even more payload to GTO.
Most satellites launched are actually not one of a kind. At the very least there will be 2-3 similar satellites and in the case of GPS satellites, which are a significant amount of the launches, even more than that. You just need to think this over. If you want to have global coverage, which is most often the case, even with a polar orbit satellite network you'll need at least 2 satellites to have global coverage. Possibly more with on-orbit spares. If it's a global network of low orbit satellites, like GPS, then you'll need dozens of satellites.
You also ignore that a large amount of the cost in developing a new type of satellite is the R&D for the specific satellite. Building an extra similar copy of the same design in comparison is quite inexpensive at a fraction of the cost.
So no it doesn't make sense to use a flight service that costs twice as much in this case. What you are paying extra is basically the monopoly price of having a single vendor like ULA.
Fuck you [citation needed] morons. Which link did the parent post provide for his scare mongering?
It's plainly obvious it's true. Go to the Wikipedia page for "Iceland" and read the historic migration flows section. No I won't provide a link. Fucking idiots who need to be spoonfed all the time.
The AGW scare is plain bullshit. The North Pole has been a lot warmer than it is currently in recorded history. Back when the Novgorod Republic was at its height, around the same time the Vikings were settling Iceland and Vinland it was clearly warmer than it is today. Back then the world population was much lower.
The influence of human activity on global temperatures is clearly overblown.
There are plenty of ways to do it like doing work on a commission basis. I'm a programmer and I don't expect people to continue paying me for my services after I've been dead for 80 years.
Whatever. I don't use it. I've heard people used it because it claimed to be anonymous with encryption. Good luck with that if it goes through Facebook's servers.
There are plenty of useless ISO standards. Microsoft's OOXML is one. It doesn't matter if ISO rubber stamped it or not. What matters is if it gains widespread adoption to be considered one.
That appleinsider.com article is from March 7th 2013. As usual they put their own special spin on it. The fact is Google and the MPEG LA reached an agreement after the DoJ started to investigate the MPEG LA for stifling competition. The agreement is that Google has a patent license for VP8 and Google can sublicense it to anyone they wish to.
Practically no one uses HEVC hardware decode right now. Don't think that because it will come to market first they will necessarily win this one. HD-DVD players also came out before Blu-ray players and still lost in the market.
It's not like they couldn't continue using H.264 for a couple more years until AV1 was available if they wanted to.
Instead they're trying to promote a codec they stand to earn patent royalties from. At the same time they sue Qualcomm for enforcing antenna patent royalties on them. Typical.
"Lossless audio is a pretty niche thing to start with... Hell, having actual audio files on your device (instead of spotify / apple music cloud / pandora / whatever) is becoming a niche activity."
Apple bought Beats right? In comparison this actually makes sense. Me? I'll keep using crummy MP3s.
MP4 sucks in comparison with MKV. It's much a much more spartan container format. MKV is also required for hardware to be able to have the DivX logo. So it's real lame that Apple doesn't support it while no one else uses QuickTime but them. Then again they haven't cared about their desktop or multimedia support for yonks. All that matters is how thin is the next device or how the icons look on this iOS version.
Face it, Apple's love for their own proprietary formats of late is making even Microsoft look good.
APE (Monkey's Audio) popularity kinda predates FLAC. Still even Microsoft managed to support FLAC in Windows 10 before Apple added support for it to iOS... There have been portable music players with FLAC support for like a decade already.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows, their service might be as good as Virgin Galactic's.
A large amount of the FLOPS is usually GPUs or something similar. Like NVIDIA GPUs or Intel Xeon Phis.
I think it would fall into this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Musk has always been honest about this. He claims Tesla is "cash-flow positive" rather than say that the company is profitable. He also claims they earn money with every Tesla sold. The problem is their vast investments on infrastructure like the Gigafactory or the Freemont expansion for Model 3. If there's anything you can accuse him for being less than honest was with the SolarCity acquisition which clearly seems to have been done to bail that company out at the expense of Tesla.
As for SpaceX it was through a rough spot with all the Falcon 1 launch failures before they got the NASA CRS contract. But that's way behind them. They claim to make a profit with each Falcon 9 flight and I believe them. They also claim the company itself is profitable. They have a really healthy amount of space launch contracts right now. If they can deliver on those they should have significant profit. Enough to design their next generation launch vehicle. In addition they also have Commercial Crew lined up.
SpaceX launches are not at a loss. It is just that they perform a lot of the manufacturing in house so they have a lot less overhead than, say, ULA with their network of contractors and subcontractors, etc, piling on extra cost, which ULA is fine with since the government basically pays them on a cost plus basis (i.e. the government pays them for all their expenses + a fixed percentage profit margin). So the more cost there is, the more total profits ULA will have, plus without having in-house employees they need to feed thanks to the subcontractor structure. You get the idea.
The $422m figure is for a Delta Heavy launch, which makes the comparison with the Falcon 9 laughable - it should be compared with a Falcon Heavy launch, which SpaceX ain't giving launch cost figures for yet.
Actually, no. Those $422m are the average cost for a launch. Most launches are done with Atlas Vs. The current Falcon 9 FT can launch up to 8.3t to GTO while an Atlas V can launch 8.9t. Once Falcon 9 Block 5 comes out later this year then Falcon 9 will have even more payload to GTO.
Most satellites launched are actually not one of a kind. At the very least there will be 2-3 similar satellites and in the case of GPS satellites, which are a significant amount of the launches, even more than that. You just need to think this over. If you want to have global coverage, which is most often the case, even with a polar orbit satellite network you'll need at least 2 satellites to have global coverage. Possibly more with on-orbit spares. If it's a global network of low orbit satellites, like GPS, then you'll need dozens of satellites.
You also ignore that a large amount of the cost in developing a new type of satellite is the R&D for the specific satellite. Building an extra similar copy of the same design in comparison is quite inexpensive at a fraction of the cost.
So no it doesn't make sense to use a flight service that costs twice as much in this case. What you are paying extra is basically the monopoly price of having a single vendor like ULA.
Fuck you [citation needed] morons. Which link did the parent post provide for his scare mongering?
It's plainly obvious it's true. Go to the Wikipedia page for "Iceland" and read the historic migration flows section. No I won't provide a link. Fucking idiots who need to be spoonfed all the time.
The AGW scare is plain bullshit. The North Pole has been a lot warmer than it is currently in recorded history. Back when the Novgorod Republic was at its height, around the same time the Vikings were settling Iceland and Vinland it was clearly warmer than it is today. Back then the world population was much lower.
The influence of human activity on global temperatures is clearly overblown.
Perhaps they shouldn't go to the North Pole in June if they didn't want to see melted ice.
The Pirate Bay hosted torrent files which basically contain filenames and checksums for file blocks. These don't contain the actual data anywhere.
Later they switched to Magnet links which basically only have the torrent checksum and the filename.
To me, it's quite clear they aren't infringing copyright. You might call it conspiracy to infringe copyright at best.
There are plenty of ways to do it like doing work on a commission basis. I'm a programmer and I don't expect people to continue paying me for my services after I've been dead for 80 years.
Bitcoin is too effin' slow to be used for micropayments.
Yes and Tesla is bigger than Ford right.
That's nothing. BLAZE MONGER can compress 16kx16k video at 150 fps with 1-color (which must be black) at 0 bits/sec.
I've had it with whatever is the latest IM fad. I've switched IM clients more often that I would care to remember.
Whatever. I don't use it. I've heard people used it because it claimed to be anonymous with encryption. Good luck with that if it goes through Facebook's servers.
There are plenty of useless ISO standards. Microsoft's OOXML is one. It doesn't matter if ISO rubber stamped it or not. What matters is if it gains widespread adoption to be considered one.
That appleinsider.com article is from March 7th 2013. As usual they put their own special spin on it. The fact is Google and the MPEG LA reached an agreement after the DoJ started to investigate the MPEG LA for stifling competition. The agreement is that Google has a patent license for VP8 and Google can sublicense it to anyone they wish to.
Practically no one uses HEVC hardware decode right now. Don't think that because it will come to market first they will necessarily win this one. HD-DVD players also came out before Blu-ray players and still lost in the market.
It's not like they couldn't continue using H.264 for a couple more years until AV1 was available if they wanted to.
Instead they're trying to promote a codec they stand to earn patent royalties from. At the same time they sue Qualcomm for enforcing antenna patent royalties on them. Typical.
Who knows. Maybe one day we'll be able to install our own apps on our own phones too. Oh joy.
"Lossless audio is a pretty niche thing to start with... Hell, having actual audio files on your device (instead of spotify / apple music cloud / pandora / whatever) is becoming a niche activity."
Apple bought Beats right? In comparison this actually makes sense. Me? I'll keep using crummy MP3s.
MP4 sucks in comparison with MKV. It's much a much more spartan container format. MKV is also required for hardware to be able to have the DivX logo. So it's real lame that Apple doesn't support it while no one else uses QuickTime but them. Then again they haven't cared about their desktop or multimedia support for yonks. All that matters is how thin is the next device or how the icons look on this iOS version.
Face it, Apple's love for their own proprietary formats of late is making even Microsoft look good.
APE (Monkey's Audio) popularity kinda predates FLAC. Still even Microsoft managed to support FLAC in Windows 10 before Apple added support for it to iOS... There have been portable music players with FLAC support for like a decade already.