Re: Availability
We are actively trying to prevent scalping, so I suspect most are just second hand.
2637 posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Well, that was a tedious read. I wish when people try to tell us how to run a business, they could at least get the name of the company right. It does make you wonder if they can get something so simple so wrong, then what else is wrong in their post.
AIUI, you just want us to try and stop scalpers by putting our prices up?
Not going to happen. We have a price, we stick to it. We are not in it to make ridiculous profits (which we could if we wanted), we are not an energy producer. What we do is actively try and prevent scalping - our commercial team work very hard on that, along with trying top spread the production over as many companies and resellers as possible.
It may come as some surprise, but we are making between 400 and 450k units a month at the moment, but demand is exceptionally high, and supply problems (you know, the ones everyone is seeing) mean we cannot make as many as we would want. We have the capacity, but not the parts.
Look like the letter writers have been shown the door.
I am not surprised.
Had I written something like this, I suspect for ANY of the companies at which I have worked (big, small, in the middle), I would also have been sacked. You don't write open letters like this and think you can get away with it.
Actually, I think you 'll find that to all intents and purposes, the man is the company, and the company would certainly not be where it is without the man.
Musk owns the majority SpaceX, it's his company. I suspect that without his drive and dictatorial leadership, its would never have survived its early days, and certainly would not be where it is right now. Musk is the chief technical guy, so he tells them what to make, and they make it. The decisions are his.
If people want to change that, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
You clearly know nothing at all about it. Just look at the costs of laying fibre/copper, compared with satellite. Satellites are WAY cheaper in remote areas. They also don't suffer from people digging up cables and selling them....Also more environmental friendly. A few satellite launches, vs digging up hundreds of thousands of of miles of trenches with oil driven excavators.
Put it like this. Musk is not stupid. He is not going to be doing this unless he knows it's going to make money when compared with all the other systems available.
As for "sky pollution", AIUI, these satellites are not visible to the naked eye once at altitude, or at least, very faint.
You don't NEED cooling of any type. You can add it if your particular workload causes thermal throttling but the latest DVFS firmware does a great job of keeping things cool.
Passive cases work fine, we sell a case fan if you want one. But it's not essential. I never use any extra cooling.
Wrong conclusion. We ARE interested in open source, which is why so much of the latest software has replaced the proprietary firmware blob with open source alternatives. KMS, DRM, libcamera, V4L2 etc. It just takes time to make this transition, and make that transition easy for users - we like backwards compatibility.
With regard to RISC-V there clearly is not a core available that is better than that in the Pi4, never mind the more recent Arm architectures.
The next gen Starlink satellites are much larger, so that will increase capacity. But I agree that their market is NOT cities - fibre will always be faster/cheaper. But not all the world is cities, and Starlink works on planes and boats...
Where I live, in Sunny Fenland, within commuting distance to Cambridge, tech capital of the UK (my opinion!), broadband is really patchy, so for many people around here it would be a godsend. And its not like the UK is a third world country. Apparently.
The premise is that you need a key to unlock a piece of hardware, and that people who don't have the key are going to be pissed they paid for silicon that can do something but doesn't. The people who have paid for the feature look on the cheap one and think "same hardware, but cheaper".
This is not the way to look at it. It's much simpler to ignore that fact it done by enabling parts of the silicon, just look on it as paying for a specific feature, irrespective of how it is supplied. The fact the HW is there to support it is a bonus! It means you CAN upgrade in place.
Of course, Intel being sneaky with regard to getting the kernel support is a different kettle of fish, but I see no problems with the premise of keys to unlock extra features. It's done in many other industries after all, with great success.
But someone has to pay for the development costs of that extra silicon. Should you charge everyone for it from the first release, even if most people don't need it? Or should you allow people to only buy what they need? A scheme like this means cheaper silicon for the basic users, and people who want better performance simply pay more for it.
Isn't this a pretty standard thing in a lot of industries? Cars? Software?
Please listen to the Reith lecture, by a world leader in the field, before commenting on it.
I heard nothing in that lecture that wasn't already possible, or possible in the very near future.
The shoepolish drones sound entirely possible NOW. You only need 3g of explosive to kill (apparently), and with current MI and tiny drone tech, it seemed completely feasible, and VERY cheap. You could make hundreds for very little outlay, you can target individuals (for example people with particular facial features; gingers, people with bad hairstyles etc), and a single container can hold 1 million of them.
And they would work fine in a city, where the breeze will have little effect.
Gnome and GTK3+ are a PITA. They care nothing for backward compatibility, they care nothing that people use features they then remove, they care nothing that their idea of what is "Correct" is actually "Not correct", but provide no ways of correcting without hacking the code. Sadly we still have to use it.
Now that the huge amount of work needed to get Bullseye out is done, we can spend a bit MORE time on the 64bit version. Fortunately a lot of the work done for Bullseye is directly applicable to a 64bit version (libcamera, V472, KMS etc). Try out the latest beta released the same day. Bound to be some issues, so the more testing done the better.
Considering El Reg generally attracts technically competent people, there are surprising number of posts on this topic that are clearly horribly informed.
I mean, not understanding long exposures? Not understanding latency? Not understanding that fibre to everyone is WAY more expensive than a bunch of satellites to everyone? Not understanding that the tech required to launch all these satellites is the same tech needed to launch BIG space borne telescopes? Not understanding the space is BIG, and these satellites are not going to be close together? Not understanding that these LEO satellites decay naturally? Not understanding that getting internet access to third world countries drags them out of poverty? Not understanding high frequency trading? Not understanding that there are people who don't have power lines to their huts? Not understanding Kestler syndrome is not all its cracked up to be? Not understanding that all satellites launched nowadays have to have a deorbit mechanism (or at least the ability to park out of the way)
For Christs sake people, at least do a little reading before commenting. It's not rocket science...or is it?
In the UK, there are often reports of lorry drivers crashing in to the back of stationary vehicles whilst driving down the hard shoulder of motorways, causing a number of deaths. So humans have done this multiple many many times over the years. Why do you expect a computer controlled car to be able to achieve zero when humans cannot even achieve it?
Yup, we recommend a RO FS for this sort of thing, and a ram disk for log files if you need them. We've also done lots of tests of SD cards, and Sandisk, as long as they are genuine, seem to be exceptionally robust when it comes to unexpected power downs i.e No failures after thousands of random shutdowns.
I suspect the vast majority of these guns are shotguns, used for clay shooting or pest control in the countryside. Storing shotguns away from [private homes makes it almost impossible to do either. And the rules for shotgun storage are very strict.
Just so you know, shotgun/clay shooting is an Olympic sport, it's "playing" in the same way cycling is "playing", or rhythmic gymnastics is "playing".
@machdiamond The problem you have is that you appear to be old space, a system that is no longer fit for purpose, and I suspect that the contents of your post will come back to haunt you. SpaceX are clearly ahead of BO (although not by as much as many people above seem to think). They are clearly ahead of everyone else as well. There development strategy is to test real stuff rather than paper trails. This has already proven to be a faster way of getting to the require end result. Their flight performance and history is pretty impressive, and the negatives you quote above are simply part of their testing process - they test, when something doesn't work they fix it. And much much quicker than any one else (The Boeing farce with the stuck valves comes to mind)
Whether SS succeeds or not, and I suspect after a few launches, it will, SpaceX have certainly shown a clean pair of heel to their competitors. Reuse has been shown to work and be more cost effective than expendable, and that INCLUDES the hit you take on payload to carry the recovery gear. And that is despite people from an old space background saying it could not be done.
As for the EIS, that is a point that needs to be sorted out, I suspect it will be sorted out, and fairly quickly.
@Machdiamond
Rockets like this don't explode, they deflagrate. Which is much more benign (but still impressive).
So you cannot compare energy released, as its needs to be "amortised" over the time if takes to oxidise. Which is short in an explosion, but long in a deflagration.
The file systems you quote have been in development for many many years, they were not introduced to the kernel as monolithic chunks of code, as happened in Paragons case. They have gestated over many years and many commits, each (mostly) small enough to be properly reviewed.
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