They do have to be if they want to be approved by the FCC.
And btw Kessler syndrome applies to any orbital band. You've got the logic backwards. Kessler syndrome is usually only considered a threat for LEO because that's where most of the satellites are. But if you're throwing million(s) of satellites into orbit, it becomes an issue at whatever orbital height you pick.
Is sort of somewhat handling 10,000 by enabling them to make orbital adjustments more quickly. By the time you have a million, you will run out of prop way too quick.
Sorry I misspoke, you're totally correct. What I meant to say was it's only a problem if they're orbiting around the Earth. I've heard sun orbits mentioned as a possibility for data centers.
It would still be a space junk problem. Space is big, but amazingly not that big. If you start ejecting little hot BBs at interplanetary speeds, you are creating broad swath of buckshot that will eventually impact something with the force of a missile. Put millions of these satellites into solar orbits (I’m ignoring the huge increase in launch cost this would require, and all the other issues like latency and comms), and you could very well make trips to other planets impossible.
It wouldn’t be Kessler syndrome as you would not have a chain reaction of collisions, but the end result would be the same.
Yeah if you leave enough junk in any orbit it'll become a problem, but I don't think that's necessarily an argument not to put things in that orbit. You'd just need to not hit that critical limit where things become untenable.
Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.
Billionaire money is not like money for the normal person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you have on the economy - and even the state.
It is not just a number, as it is for people who just save a few dollars, for whom it really is just a number until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire's money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and the abstraction of turning this into a number does a terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many. Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-control-giving paper assets is different and not what being a top capitalist is about, only used as an additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully control (the small investor does not even have any control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public company).
They don't just play with money, they play with real things! And they want to play with ever bigger real things. They don't just want to improve some minor product. They want to control the fate of civilization.
OT:
I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too many people discussing wealth inequality issues get wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile. Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly, hiding what is actually going on for too many observers who then go on to discuss "numbers".
That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual real complex organizations. And you can't just make everything into a public company, and also, even when they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just does not work the same.
We will have to look at what those super-rich are actually doing, case by individual case of ownership, not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection of "who would control that?", because right now they control themselves so it's never nobody.
I think you have read the "redistrubute the money" people wrong. They definitely, absolutely want to reduce the power the tiny minority hold over the many. That's the whole point. The money is a tool to get the work done.
What exactly has Elon done that's "impossible"? Like the Boring Company where he promised 1,000x faster boring? It turned into a mile or two of a poorly routed hole with some Teslas tossed down into it. He and his shills hand waved away the problem, confident their brilliance would allow them to dig 1,000x faster than modern commercial boring. It never happened.
The only impossible thing Elon has done is make fantasy claims and real people fall for it.
I will definitely credit Elon with building a company that made reusable self-landing rockets seem routine and boring. That was definitely "impossible".
Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.
I guess everything is relative and I'm well informed on everything but no, "first new car company in America in a long time" doesn't leap out as a wildly difficult challenge in a time of great innovation. It was followed a couple of years later by Rivian.
First popular electric car...maybe hindsight helps, but it was kind of a matter of time with battery technology improving, although certainly they did a very good job.
Both difficult, for sure, but not quite as mind-blowingly impossible sounding as reusing a rocket dozens of times. To me.
It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.
Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don’t have to keep spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets. It’s not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.
It’s like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it was still something people could plan and prepare for. But you’re not going to climb all the way to the moon, even with oxygen bottles. It’s a completely different problem to solve.
The most difficult point to argue against for people who want to defend Musk’s delusions is simple economics: at the end of the day, when you’ve solved
- the energy source problem (difficult but probably doable);
- the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);
- the head dissipation problem (physically implausible, to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would just be very difficult);
- the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite, so you’d need communication to be more useful than a couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that’s additional moving parts, it’s probably doable but still a bit of work);
- the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all I can say, that’s a fair number of orders of magnitude larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy to do it);
- and all the other tiny details, such as materials and logistics just to build the thing.
Then, you still end up with something which is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no upside.
Seems like you'll still be able to use your own apps just fine under this scheme.
It also seems pretty obvious that the ignorant phone-users of the world who get scammed are the reason for this change. The revenue lost from people like you is really not worth any amount of engineering effort.
This solution clearly mostly benefits the ignorant phone users of the world who are susceptible to scams. There is a minuscule number of people sideloading Android apps on their phones compared to the greater population.
Like I strongly believe that sideloading should be possible on phones, I don't even do it myself anymore but it can be very helpful and is part of what makes the Android platform fundamentally more open than iOS. I was VERY opposed to their original idea of closing off sideloading altogether, but having to mark it in your settings manually seems like a very good compromise.
IDK what you could possibly mean by saying it was "a copy of the BlackBerry" and further I don't see how that validates the claim that "Android itself was a reaction to iOS".
The actual truth seems to be that "Android's introduction of touchscreens was a reaction to iOS", which is WAY different than saying that the entire operating system was spun up just to compete with iOS.
Android was in development well before iOS was released, really the only big change was the touchscreen, which is obviously revolutionary, but that's a long-way from "Android is a reaction to iOS".
There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents.
Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop.
It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector.
Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage.
Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game.
Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could.
You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl.
Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off.
All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
The contradiction is that breaking up Google and Amazon would also destroy categories of business where the United States is dominant over other countries.
Prevent them from buying their competitors, for sure, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there are many neat ways to parcel these companies up into neat little independent business units. There is at best a very small number of ways to do this and the government will not get it right, just look at their most recent attempt with Google to strip out Chrome of all things.
Just to be clear on my stance,I agree that blocking the irobot deal was absurd. Context matters in a big way, clearly they were struggling and were basically alone in the market as an American company.
I think you also need to apply that context to Google and Amazon and consider whether the government would do so wisely.
The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.
The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad.
In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.
Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?
Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?
Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.
I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
You need multiple services whenever the scaling requirements of two components of your system are significantly different. That's pretty much it. These are often called micro services, but they don't have to actually be "micro"
That's the most nonsensical reason to adopt microservices imo.
Consider this: every API call (or function call) in your application has different scaling requirements. Every LOC in your application has different scaling requirements. What difference does it make whether you scale it all "together" as a monolith or separately? One step further, I'd argue it's better to scale everything together because the total breathing room available to any one function experiencing unusual load is higher than if you deployed everything separately. Not to mention intra- and inter-process comm being much cheaper than network calls.
The "correct" reasons for going microservices are exclusively human -- walling off too much complexity for one person or one team to grapple with. Some hypothetical big brain alien species would draw the line between microservices at completely different levels of complexity.
At this point, I'm convinced that too many people simply haven't built software in a way that isn't super Kubernetes-ified, so they don't know that it's possible. This is the field where developers think 32 GB of RAM isn't enough in their laptop, when we went to the moon with like... 4K. There is no historical or cultural memory in software anymore, so people graduate not understanding that you can actually handle 10,000 connections per second now on a five-year-old server.
Many developers started their career during the ZIRP era where none of the typical constraints of "engineering" (cost control, etc) actually applied and complexity & high cloud bills were seen as a good thing, so no wonder.
There is in fact software that consumes large amounts of resources for fundamental reasons that saves real dollars when it is split into different units for the purpose of scaling those units independently. Most of that software is not primarily dealing with the number of connections it has.
When people talk about scaling requirements they are not referring to minutiae like "this function needs X CPU per request and this other function needs Y CPU per request", they are talking about whether particular endpoints are primarily constrained by different things (i.e. CPU vs memory vs disk). This is important because if I need to scale up machines for one endpoint that requires X CPU but the same service has another endpoint requiring Y memory whereas my original service only needs Z memory and Y is significantly larger than Z then suddenly you have to pay a bunch of extra money to scale up your CPU-bound endpoint because you are co-hosting it with a memory-bound endpoint.
If all your endpoints just do some different logic and all hit a few redis endpoints, run a few postgres queries, and assemble results then keep them all together!!!
EDIT: my original post even included the phrase "significantly different" to describe when you should split a service!!! It's like you decided to have an argument with someone else you've met in your life, but directed it at me
I think I get your point: e.g. some part of your application absolutely needs the world's fastest NVMe as its local disk. Another part of your application just needs more cores from horizontal scaling. If you horiz scale to get more cores, you're also paying to put the world's fastest NVMe on each new machine.
Eh... I think you can achieve this in a simpler way with asymmetric scaling groups and smartly routing workloads to the right group. I feel like it's an ops/infra problem. There's no reason to constrain the underlying infra to be homogenous.
Another case I’ve seen is to separate a specific part of the system which has regulatory or compliance requirements that might be challenging to support for the rest of the larger system, eg HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance, etc.
Operationally, it is very nice to be able to update one discrete function on its own in a patch cycle. You can try to persuade yourself you will pull it off with a modular monolith but the physical isolation of separate services provides guarantees that no amount of testing / review / good intentions can.
However, it's equally an argument for SOA as it is for microservices.
There are some other benefits like having different release cycles for core infrastructure that must never go down vs a service that greatly benefits from a fast pace of iteration.
Literally one function per service though is certainly overkill though unless you're pretty small and trying to avoid managing any servers for your application.
I came here to say the same. If you’re arguing either for or against microservices you’re probably not thinking about the problem correctly. Running one big service may make sense if your resource needs are pretty uniform. Even if they’re not you need to weight the cost of adding complexity vs the cost of scaling some things prematurely or unnecessarily. Often this is an acceptable precursor to splitting up a process.
You can still horizontally scale a monolith and distribute requests equally or route certain requests to certain instances; the only downside is that those instances would technically waste a few hundred MBs of RAM holding code for endpoints they will never serve; however RAM is cheap compared to the labor cost of a microservices environment.
For those numbers, yeah you should absolutely do that. But you might want to host your database on different machines than your application because the numbers will likely differ by much more than a few hundred MBs.
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