I think it's the best of every world. Self contained, with an install script. Can bring up every dependent service needed all in one command. Even your example of "a simple script" has 5 different expectations.
The Outer Space Treaty is very very clear: anything launched into space is the responsibility of the country that launched it. Even if a private company payts for it and operates it, it's still the responsibility of the launching nation. Even if you launch from international waters, your operating company is still registered to a specific country, and the company is made up of citizens of one or more countries, and it is those countries which are responsible for the satellites. Those countries, in fact, have the responsibility to make sure that their citizens follow their laws and regulations. Unless you and your entire team are self-sustaining on that datacenter in outer space (maybe possible a century from now? Maybe not possible ever), you will be hunted down by the proper authorities and held to account for your actions. There is no magic "space is beyond the law" rules; it is just as illegal- and you are just as vulnerable to being arrested- for work done on a datacenter in space as work done on a datacenter on the ground.
Spy satellites maneuver so that no one can tell who launched them, or when. If these satellites can do the same, good luck pinning responsibility on someone on the ground. Hell, with Musk's low orbit network, he could probably even provide connectivity to them in a plausibly-deniable manner.
A data center on an orbit that is only known to the operators makes it difficult to use as a data center in a meaningful way - where do you point your uplink?
Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.
Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.
> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.
These aren't small things. You can't hide it.
> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.
No, this is not true. First of all, every nation is required by space law to publish the initial orbits of every object they launch, as part of that taking responsibility I mentioned earlier.
The US Government further publishes tracking on pretty much every single thing in orbit of the earth larger than a few centimeters, to help satellite operators avoid space debris. They do obfuscate the current orbit of their own spy satellites (only publishing their initial orbit), but other countries and even private citizens around the world keep obsessive tabs on these things (e.g. https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/). This sort of thing is easily within the reach of even a medium sized nation state that was interested in the investment: just need a couple of big ole radars and you can do it just like the US does. So if you do try and hide the resources of a nation-state can easily counter.
The solution to oppressive government is not technological, it's political. Prevent countries from going bad, retrieve the ones that have gone bad, it works out a lot better for everyone.
Bitcoin is a great example of something outside of jursidictions. Now look at how much BTC the FBI has seized. In practice, power is gonna power. The US, Russia or China can take out your data centre unless you play by whatever the rules are. If not physically blow up you need to trade, you need a country for ground operations etc. You need a downlink. Being in space meaning no jurisdiction is plain rediculous.
The goal of society was to encourage upward mobility and not the other way around.
Not that working class has anything wrong with it. Most of us are. Preferring to do white collar is perfectly alright. Considering the emotional toil rote work has on you
I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB.
I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.
The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no benefit in convincing people otherwise
Many small boxes
Pros:
- Cost. Small boxes cost less. Spend less or spend more as needed. If one dies, cheaper to replace.
- Efficiency. Scaling *down* saves money when load is low. Can schedule specific loads to specific boxes.
- Redundancy. Multiple VMS, OSes, network paths, etc. No single point of failure.
- Zero-downtime. Rolling deployments, upgrades means changes with no user impact.
- System bandwidth. More network links, cpus, kernels, disks, etc = more bandwidth, capacity.
- Performance resilience. A heavily loaded app on one server doesn't affect others.
- Immutability. "Pets" rather than "cattle" uses automation to reduce maintenance/instability.
- Scalability. When you run out of resources, adding more is easy, zero impact.
Cons:
- Does not work with applications that require large memory/cpu.
- Inefficient for apps that require shared filesystem access (as opposed to database).
- Requires smarter architecture to reduce long tail of cross-host calls.
- More transient network path failures, troubleshooting issues.
One big box
Pros:
- Allows applications which require large memory/cpu.
- More efficient for apps that share a filesystem.
- Simpler architecture.
- Fewer network path failures.
Cons:
- Large cost that you can't easily reduce as needed.
- Waste (in unused resources) unless load is constant.
- Single point of failure, for reliability and security.
- Upgrades require reboots. App goes down; possibility the server might not boot up properly.
- Single network, cpu, kernel, disks(s), etc become bottlenecks.
- A single heavily-loaded process, excess interrupts, etc can bring down entire system performance.
- Often treated as "pet" rather than "cattle"; creates more maintenance, instability.
- Not scalable.
Big box VM host running several VMs, hardware starts to fail, brings the entire setup to its knees. That wouldn't happen if you had each VM running on its own physical hardware, unless the UPS/PDU died...
VMs are able to live migrate these days. Single VM has a lot more uptime guarantee than a distributed system with multiple over the network communication layers.
Interesting, I was in a (minor) accident with a waymo and a cat in LA.
The cat survived, but waymo had no idea about the cat. It definitely could see dogs on the sidewalk fine, but cat crossing the street is just too small to notice
> The answer lies in recognizing that wages are just one source of income. People also earn income from investments....
I already can see the slant that, this whole article is going to be about. Capital holders are going to be the only people matter. Everyone else is trivial. i.e. the top 5% who hold 80% of all wealth in the world.
>Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits.
My father was one among those 94%. Stayed away from my family for more than a decade, only visiting us for 2 months every 2 years. Leaving with tears in his eyes every time. Qatar shouldn't be a point of comparison for capitalism. With no way for naturalization, a strong monarchy, and Labor oppression. I think it's the opposite of free trade capitalism as preached by the west.
What I got from this article was. More money for me, and none for the peasants, but that's okay because they or their work don't matter anyway.
The article is equating automation technologies to the laborers in Qatar and humans in General to the Qatari.
The comparison is bad and yes the article is ridiculous, but it does not argue for human oppression or capital accumulation in a small minority of humans, it argues that in fact such an accumulation will be meaningless.
> But there is a risk that those who own negligible amounts of capital prior to full automation will be out of luck. With nothing but their wages to survive on, they may live dreary lives, and perhaps even starve. However, at least for citizens of high-income democracies, this risk seems to be quite small.
And then the article goes on to explain, how historically governments have always redistributed wealth from rich to the poor.
The wealthy were incentivized to provide for the bottom of the population only because there was need for labour for the wealth to stay alive. but then, going by the article's analogy when there is no need for labour, there is no need for the bottom 75% as well.
I'm quite curious about this decision. There is no definitive way/benefit to "not leave the shores". You're only bypassing only one layer and paying 2x premium to give money away to the hardware builders (who are all out of shore anyway.)
is this a company specifically focusing on indigenous growth product. or is that irrelevant to their core product?
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.
Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
I think it's the best of every world. Self contained, with an install script. Can bring up every dependent service needed all in one command. Even your example of "a simple script" has 5 different expectations.
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