For instance in Australia, I’ll have to register with the ACMA (our FCC) and they require information about what kind of radio your using, where your ground stations are, and it actually creates a bit of a catch 22 here in Australia for non-experts. You need the ACMA documents to get the launch permits to get orbit information to get coordinated with Amazon Ground Station to get documents about your ground stations for the ACMA.
It’s definitely resolvable but it’s non-trivial and requires dealing with people who are familiar with the intricacies of a specific government bureaucracy. There’s no equivalent of “a Wi-Fi module” for space and despite the massive improvement in electronic systems that can survive in space for a while, you’re going to run into a brick wall of red tape the moment you want to communicate with your space craft due to how complicated the regulatory environment is in space for small operators. A great example is the fees involved, for a first time applicant it’s AU$135,000 to file the paperwork (plus extra if it’s not perfect and they have to work with you to actually get it accepted) to use a radio in space, that’s $135000 to say “I’m going to use standard s band communications at x number of watts power using a global commercial provider like Amazon and have nothing custom at all” and it’s sufficiently uncommon that there’s not even a form to fill in so you end up having to talk to people they recommend as consultants just to find out how to format the documents you’re sending them.
All of this is complicated gone for laser communication systems. If you have a ground station with appropriate airspace clearance (cause firing lasers into airplane cockpits is bad) which is actually pretty easy to coordinate as the air traffic regulations are used to putting in place all sort of “don’t go here during x/y hours” type notices and it’s not a big deal to them why… all the paperwork is done at that point other than your launch permits. No radio regulation, no ACMA rip off fees, no hassle at all. It’s just very difficult to get laser communication equipment at the moment as it’s still the bleeding edge. It’s rapidly growing as commercial providers bring things to market but it’s still getting through the chicken-or-egg phase of you don’t have demand for ground stations without satellites and satellites can’t use them without ground stations. But it’s slowly improving.
However for a long time cost will be prohibitive for laser comma. Despite the elimination of all the fees and bureaucracy it’s still much cheaper to develop your small satellite with off the shelf Software defined radio hardware which can cost significantly less money during development and prototyping phases because the cost of commercial “off the shelf” parts for space hardware is insane.
I’m looking forward to SpaceX getting starship flying because it’s going to utterly destroy this state of affairs by sheer market forces. The first year of starship flying commercial payloads once a week, will be able to put more hardware into orbit than we have in the entire history up to this point, including falcon 9 and the copious launches of Starlink satellites. When it costs more to file the paperwork than it does to build and launch your entire cubesat, ($100000 is very generous budget for a 3-6 month cubesat if SpaceX live up to their projected costs per kilogram to orbit… minus regulation costs) your going to see people push for the necessary regulatory changes to get us an equivalent to “Wi-Fi” but in space, an anyone can use this under x watts frequency allocation that will just open the floodgates to innovative small satellite designs and projects.
Could SpaceX say, “if you put your satellite up with us, you can use this nifty, cheap module to link up with Starlink satellites in orbit, then we’ll forward your data directly to your terminal; no need for any radio permitting.”
Nope. You as satellite operator are responsible for requisite communications permits as a pre-requisite for your launch permits, including Earth to Space, Space to Earth, and Space to Space, all of which are separate item and while you can put any combination of multiple ones of them in a single application to the regulatory body, you end up with separate permits for each. In that scenario You would have to get a bunch of information from spaceX in order to prove to the regulator that your not going to interfere with the operation of the entire starlink constellation (spaceX providing the hardware is not sufficient proof). What SpaceX could do is provide a module that connected to the StarLink inter-satellite laser links they are planning to add in between the StarLink satellites.
Like I said, there’s really only two scenarios to change this. One is that we get regulatory change, which the ITU (the people globally in charge of radio regulation between countries, the FCC and ACMA coordinates their respective countries compliance with ITU regulations in order to meet extremely well established treaty obligations, the ITU is over a hundred years old) rejected the need for in their last meeting, based on evidence gathered in the years before that, essentially this entire scenario will break down when Starship slashes launch costs and they will either rule with an iron fist or bend to allow ISM band style approaches in space. The other is if
laser communication systems come down significantly in price, the current cheapest I’ve seen is a one way (space to ground) link for “$10000 USD” list price and that wasn’t available ready to order and had no flight heritage so I’d be unsurprised if the price became $25k USD when it finally had some flight heritage. (One of the nasty secrets of aerospace engineering is how much Commercial “Off The Shelf” hardware is actually just built to order based on an approved design) and you need two way units to actually become cheap enough they aren’t more expensive than a radio permit is, which they aren’t at the moment since most people would have to both get the satellite hardware in the order of a hundred thousand or more, and also build a dedicated observatory with a sufficiently good telescope and powerful enough laser as their ground station which will probably set you back at least $50k unless you score as bargain or strike a deal with someone operating an experimental one.
> What SpaceX could do is provide a module that connected to the StarLink inter-satellite laser links they are planning to add in between the StarLink satellites.
Yea, that was basically the idea I was asking about, but like you explained, it seems laser links are expensive and rare still, so I guess that isn't an answer for at least a while yet.
Isn't that caused mainly by lobbying and so?
Some context. Generally speaking money in practice means power just because it allows lobbying and hiring good lawyers. And power basically is ability to have someone else solving one's problems.
"Lobbying" just means presenting your position on an issue. Money can help with making a persuasive presentation, to a point, but lobbying per se is never the cause of the problem. You can blame that on the people with way too much power who listen to the lobbyists and do as they ask—instead of actually doing their jobs and representing the interests of all their constituents.
This is an extremely linear way of looking at public corruption.
It's all well and good to say that politicians should act morally, but if you don't do what you're told, you won't get the money, and you won't keep the job. You'll be replaced by somebody who does what they're told. We're filtering for trash.
It's weird that you're even combining this with a defense of cash payments to politicians from special interests. You characterize bad governance strictly as a moral failure, but defend bribes as an mostly irrelevant rhetorical addition to the persuasive presentation of one's position.
> … if you don't do what you're told … you won't keep the job.
Whether you keep your job is determined by who your constituents vote for, not by lobbyists. Perhaps voters are sometimes too easily swayed by campaign spending, but that's a separate issue from lobbying.
> It's weird that you're even combining this with a defense of cash payments to politicians from special interests.
You misread. Spending more on your presentation can make it more persuasive because (up to a point, as I said) the end result is better researched and more polished in general compared to what can be produced on a shoestring budget. I was not suggesting that lobbyists ought to bolster their arguments with cash payments to politicians. Frankly I don't really care whether bribes are exchanged so long as the end result serves the constituents as a whole and not just the lobbyists. Accepting a bribe to advance lobbyists' interests at the expense of one's constituents would be an obvious example of corruption. As would doing the same out of personal preference without any exchange of favors.
It started like this! The first formal police force in Britain (and I think the world) was created to prevent theft at London docks. The first in the USA was born of people catching and beating runaway/errant slaves which were at the time considered capital.
What can you recommend as a balanced linux distro between the constant updates of arch on one hand and mostly very outdated package versions of debian/centos on the other?
There is of course Fedora. The latest is quite cutting edge, but you can choose when to upgrade to the next release. And there are security updates for older releases, so you don't have to immediately upgrade. Still, keeps you in the Red Hat universe.
This is exactly why I settled on Fedora after a few years on Arch, a few on Ubuntu/Debian/etc. Fedora is the best blend I've found. New releases about twice a year but you can skip a release if you want and upgrade every other release (or always stay on release n-1 which some people I know do).
Arch and Fedora follow the same conventions so everything on Fedora is where you expect it from Arch (this also makes much of the great Arch wiki applicable directly).
There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Arch, but Fedora is the perfect balance for me. I can't have my work machine getting broken and forcing me to read forums and mailing lists, etc.
Instead of being afraid of updates you should be able to rollback any problematic updates and be impossible to end up in a broken system because updates interrupted. The only distros offering that are NixOS and GuixSD.
That's a great start, but does not help if the data was also affected. For instance, running a new version might have upgraded a database to a newer format, or added new data with a format that the older version does not understand.
True, schema upgrades are an issue which hasn't been discussed[1]. Maybe some kind of versioning or pre-update backup in case of non-invertible data upgrade could help?
Obviously, perfect stability and perfectly up-to-date packages are not possible, but I think Ubuntu LTS is a good compromise. I've used Arch (which I enjoy using to improve my understanding of Linux w/their excellent docs), Debian, Fedora, OpenBSD, etc and I always find myself going back to Ubuntu LTS for my work machine.
Lots of projects also put out PPAs with frequent releases for Ubuntu, which are ideal if you need the very latest and greatest. Just realize that you're relinquishing root access to every PPA you add, so be very careful whose PPAs you install, and try to limit them to the extent possible (same applies to any apt repo, obviously).
You might take a look at openSUSE Leap. I use the rolling update variant Tumbleweed for my laptops. But my feeling is that they are working hard to find the sweet spot between stable and bleeding edge.
I used recently and it's impossible to use with keyboard only, you can try yourself.
During duty shifts I was helping our support. The incoming flow of requests had peaks of ~3-4 situations per minute, all as messages in Slack channel, needed to be responded in newly created thread each. I've come up with a flow, but I cannot avoid mouse at all.
Slack just does not have enough key bindings to be used without mouse! Slack was a bottleneck for me.
If you are not willing to invest into UX that's fine to have gateways for people to use whatever client UI they need. But you just cannot wear to hats by both removing gateways and avoiding investing into your client UX. Result is plainly awful.
Nothing personal, I am actually hate using Slack, sad to say that. I will avoid using Slack in current state at all cost whenever I can.
Good luck to you! Hope you will make your product better!
SlackHQ, we are software developers, devops and QA engineers, data scientists and IT support specialists - we are your biggest user base!
When we say it is not working, please, listen to us.
Please, do try using your app without the mouse and maybe then you will see what we are talking about.
It is not a baseless demand, our companies pay to use your service. If your codebase was open-sourced we would've fixed this issues ourselves.
Please, don't make us hate you. When you just started you were awesome, but now you are slowly turning into Atlassian.
Don't know if this is the case here, but if a mod notices something interesting and it doesn't gain traction, they will invite the submitter to submit it again at a later date and add a bump to keep it up a little longer to see if it gains traction then.
It's nice that there is some variety of interesting things here so that it's not all tech-related. Most hackers love cats I think.
Thanks for details. What do you mean, would you elaborate please?