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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • I wish people (especially journalists) would get it through their skulls already:

    • Vehicles don’t communicate with satellites.
    • GNSS (like GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, or BeiDou) do not use two way communication.
    • The satellite can therefore not know the position of a GNSS receiver.
    • Instead the satellites send timestamps and their positions, the receiver uses that information to calculate its own position. If the system with the receiver needs to report its position to someone they typically use some form of terrestrial communication, like mobile phone networks.

    With that knowledge the comment by /u/imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com makes a lot more sense than whatever the article is trying to imply about satellite failures.






  • some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

    Name and shame:

    • Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
    • Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

    What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

    Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.










  • It may act on the whole market, but it doesn’t have the same impact on every OEM.

    It’s a bigger issue for Valve than the console competition, who have established supply chains potentially with fixed prices for certain terms or at least more significant volume discounts, and proprietary compatibility hurdles binding their customers, so they can sell hardware at a loss if they want to.

    If Valve sells the computers at a loss they run the risk of people buying them for other uses, without generating corresponding Steam profits.




  • Yeah I don’t know why anyone entertains the idea.

    Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you’d have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can’t keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that’s more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.

    Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.

    The energy I don’t know about really, but at least it doesn’t sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You’d have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don’t see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.