ixfo

To be fair, I'd imagine that the air turbulence should keep the solar panel reasonably clear...

Generally cameras are reasonably rad-hard because the pixel size dictates a lot of the wiring size (and puts a lower bound on the process size). 3.5um pixels don't play well with 5nm features. Bigger features are generally more resistant to radiation fun.

The big problem I had with the remote was elderly users. Picking up an object should not have side-effects.

No Ethernet port on a desktop is just insane. I can see the sense in saying "your dock is Thunderbolt and Ethernet goes on the dock" for laptops, but on a dekstop?

More than allowed - in the EU at least, telecoms (wireline at least) is heavily regulated, and monopoly infrastructure providers (i.e. wire owners) are required to provide wholesale services and operate on those services for their own retail arms. Mobile operators have slightly less regulation in the way of competitition but there are similar requirements for vMNOS etc. So yeah, overall margins tend to be smaller and there's healthier competition overall, but telecoms is still flush with cash in general.

Keep the relevant enforcement agencies fed and watered for starters, and the rest goes to govt as a contribution towards the usual things that taxes pay for.

Matrix.

They're still managing to ship to the UK. You lose all the consumer protection (thanks, Conservative party!) and have to pay VAT and import dues (thanks, Conservative party!) but they're managing. They're still a fab company.

Not OP, but there are plenty of examples out there: https://www.astrobin.com/search/?q=starlink

This is an excellent summary of a lot of the kickback and risk for Elon.

I think if Elon had gone to, say, the UN and tried to start a discussion about this stuff more generally to establish some ground rules for SpaceX and others, it would have been much better received. It would've given a forum to those affected - communities around the world and astronomers and other satellite operators - where none exists. Some discussions around things like target albedos, orbital parameters, and constellation sizes could've been had before a single bird went up. This would've also made life easier for other operators now working out how to dodge the Starlink constellation on the regular.

But Elon is not that sort of person, which is the great tragedy in all this. Maybe you have to be a screw-the-rest, I'm-going-to-do-it kind of person to succeed as he has (or just inherit a huge pile of cash, or maybe both). But it strikes me that as a strategy he's opted to go it alone until regulators start to step in, which is unlikely in this industry for a while given the global nature.

I think it will take something akin to the blocking of satellite uplinks (that brought the UN into international satellite operations somewhat, and effectively designated such jamming as an offensive act of war) to actually bring regulatory scrutiny to bear. The loss of ground-based astronomy isn't a big enough issue - yet - to justify the engagement. But if these constellations get bigger and bigger and the impact gets larger and larger, then that impact will add up. All we've had so far is the "early warnings" from those paying attention to the early deployments.

I think Starlink and its competitors are a very important short-term part of the global internet access discussion, but it's not a long-term fix; constant satellite launches, maintenance, and deorbiting will not be viable cost-wise over the 20-40 years most fibre installations expect to be around for at a minimum. Fibre will eventually reach everywhere - wireline operators across the globe are seeing Starlink as a short-term thing which may paradoxically make it much harder to justify rolling out a proper fix to the hardest to reach, and which may cause governments to deploy subsidy to offset the risk. In the USA it's a bit mad and distorted because of the insane market that regulators have allowed, but in the EU/UK and most of Asia, govts are making sure full fibre gets to everyone (slowly, in many cases, but it is speeding up rapidly these days).

Just like nuclear, this is a perfectly good stop-gap. But the right answer is renewables - everyone knows it - it's just a matter of timing.

Agreed. I do know that ISO and at least two national standards bodies I work with basically do charge on a cost-covering basis (which is why pricing is largely tied to tiers of page count, which is a reasonable proxy in most cases to effort/time). But industry/hobbyists shouldn't really cover this cost - or should do through general corporation taxation.

To be legally compliant to install cables in the UK I've got £500 of standards on my desk. We actually pay our national body circa £5k a year for access to various industry standards we need to be able to hold suppliers to account. Govts should just properly fund this stuff.

It really should be that way - i.e. we agree that standards are a net good (and I don't think anyone would argue otherwise) for industry and society, so make them free at the point of use and fund their development through government.

This removes any commercial incentives that may result in regulatory capture - a big issue in some areas - and should (if implemented properly) drive investment in strategically sensible areas.

The profit that most national/international standards bodies just about covers costs, but none of these bodies are particularly expensive to operate in the grand scheme of things. Some already get partial funding from govts. Full funding is clearly the sensible model.

This is really where OLED is the right answer, I think. On smaller devices it's more or less entirely replaced 7-segs and similar displays. High contrast, high legibility, high resolution, but high cost. But if you're considering the cost of a monochrome/limited-colour OLED vs an LCD against the rest of the cost of upgrading a bus stop signage display the differential won't be a huge factor - labour, metalwork, etc will be. I've also seen high-resolution signage-oriented LED/LCD displays used for this sort of thing successfully.

Oxford's travel signage has always been a bit crap, though (and not alone, of course, in this - lots of places in the UK and Europe (and I'm sure US) have crap signage following similar patterns).

The amber matrices were at least clearly readable, but the presentation of information left a lot to be desired. Even on legible displays, constant scrolling displays that alternate between scrolling directions for different text displays for no good reason, and other such madness make it so hard to actually get information about stops that I ended up writing my own wrappers around APIs/website scraping to make a legible display on my phone.

This sort of thing should really be considered in terms of accessibility - for able-bodied people with good eyesight and a quick mind these displays may be legible, but a good % of your users are disabled, elderly, etc - none of the moving display, low-viewing-angle, small-text displays will be usable, but partially sighted/elderly people will generally make do with big friendly text that doesn't change except when it needs to.

Your shadowing comment depends heavily on location. In large portions (and heavily populated bits at that) of the world they'll be visible all night for 1/3 to 1/2 of the year.

Sure those big routers are costly but they're maybe the cost of a dozen satellites and serve half the total constellation size. Buried infrastructure has a 20-30 year guaranteed lifespan if built with fibre. Routers tend to last 10 years minimum. The opex cost of constantly replacing satellites is going to be pretty substantial.

Also Starlink doesn't have last mile costs as such (they just push that to the consumer) but they do have ground station requirements which will grow linearly with demand. It'll be interesting to see how they manage that as they grow. And of course, they're going to need those big routers too...

10,000 * 20Gbps = 200Tbps, and that all assumes that the traffic is going in and out directly from customer to internet with none of that capacity used for anything else like groundstation-to-groundstation hops or anything like that.

You'll find a *lot* more than 200Tbps of usable bandwidth in even a moderately sized national operator. At a small ISP (~90k users) we have about 25Tbps of capacity in our equipment.

A single mid-range carrier router can easily handle a dozen terabits; something like a Juniper MX2020 has 80Tbps capacity. A Nokia 7950 XRS-20e has 96Tbps. These are single racks worth of kit that deliver half the entire constellation's capacity.

Headroom is particularly important for usable high speed services as traffic becomes burstier. Statistical multiplexing gets you so far.

Now bear in mind that's with 10,000 perfectly working satellites and no degradation from 20Gbps based on spectrum availability and I'd be surprised if SL carries more than a million or two people - maybe 10 at the highest level.

Don't get me wrong, service for the hardest-to-reach million or two places on Earth with good latency and throughput would be awesome, though I think they have a lot of work to do on their impact on ground based scientific astronomy if they really want to launch and maintain 10,000 sats. But a mass-market service it ain't.

It's a little different with videos and audio, though. People place much more trust in them, for now at least, and people do generally still trust photos more than text, so there is a wider challenge as we become more able to suborn higher levels of truthiness for propoganda/memes.

The threat model for prevention of censoring Signal was originally developed around China, Best Korea, etc.

The original reasoning why WhatsApp used the same crypto/messaging format as Signal was in large part (aside from it being Good Crypto) to make it harder to selectively block TextSecure/Signal based on message content.

So the threat model is now changing (if you're trying to avoid censorship by the US govt etc) and that's going to be interesting to watch unfold. Matrix is much less susceptible to this being an existential threat, of course.

We had a veto, rarely used, if we didn't like anything. We were very poor in effectively making use of the powers we had within the EU. Of course, now we have none of them, so the EU can do what it likes without worrying about us or our pesky veto now.

Given Intel has stated now they'll consider outsourced fabs, it'd be a pretty sound bet.

Sort of. There are transports that make Tor traffic look identical to generic HTTPS traffic etc. So you can filter based on endpoints, but that's hard to do for unlisted bridges and the like. In terms of exits, most countries prefer not to block them.

In this case the pool boils off slowly enough from thermal load to let decay heat reduce to the point where air cooling is adequate. So it remains passively safe unless there is a sudden loss of water from the pool.

Engineering a very resilient pond does not feel like as complex a problem as engineering highly complex cooling systems to be resilient.

And clearing - i.e. what happens to match people to the vacant spaces left by those who didn't make the offer target - is almost 100% interview based, usually by phone and on results day.

It will likely be point to point optical networking (Ethernet/OTN) on these links. Once you get to the last mile, PON (probably GPON for now; XGS-PON is starting to come down in cost now, but is still probably 2x GPON generally).

Point to point kit is cheaper till you get to the customer-facing aggregation, at which point per-port cost of PON vs PtP is much more in PON's favour, and PON customer kit is very cheap from benefits of scale.

PON on the other hand isn't good for long range links. Even amplified (which is £££, and not normally sensible) it has quite a low range compared to point to point at the higher split ratios that make the cost of kit per user so attractive.

As someone who has been a customer once and a near-customer another time (both times on fixed line and wireless network tech), Nokia has fantastic, properly brilliant hardware, and middling software (though moving in the right direction - they're moving to open interfaces, NETCONF on hardware rather than just NBIs on big opaque NMSes they charge a fortune for, etc), and an utterly useless and highly expensive services division they could do well to lose.

Big, national telcos don't need "services" divisions like that and the few I know of who are tied into Nokia are desperately trying to get away from the services arm and that usually involves losing the software/hardware too. They're so heavily tied into the sales pitch that it's nigh-impossible to just buy a box now. If the services arm were competent they'd have a chance but stuff like their network design and project management services are just flat-out incompetent.

Compare that to a lot of smaller players (e.g. Edge-Core, IP Infusion) who will ship hardware with open interfaces, may provide NMSes and element management systems etc but generally with open interfaces, and provide as much support as you want to pay for, and for most small and large telcos that's the way to go towards.

If I were running Nokia right now I'd be ditching the bulk of the services arm and taking what's good in there into support and engineering, pivoting as quickly as possible to adopt open standards and interfaces, and getting involved with things like the Telecoms Infrastructure Project, CORD, et. al.

Their hardware is fantastic but their software sabotages it. This isn't an uncommon pattern in telecoms per se; one might go so far as to call it the default position, especially these days where software is the key part of most fixed/cabled networks, given photonics is broadly standardised below and even at 400G outside of long-haul coherent stuff. Nokia however seem to manage to suffer much more from this than other vendors of kit.

Compare with companies like Adtran who have okay hardware, okay software, and are just dominating the entire EU XGS-PON market despite Nokia's desperate attempts to claim it; mostly this is down to TCO for the Nokia stack being a bit higher, and the whole services/support/software arm being so huge and unwieldy. You can buy a $20k line terminal but need $50k of software just to turn the damn thing on.

Definitely not working ones. As someone who ran an AM+FM station for 5 or so years not that long ago, 99% of listeners were FM, with very few AM listeners.

In another life I did work on broadcast censorship circumvention into places like China etc; the main concern at the time was that shortwave radios were becoming rare enough to make the traditional big SW/AM TX near borders kind of irrelevant, so focus was moving to online - Tor, et al - because people actually had that tech.

Worth mentioning in the UK things are still DAB and there is no plan to migrate to DAB+.

Set anti-mass spectrometers to 105%.

I think it can, just not so often - there's a lot of empowered indies out there. ZA/UM and Disco Elysium springs to mind.

It's gotten better - I'm dual-running Riot/Matrix and Signal. Cross-signing has fixed the main issues affecting encrypted chat usability but there's still plenty of UI improvements to make.