Thorry84

@Thorry84@feddit.nl

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Open sourcing the app

@kuro_neko have you ever thought about making the app open source? I’ve used Connect for a little bit and I really like it, it would be really cool if the app was open source. You practically don’t have anything to loose, as you don’t sell the app or insert ads and trackers. Lemmy is an open-source plattform, and many (if...

Thorry84,

Not really I’m afraid. ReactOS is focused on implementing the old APIs which allows software that used those APIs to function.

But my experience with old proprietary software from that era is that they were trying to do something which was hard at the time. So they wrote their software with lots of clever tricks and hacks, to make the thing do the thing. This can be as simple as manually invoking interrupts and using undocumented APIs, to setting up non protected memory and communicating with the hardware directly.

I’ve seen cases where the software would only run with a specific version of Windows 95 and only with specific chipsets. Even changing the cpu from an Intel to a Cyrix for example could cause issues.

I was involved as an intern with a project to fix something like this a long time ago. We chose to simply reverse engineer the hardware interface, put in a custom controller to handle it and write modern software. It took a lot of doing and we lost some features, but the original system was beyond saving.

As time went on more and more hardware abstraction is applied, so I would hope this issue would be fixed in the future. But the whole of the 90s and early 2000s is a big issue.

Thorry84,

Well Starlink is yet to turn a profit, so I’m not sure it has any place to actually exist. I think it’s mostly there to fill up the SpaceX launch schedule. Especially since the Starlink stuff de-orbits in like 3 years, so they have to keep on launching.

Thorry84, (edited )

Yes this helps with positioning and orbital decay. Almost every satellite has this, it isn’t special to Starlink stuff. I know Elon makes it sound like they’ve invented the wheel here, but much of what they do has been done in one way or another.

There are a couple of factors which impact the lifespan of these satellites:

  • Technological progression. As they refine the technology and techniques they need to update the satellites with the latest and greatest. This means of course removing the old satellite and replacing it with a new one. Especially in the early days (now) this is a huge factor in replacing their stuff.
  • Failure rates. This is mostly due to radiation, but may also be due to other factors. The network is only as good as its nodes, so failing nodes need to be replaced fast. Radiation hardening is expensive and usually adds weight. This is a trade off between launch costs, the number of satellites they can fit in a Falcon 9 and lifespan of the stuff. Things like solar storms can have a huge impact, as Starlink found out the hard way.
  • Fuel consumption. Exact positioning is important for Starlink and with their VLEO orbits drag is a big factor. The satellite have very cool engines that help them stay in place, but only a limited fuel supply. There is a safe minimum fuel as regulation requires them to de-orbit safely, which takes a lot of fuel. So just running it till it’s empty is a no go, they need a good safety margin. They also don’t want to start any kind of Kessler syndrome kind of deal, so old spots need to be cleared out before new stuff can go in.

There are other factors, but these are the big ones. Starlink say they are aiming for a total replacement every 5 years, but in practice it’s more like 3 years. This is mainly due to the first batches being more prototype like, getting nearer to a final design recently.

With the proposed 11.000 unit constellation and the 5 year replacement rate, they would need more than 1 Falcon 9 launch each week. The costs are literally astronomical and the revenue has been only a fraction of what Elon sold the investors. I would be surprised if the plug is pulled on the whole Starlink thing.

People seem to think Starlink is the first and only one to try this, but it has been tried for decades and almost all have failed. The only success is with companies targeting niches, where there is little to no competition and premium rates can be had. For example reporters in the field broadcasting from a van to a satellite to be live on TV was a big niche. So far Starlink hasn’t delivered on a lot of the promises made by Elon and is destined to fail unless something big changes.

Thorry84,

Hundreds of millions would be a lot. I think you overestimate the demand for something like Starlink a lot. People who can afford to pay and would consider paying for Starlink tend to live in well developed countries. These countries typically have internet connections which are better than wat Starlink offers. Statistically most people live in cities, which also typically have good internet. People who live in lesser developed countries and don’t live in cities tend to not be able to afford or willing to pay for Starlink. Usually there are other cheaper options available, even though they would offer less bandwidth than Starlink. So the total market would not be hundreds of millions.

Starlink also offers poor bandwidth and latencies compared to local solutions. People who just use things like Facebook would rather have a low latency and low bandwidth solution than a high inconsistent latency and high bandwidth solution. Starlink is getting better, but the latency, especially in regions with few base stations (which is their best use case) will be inherently poor compared to wired or local wireless solutions.

Starlink themselves thought they would have 20 million subscribers in 2022. In reality they managed just about 1.5 million. (It’s not clear how accurate these numbers are and if they include non paying customers) They could get more people on board if they lower pricing, but then they need more customers to get the same revenue. Since the costs of building and launching the satellites, managing them and maintaining the ground part of the system are fixed and high, they need to generate a lot of revenue to turn a profit.

There may be large parts of underdeveloped areas in the US for example where people have the need for high bandwidth internet and are able to afford it and local solutions are lacking. But you end up with only 50 potential customers for one area of which maybe 5-10 people actually sign up. As soon as you hit something like a town, local wired and wireless internet solutions will outcompete Starlink easily. In a poorer country there may be more people to be found in rural areas, but if you only make the equivalent of $5000 a year, you probably won’t spend more than $1000 for Starlink. For those people the budget they have for internet would be more like $50 a year max.

And remember even if Starlink starts to operate at a profit, they aren’t out of the woods yet. They have had huge upfront starting costs, much more than they expected. Those costs need to be covered before investers actually get anything.

All the while they are competing with local internet solutions which are being rolled out fast all around the world. Something like 5G is rapidly cutting into the need for something like Starlink. As soon as subscriber count starts dropping instead of rising, it’s all over.

Thorry84, (edited )

While the general message of this meme is true, almost none of the internet actually goes through satellites. There are huge cables all around the world connecting the whole thing. And while launching rockets and deploying satellites is really cool, I think ocean crossing cables are impressive all on their own. Imagine a cable not only long and strong enough to cross an ocean, but also resting on the ocean floor, exposed to the environment and expected to work for decades. And to think the first of these cables was deployed back in 1858.

Thorry84,

I’ve been told they are also looking into light, like inside the body. They are looking into that?

Thorry84,

You should absolutely wash everything you intend to put in your body. Not only are fruits and vegetables covered with things like pesticides, even when they are totally organic, they were probably fertilized with nitrates which are bad to ingest (and organic pesticides are a thing and not good for humans). And even if that isn’t the case, they grow those things outside like on the ground. There is a reasonable chance at least one animal has pooped or peed on them.

Thorry84, (edited )

The Milky Way galaxy is “only” 100.000 light years across, so any planets we see around stars in our galaxy we would only see about at most 100.000 years in the past. So it would be very unlikely there would be detectable life now, where there wasn’t 100.000 years ago. And even if there were, it wouldn’t be complex life.

The most distant exoplanet we’ve found to date is 27.710 light years away, so we see that planet as it was 27.710 years ago. We’ve had humans running round for at least a 100.000 year on Earth, so if there are any aliens on that planet we would see them.

Almost forgot the mandatory XKCD reference: xkcd.com/1342/

Thorry84,

That’s one way of detecting exoplanets, but not the most common one.

There are a couple of ways we can detect exoplanets:

We can see a wobble in the position of the star, as the star and the planet orbit around their common center of mass, which is offset from the center of mass of the star due to the mass of the planet.

Another way is to observe the light from a star, as the planet passes in front of the star some of the light gets blocked by the planet. By measuring the time and amount of light blocked, we can tell a lot about what is doing the blocking. The benefit of this method is some light passes through the atmosphere of the planet (if it has a significant atmosphere), by analyzing the spectrum we can tell what the atmosphere is made from.

We can also literally see a planet by direct observation, by blocking out the light of the central star, we can see light bouncing off the planet and observe that directly. This is hard, but has been done with several exoplanets.

There are more ways, see this Wikipedia article as a jumping off point for learning all about it: en.wikipedia.org/…/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanet…

Thorry84,

I really don’t see how. Yes there is life at undersea volcanic vents on Earth, but they don’t live like in the vent itself. It’s where the temperature gets lower there is life.

As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long and Venus has been way above boiling for millions of years. There are extremophiles that survive a little above boiling, but 400+ degrees I really don’t see how.

There is a chance in the atmosphere where there are parts with reasonable temperatures and pressures. But there is also a lot of acids floating around, which is sorta incompatible with life. If some photosynthetic life was present in the atmosphere, floating around and living on sunlight, we would have seen it by now. There would be seasonal blooms, similar to plankton in the oceans on Earth.

It’s cool to think about and I remember reading old sci-fi with Venus as a forest planet, since it’s so like Earth in a lot of ways. But in reality it’s dead dead.

Same for Mars I feel like. We might find indications life once lived there, which would be a huge deal. But as far as actual current life, I think chances are slim to none.

Thorry84,

It’s the temperature, a lot of chemistry doesn’t work at higher temperatures because everything is too unstable. There is simply too much energy messing things up. This is why having a surface temperature that allows for liquid water to be present is such a good indicator for life. A lot of chemistry for life as we know it works at liquid water temperatures and water does play a big part as well.

The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.

I’m pretty sure life on Earth evolved at the surface (or even in the atmosphere, it is thought lightning plays a part) and only adapted to use the vents later on. I’m not sure life could get started at those volcanic vents.

Thorry84, (edited )

Yeah it’s hard to even make out individual stars in other galaxies, let alone planets around them.

Only chance we have of seeing life in other galaxies is if they have built stuff like Dyson swarms.

Thorry84,

Remember Venus is a Earth like planet and even relatively close to the habitable zone (depending on your definitions and error bars). Just because it’s a planet like Earth, doesn’t mean it would support life.

voxel, (edited ) to privacy
@voxel@infosec.exchange avatar

is making the watching experience worse on and Microsoft Edge.

I didn't believe it the first time I heard abt it, since it sounded more like a conspiracy theory than a actual thing, but it's true. Google does add 5s timeout specifically to Firefox and Edge users when they try to watch a video on YT. If you want to know more about it, Mental Outlaw make a very good video abt it (Link: https://youtu.be/v4gXhmzQztE ). I think Google did this, to get people moving to Chrome since the majority will think this is a browser issue, nobody would expect YouTube to purposely doing this. In the attached Screenshot you can see that YouTube checks the user agent of browsers to see if it's Edge, Firefox or not. You can bypass this by changing your User agent to chrome.

Edit: Due a lot of people saying a lot of different things abt it, I want to say that I'm not 100% sure abt how exactly this works, there is a inbuild delay by Google, but who is actually affected, there are a lot of different opinions abt it. I wasn't able to verify this myself in LibreWolf, but this could be the case due my intensive hardening I did and this is just a result of what I found in the code and what Mental Outlaw and others shared across social media, if you got different or additional infos abt this feel free to comment and I suggest everyone ti also check the comment section.

@privacy

Thorry84, (edited )

I’m not even sure the code in this image is related to YouTube at all. Seems like a bog standard code copy pasted from somewhere. The video doesn’t really go into any detail anyways, except to show there is a 5 sec delay inserted, but the code seems te be related to ads and not anything about which browser is used.

This whole story is just made up, someone put two unrelated things together based on a poor understanding of the code and the internet ran with Google bad Firefox good!

Thorry84,

But would Antignocchi be considered an antipasto?

Thorry84,

And on Sunday the people in the US go to church like the good Christians they are. Afterwards they will abuse the staff at their local food dispenser, because they are pieces of shit that don’t even go to church.

Thorry84,

I imagine a real life remake of Aladdin where a thief kidnaps a rich girl and gets her hooked on opium. They lay in the drug house on a filthy carpet, out of their minds on drugs. A flee infested monkey eats scraps off the floor and yells at them. The thief forces the girl into slavery, always chasing the next high. Until the thief tries to blackmail the girl’s father. But the father’s business partner finds out and under brutal shariah law the girl gets beheaded. The thief is locked up and goes insane inside the dungeon, he talks to a blueish rock vaguely shaped like a man until he dies from dysentery.

Thorry84,

Star Trek going woke again, who would seriously allow women to wear clothes, let alone earn profit. Disgusting!

Thorry84,

Your fixed link is broken for me on Jerboa

Thorry84,

I think they are a millennial, those are all the calls they got the past 6 months and they didn’t answer any of them.

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