I can also recommend the book the TS mentioned, it is very good and after reading it you will understand regular expressions. It’s fine to use a cheat sheet if you want, cause if you don’t do it regularly the knowledge can sag, but the understanding is what matters. Also depending on the context, different implementations can have slightly different syntax or modifiers to be aware of.
I lent out the book to my brother once and he somehow lost it, so I never got it back. Don’t lend out book guys.
And remember not everything can be solved using a regular expression: xkcd.com/1171/
I’ve seen my cat once eat a pretty big mouse in my backyard in one big gulp. A cat could eat one of those chickens like the nuggets they will be someday.
Hello, my name is Hollywood. It has come to my attention you at one point liked this thing. For your entertainment I have shit all over this thing and would request you consume it.
No thank you?
Shoves shit down your throat - I SAID FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT!
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.
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.
They don’t tell us they are testing, it’s done at random. Reporting is policy, it needs to be done with every phishing mail that gets past the filters. It’s one of the big ways a company is vulnerable, an employee clicks on a link in a mail, opens something they shouldn’t and before you know it there’s been a databreach. I don’t think they are especially worried about the employee leaking his personal info, they are worried about targeted attacks and corporate espionage.
I’m sure there are a lot of false positives. Even though I work in a technical company, we have plenty of people who aren’t as handy with tech. People get training regularly and if one person reports a lot of useless I’m sure they will train that person extra. I think for a lot of people except maybe sales something like 80% of all mail is internal. And the other part is probably 50% repeating automated mails. So the number of mails that could even be phishing are limited. It’s a mid sized company with about 1000 employees.
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.
I actually unsubscribed from him about a year ago because his content became unwatchable. I was subscribed for a long time, I really like the dude and he does great stuff. Where he went wrong for me is pursuing a more aggressive release schedule, pushing out a lot of videos. This lead to the content being a bit lacking at times. Still good topics and perfectly produced, but really not very much info or depth.
He seemed to also be pushed to a certain video length, which led to a lot of filler. And by a lot I mean more than half of the video was filler. Maybe great for people with short attention spans, but repeating the same thing in slightly different wording 3+ times becomes annoying really fast. He was also not good at filler, using pretty much the same script and wording in each video. There is something to be said for style, but if I can predict 80% of the video word for word in advance, it loses incentive to watch.
Now I don’t blame him, he is just following the algorithm which is his job as a content creator. And some of the videos are really cool, especially on the rare occasion he does a bit of a deeper dive. And the dude knows his stuff, you just know he wants to tell more about some subjects, but doesn’t because it doesn’t fit in his video format and the audience he is targeting.
For me, I would put MVG in the used to be great, now is mediocre category.
Nothing to lose is maybe not correct. I’ve been in kinda the same situation before and chose not to open source my app. This was years ago, when I stopped with the project the number of active users had already been declining for years. Somebody contacted me to take it over, but I feel like he wasn’t serious about it. He just wanted to keep it running and be the owner, but not do any of the things needed to get it back on track.
There are a couple of reasons maybe not to open source it:
No code is perfect and people can get really self aware about that. I know I have had imposter syndrome in the past where I thought my code was shit, but people always complemented me on the result. Opening up the code can lead to people seeing how shit it really is and call you out on it. The code is probably fine, but it’s a legit fear.
With open source people expect you to provide a way to report issues and respond to those publicly, with many people adding their 2 cents and big discussions. If you don’t see it the same as they do, or your solution isn’t what they expected or you simply aren’t fast enough, it’s a problem. We’ve all seen flame wars and stubborn developers on open source projects, the drama factor is real.
Forks. Simultaneous the strongest and weakest part of modern open source software. On the one hand it’s awesome we can make multiple versions if the needs diverge or the original devs abandon the project. But on the other hand, it leaves you with very little control over the project. One case I’ve seen one dev worked on a project almost every Sunday as a hobby, the project was popular and had a tight community which grew a bit big. The amount of open issues grew and bigger tasks just didn’t fit in the original dev’s schedule. One of the community members was a good dev who just got laid off and had some extra time. So he forked the project and spent some weeks working on it fulltime, fixing a lot and expanding the project. The original dev wasn’t happy, it was his hobby and the community fragmented over people using the new version and the original version. Everybody was upset and the original dev called it quits and said talk to the new dev. The new dev however got a new job and also abandoned the project, with nobody left to pick up the pieces. The community was already fractured and people stopped using it.
Of course these are only some examples and people feel different about different things. But I can understand reasons not to open source stuff. I also haven’t mentioned the many many reasons why it’s a good thing to open source stuff, they exist and are valid as well.