331–340 of 365 posts
Light grey on white is horrible.
sneak@sneak.berlin
> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…
I agree with the social impact point. The wording reminds me a lot of what Zuckerburg's mission for Facebook was for the longest time: connect people and everything will be great. I think this is amazing and definitely going to change the world, but we in the tech world need to curb our hubris because it's bitten us before, and if unchecked, it will bit us again.
What this article didn't mention is the potential for this to significantly disrupt commercial internet monopolies in regional markets. If service is $45/ month for 100GB, a lot of people will drop Comcast in a hurry.
It didn't mention it because that's not true. This is targeted for enterprise, and there are no plans to sell cheap internet at the price the antenna costs.
> This is not just a game changer for people like you and I, living in relatively populated places struggling against greedy last-mile monopolists
So I was wrong that it was omitted, the article explicitly makes it clear that it's going to be a game changer even for people with existing internet.
Also it makes it pretty clear that the service is going to affect individual users and not just enterprises:
> Starlink means that you can go live in the woods in Siberia if you like
> some automakers will likely build them into the roofs of cars or trucks
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I don't think there is a treaty about it. These satellites are in space, not in the air. Around 100km usually is used as the boundary or, more practically, as high as your anti-aircraft missiles can go. It does not really make sense to claim everything up in a cone from your country to infinity. Multiple countries claiming different planets at different times would be weird. SpaceX got approval to launch these satell…
Wasn't some time ago a Chinese satellite blown from their orbit by a missile? I think current technology allows you to blow stuff up from sky quite more then just 100 Km.
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It didn't mention it because that's not true. This is targeted for enterprise, and there are no plans to sell cheap internet at the price the antenna costs.
My understanding is that this would become more widely available as it rolls out, and the article supports this idea as well: > This is not just a game changer for people like you and I, living in relatively populated places struggling against greedy last-mile monopolists So I was wrong that it was omitted, the article explicitly makes it clear that it's going to be a game changer even for people with existing intern…
There are existing solutions, like o3b to cover underserved areas with high speed internet. They pivoted to cruise ships because the equipment is too expensive. If you have a link other than this blog showing otherwise, please provide it.
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Oh that's great. Now I can better aim my Elon-Sattelite-fryer device. I already collected 25 old microwave ovens which I plan to operate as phased array to produce a collimated beam of microwaves directed at the satellites to fry their electronics. I might have a better chance If know the exact frequency their receivers are tuned to. Does anybody know more? The reckless littering of our precious LEO must end here!
For all the downvoters: it was a joke. But since this is "Hacker" News it should be the perfect place to hypothesize about potential attack vectors and penetration testing. Any rogue nation could easily endanger the whole enterprise and with the resurgence of nationalism those scenarios are more a matter of when, not if.
> don't miss out on this chance to see Elon Musk's secret plans for world domination before he goes full megalomaniacal evil Iron Man, when we can still naively look up in the sky and pretend it's nice
While I'm sure this is mostly not-that-likely, I totally agree that a discussion about the vulnerability of such systems would be intriguing. What kind of cyberpunk future are we developing as a check against the inevitability of some billionaire's less-than-wholesome private interstellar armament? I'm sure such a discussion may provide a modicum of comfort to Johnny Depp's ex-wives, at least.
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Out here it is purely economics and population density. I live in West TN and the nearest cell phone tower is 7 miles in a straight line from my house. There is one provider that works here, and a good signal is 2 bards, but usually, 1 is normal and things like 4g or LTE rarely work. I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.
> a good signal is 2 bards Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed... Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps. So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far sl…
If it's not sensible, I'm sure the speed will also be correspondingly slower.
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It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house This must be made up. I have been assured repeatedly on HN that Starlink is a visual non-factor, and that nobody would notice them in the sky, they won't get in the way of astronomy, stargazing, or just enjoying the night sky like humans have done for thousands of years.
Well, there's an easy way to find out who's right. Look at the website, go outside when it tells you to, and look up. Let us know what you find.
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Aren't the satellites in LEO only visible for a short time after sunset?
This landed earlier today. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10952 tl;dr: starlink and its competitors pose serious Earth-based observation problems across the spectrum (§§4.1-4.2) especially for faint variable objects which require long exposures and for which any missed pixels matter. The missed-pixels problems run around the clock, not just when the sattelites are visibly flaring, as do non-visible-spectrum noise problem…
Dead-simple algorithms to erase satellite trails are available for hobbyists right now: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foun...
And more complex ones for professional astronomers should still be super simple to implement compared to many of the algorithms astronomers have to wrangle with.
Just going to plug my Starlink tracker here: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.