this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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I can't stand him but Starlink is so fucking awesome. Having high speed internet fucking everywhere is a game changer.
Eh, not saying starlink isn't good, but it's not exactly novel. It didn't take a genius to come up with the idea, which I very much doubt musk did, but the work that needed to be done and the service provided is impressive.
Musk did very little in that effort beyond paying the bill. I don't really think that's something to be commended for. Bill Gates could've paid for it and the result would have been identical.
I'm definitely not praising Musk, I'm just saying that I've been really happy with my Starlink dish. I don't like that I'm supporting him financially in this small way but it fits my needs too well.
I didn't think you were. The dude is so mind bogglingly rich that the concept of currency starts to unravel.
Bill Gates still doesn't get the internet thingamajig
Nah, he caught on late but he got it. He's been out of the game for a long time, so people don't remember when he was running MSFT. Guy was the real deal.
Nobody gets it, but that wasn't my point.
Until Elon decides to pull the plug on your access for ego reasons..
wow that was a really interesting article. the only thing impressive thing elon musk has done is getting the smart people together to form spacex, and i sure hope its out of his hands at this point so he cant drive it into the ground.
yeah not adding a water deluge system like every other launchpad ever was an obvious mistake. the pad (and tower) were mostly fine though, it just destroyed the concrete directly under the engines.
personally i find it interesting to watch them messing around, but i dont really support them. if starship doesnt work out, oh well, it was cool to see them try (and fail) anyway.
and elon musk is clearly a bad person.
Thanks for sharing this article. We're all at the mercy of the rich and powerful.
It's not gonna be high bandwidth though, just low latency over long distances. It's primarily for stock exchange information.
Mate, it's the opposite that's true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
I did more digging and:
"Traditional" satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they're the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I'm not a physics dude, so I don't know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there's a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn't a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The "genius" of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn't really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
Umm, high latency means slow reactions. I think you and OP meant the same thing, but you have the terms mixed up