[–] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (4 children)

To play devil's advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.

There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn't have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    Just us and these terrible men – for it is mostly men – who fell trees and spend other people’s lives as pocket change.

    Tripped right at the finish line. What a great way to turn a clear call to action against the leaders in charge into meaningless gender-based infighting instead.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    Strong disagree. I ran non-ECC memory on my server and services would unexpectedly crash maybe once per week. Over the span of a year I had two databases get corrupted that cost me a lot of time to fix. I tried swapping sticks but it happened with all of them. I switched to ECC memory and the problems disappeared. I needed more memory anyway and the price delta for ECC was about $100. I didn't have to swap CPUs or anything, AMD desktop CPUs and chipsets support it out of the box. ECC memory is absolutely worth it.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago*

    Not that I know of, at least not for our cubesat. The aerospace sector moves extremely slowly because of 'flight heritage' - basically, if it hasn't been in multiple long-term space missions before then it's an instant rejection. You might ask 'then how does any new tech get into space?' and the answer to that is 'it generally doesn't'. More amateur satellite developers like university programs tend to 'move fast and break things' but with an emphasis on 'break'.

    Besides this suborbital flight I haven't heard of anyone using carbon fibre frames before. I'm not a chemical engineer but I would imagine CF composites may have issues with outgassing, compared to metals. Outgassing can result in volatile compounds leaving suspension under a vacuum and depositing elsewhere, particularly bad for camera lenses and solar panels and such. Since the frame touches basically every part of the satellite, the risk here is high.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago

    The original comment couldn't understand why people were 'raising their eyebrows' at the price. I said because it's basically a luxury item. Whether there are other alternatives that are even less value doesn't factor into it. That's the 'door in the face' fallacy.

    Regardless of whether a Rolls Royce is more or less 'value' than a Lamborghini there's gonna be a whole bunch of people that are gonna look at that and say 'why would you spend X times the money when it gets you from A to B just the same as a Toyota Corolla'. That's the answer to the original question.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Sorry dude, I'm not paying $100 USD for a controller. The last controller I bought cost me ~$30 USD (GameSir T4 Kaleid) and has everything I need, including hall effect sticks. The steam controller having cool tech like touchpads and a gyro and whatever else is cool I guess, but I don't need or want that. No amount of stuff like that is gonna make me spend that much on a controller.

    So yes, the steam controller price raised my eyebrows, in the same way that basically all first-party controllers do. They're all crazily overpriced imo.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    A solar flare is just one example of many possible causes. There are plenty of other ones. You didn't touch on any of the others so let me explain - NASA reports on small satellite missions show that about 40% of satellites experience at least partial mission failure within their lifetime. Studies have shown the leading cause of satellite failure is propulsion systems, responsible for about half of all failures. This is not uncommon at all.

    Most altitude ranges in LEO still have debris from decades ago, the exception being below 300km, which is basically still in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, debris strikes have regularly produced debris that are flung into higher orbits, so even collisions between satellites in this range are dangerous.

    Edit: I also forgot to mention, the five day estimate (now three days actually) wasn't for a close-call, it was for a debris-generating event.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Collisions aren't theoretical, near misses are so common that there's an entire department at NASA dedicated to detecting them and warning satellite owners to adjust course, I know because we were contacted about a possible collision involving our cubesat. Prior to megaconstellations being deployed if humanity stopped adjusting satellite orbits there would be a collision within a month, now there would be a collision within 5 days. It's only a matter of time until both satellites on a collision course don't have the ability to adjust course (engine failure or no propulsion/fuel/comms). In the event of a Carrington-style solar flare there's a good chance a decent percentage of satellites would be knocked out, making this hypothetical into a reality. Further, we can only currently track objects down to about 10cm, but NASA estimates suggest about 500,000 objects exist between 1-10cm in size in LEO.

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