Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people
/s (just in case)
Aceticon
joined 2 years ago
And Starlink satellites are small and in Low Earth Orbit, already inside (the very top of) the atmosphere so they have to use fuel to stay in place and de-orbit naturally when they run out of fuel purely because of atmospheric drag, so they last 5 - 10 years up there and then have to be replaced.
A whole data center would be much larger and replacing one every 5-10 years would be insane, meaning they would actually be higher up all the way out from even the thinnest part of the atmosphere, more distant from the surface hence with more latency.
"Black body radiation" is the physical process by which you "dissipate" (the correct word here is "radiate") heat in space.
In space you can't just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some "substance" that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there's incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it's a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that's part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
Time to put the *boom* in the boom.
I've lived in Britain, Germany and Portugal during the period since 2009 and saw no big improvements in pedestrian infrastructure beyond a few streets being closed to traffic and turned fully pedestrianised.
The biggest change I saw was improved infrastructure for cycling, rather than for pedestrians.
From what I'm seeing here in Europe, the fines for driving with a phone are seldom applied and outside a handful of countries aren't even that large.
Also infrastructure for pedestrians hasn't actually improved significativelly in Europe since 2009 - the big difference in the quality of pedestrian infrastructure between Europe and the US comes all the way back from the 60s or even earlier, so it doens't explain a change of trend on the US but not Europe in 2009.
I'm leaning more towards the "oversized light trucks are dangerous as fuck" theory since, well, they are and the trend to see more of those on the road hasn't happened in Europe but it has in the US.
I remember back in the day when they had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement to update mainframe software because of Year 2000 and they got paid a bundle for it.
Similar thing for customization of older SAP systems after SAP changed the language used to Java but those systems were still done in the old language.
So I expect that freelance senior designer-developers are going to get paid A LOT of money to come fix things in a few years' time, especially since in places with high AI adoption this is going to be way bigger in terms of size, complexity and seniority of expertise needed that either mainframe code updating for Y2K and updating customizations in old SAP systems.
Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they're mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.
That's the vicious cycle of "not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales" for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.
And then somebody changes the auto-formatter settings and all of a sudden every single file changed and committe appears as having most lines changes and you loose the ability find the real code changes between a version before that and the current version.
Guess how I found this out ...
Standardizing code format via that path only works well if you start it really early in the project and never change it after that.
(Also, it doesn't solve the problem of different software design styles)
Anybody who has worked through the life-cycle of large projects knows that as time passes and the software gets adjusted and expanded, code just accumulates problem and brittleness - especially because multiple different people change it and they tend to each do it their way, often without full understanding of the code base - not just at the code level but also at the software design level - and eventually that code gets so hard to change or fix that a whole new system has to be built from the ground up.
In my experience this happens maybe at around 5 - 8 years of age of a codebase.
So I expect we're headed for a spectacular industry-wide explosion because using AI code vastly accelerates this because for just about anything but small projects that can entirelly be generated in one go, AI isn't consistent in coding style, much less software design.
Throwing software engineers at it right now only works if they end up spending even more time reviewing and ajusting the AI code than they would if they did the work themselves, since having AI coding is pretty much the equivalent of outsourcing to a pool of random junior developers.
Most Android phones nowadays fail at
Switch to a degoogled OS like GrapheneOS or LineageOS
either because they're not unlockable or because neither OS supports that specific brand and model.
Not saying the rest isn't correct, it's just that "most" in there that in my experience is wildly optimistic.
Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don't work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can't just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.
In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can't have any DRM as "No DRM" is GOG's unique value proposition as a games store.
Steam doesn't make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that's not at all the same as "here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they're guaranteed to have no DRM".