Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.

Category: Tech (Page 1 of 2)

Technology, the internet, cloud, and digital society.

That gives me a great idea…

This video talks about the use of virtual sets for TV series.

A cheaper, better way to put together sets.

The first time I had heard about this being used was for First Man. Ryan Gosling is sitting in a model of the cockpit, and the sky beyond is projected. So the light on his face and the reflections on the helmet glass look real -as they are real – smudges, scratches and all. This is not something it would be easy to do with CGI.

Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, flying the X15 high in the athmosphere

All this got me thinking. If I got a 60″ 4K LED TV I could put it behind me for video calls, and then stream videos like this. Static images are so last year…

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Starlink – a humble proposal

It looks like the Starlink satellites are already causing problems for the scientific community. There are less than 1% of the planned constellation of sats in orbit but they have begun interfering with astronomical observations. And if the company gets its way the dozens they have today will grow to tens of thousands! 

Leaving aside the whole question of whether this is the best way to provide internet connectivity to the unserved (full disclosure I work for a company that is committed to alternatives like 5G), what could be done to help?

Two things spring to mind. First, to get around the light pollution issue the best location for the astronomer’s telescopes would be in orbit, above the problem satellites. And secondly in most of the world the principle is “polluter pays”.

My humble proposal then is that Starlink’s parent, SpaceX, should be responsible for providing a constellation of space based telescopes in orbit for astronomers. There is a lovely symmetry to this. SpaceX touts their ability to reduce the cost of access to space, and how their work benefits humanity in the long term. They are have the rockets, and are building/commissioning satellites by the bucket load anyway. And the astronomers would then get an improved platform for observations. 

The article does mention that there is no legal protection for the scientific observation community. But in most of the world, the western bit anyway, regulatory approval would have been conditional on an impact assessment. And it would be possible to make permission to proceed conditional on making sure that impacts are mitigated. Wouldn’t it have been great if Starlink could not get their project rolling until they had built dozens or hundreds of space based telescopes first?Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Going to the moon. Maybe

It is the week of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. And a bit surprisingly it seems like there may actually be a return to the moon within the next decade! Though there are technical, monetary and political challenges to be overcome first. 

The Economist has a good summary of the different national plans, and some of the “why”. 

The fun thing is that the new 2024 deadline is being driven by Trump. He would like to have this milestone with his name against it before he leaves at the end of a second term. But to do that he will need money from the Democratic congress to accelerate the original (and already challenging) timeline of 2028. Want to bet the Democrats will give it to him?

This is all part of the ongoing debate in the US and elsewhere about where to point a manned space program as the International Space Station’s end comes into sight. Bush said Mars, knowing it would never happen on his watch. The efforts there were never serious. It can be done. But the technical and logistical challenges are huge. It would demand a financial and political commitment that to be sustained for over a decade. I struggle to see how any single government will do that (from the US or any other nation). Elon Musk’s plans are a wild card. But even they have to be regarded as speculative.

Obama effectively killed the Mars plans. Instead the target was made an asteroid landing. And along the way the moon reappeared. But now Trump’s administration, with an eye to its legacy, says it will be the moon again. Fair enough. There are hairy logistical challenges to face as well though.

NASAs description of the “Gateway” to the Moon

The US probably has a rocket for the job (the delayed and over budget SLS). It should have a spaceship to carry astronauts (the delayed and over budget Orion). The gateway is under contract (even if the timelines are to be advanced and it will be smaller than planned). The missing element is the moon lander itself. 

If all the political stuff bores you, then there is the question whether the “Gateway” idea is a good one at all. NASA likes it as it is a permanent piece of infrastructure that will anchor the manned program beyond low-earth-orbit (LEO) for years. But if your longer term objective is Mars or elsewhere, then it may actually be a speed bump. 

In the case of going from LEO to the lunar surface, the delta-v required is 6.1 km/second (it takes 4.1 km/s to get from LEO to low-lunar orbit and another 2.0 to get from there down to the surface). By contrast, to go from LEO to the Gateway’s proposed halo orbit—and then to the lunar surface—requires a delta-v of 6.85km/s.

Put another way, a spacecraft could leave LEO, reach the surface of the Moon, and return directly to Earth for a total delta-v cost of 9.1km/s. To do the same mission through the Gateway, both coming and going, requires a delta-v of 10.65km/s, a 17 percent increase. This is one reason why Zubrin has taken to calling the lunar Gateway a “toll booth,” because it adds significantly to the energies needed to reach the Moon.

Personally I think the solution to these various problems would be to massively increase the (relatively modest) spending there is on space exploration and do all of these things – moon with Gateway, a Mars program and whatever else besides. In the US NASA costs the average tax payer about $55 per year (0.5% of a $10,500 annual tax bill). And in Europe the European Space Agency is about €10 per person.

I doubt there is much political appetite for that though. Especially as in the mean time the public seems to be largely happy getting its space fix in a cheaper, and far more spectacular form from Netflix, HBO, and Amazon…Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Stop it with the WiFi bashing

 

There is a bit of schadenfreude going on over the problems with WiFi at the WebSummit in Portugal. I am amused at this. It is a total red herring. I have been to a lot of big tech events in the last year or two. Huge ones like Mobile World Congress (MWC), and CES which have about 100,000 attendees. These are serious tech events, that have been running for years. And the wifi doesn’t work there either.

I am heavily involved in the planning for our presence at MWC 2017. A few weeks ago I had a discussion with the guy responsible for our floor demos. In jest I said I wanted him to allocate me space for something 50m long, 10m high, which would need 4MW of power. His only reaction was:

“Will it need WiFi? As long as it doesn’t need WiFi anything is possible”

The reality is WiFi is not designed to handle massive numbers of concurrent users as you get at huge trade shows. When you put thousands of people on the same limited amount of shared spectrum it will go down.

Perhaps Paddy Cosgrove actually believes WiFi is an issue. I think it is far more likely that the reason he took his circus on the road was it had outgrown Dublin. There is no conference venue in the city that can take 80,000 people. The RDS was a cobbled together option that had reached it’s capacity and was barely suitable. I have seen proper conference setups in Las Vegas, Barcelona, Austin, London, San Francisco. They are purpose built for these things. And they look nothing like repurosed 19th century show grounds.

It Dublin wants to attract the big tech events (and I think it can) then a real conference venue (start with something capable of handling 50,000 attendees, served by rail links) is needed. And not gloating over an ongoing tech problem that can’t be solved anyway.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Blockchain, IoT and trust. They all go together

I just had another blog post published at work. This one is in in support of an eBook I have been working on for a while – with Mads Becker Jørgensen and Michael Bennet Cohn of course! Lets call me the editor of it. 

The ebook is about some things that are “hot topics” these days – the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technology. Blockchain is often just thought of as something for crypto currencies. But the intrinsic nature of its distributed database, makes it an excellent platform for an integrity assurance solution. The eBook talks about that in the context of IoT.

In a lot of ways Integrity is the poor child of the security trioka. The other two being Confidentiality – is my stuff secret. And Availability – can I get to it when I want. Integrity is about do I trust it. Has someone tampered with it. These are the differences between “is the bank’s internet service up” so you can get to your money (availability), “have account balances and transaction details remained private” (confidentiality), and has someone changed my balance to read €0 (integrity).

Pretty important when you get down to it. But read the book for more information.

The important thing though is that this is a real application of blockchain technology. And it is in use today. It’s not just hype.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Missed opportunities

Grrr, I have a wailing and gnashing of teeth underway as I am missing the opportunity to meet and work with this amazing Engineer in a few weeks in San Francisco. I am not part of our team travelling to be there.

My elder daughter and I have started watching all sort of cool geeky stuff on YouTube at night. It was Chris Hadfield* this evening. Tomorrow I think it needs to be Simone.

* She was fascinated by the whole life on the space station thing. And I have been asked three times to explain why everything floats in space. Its great when you can stimulate curiosity like that**

** The one complaint – she was amazed when she saw a female astronaut. I need to beat that submissive attitude out of her.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Blogging for the man – sneaking one in

About once a month I post a blog post for work*. This week I had one posted on cloud business models. You can read the post if you want. It has been moderately successful, gaining views and conversions.

churchillPersonally I am chuffed though that I managed to get them to include a photo of Churchill as part of the post. Who would have thought we could get a perspective from the man in Cloud Computing?

I’ll have to see what I can manage for the next one. I do take requests as well. Stick something in the comments if you have an idea.

* The demands of writing for work are part of the reason why I can be erratic posting here.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

I don’t care that WhatsApp is now encrypted end to end. I am not going to start using it. I will stick with my usual communication channels of phone call, SMS, email (3 accounts),  Telegram, G+ hangouts, Apple Facetime, Microsoft Lync, Slack, Voxer, Snapchat, Tinder, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and nothing else!Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

Oculus Rift vs the HTC Vive

I have been humming and hawing for a while about  VR headset. I am excited by the technology and I have played around with it at work (2nd gen Oculus) and at CES (3rd Gen). Hey I had even played around with one of the original arcade VR systems back in the 1990s when they first came out.

The problem has been deciding which headset to go for – Oculus Rift or a HTC Vive. The descriptions of the capabilities of the Vive do seem better – full room scale VR, and it will ship with proper controllers. Though there haven’t been proper head to head comparisons yet but they will come.

The reality though is that the Oculus Rift has already lost this battle, and has a serious credibility problem. Less than a month from the launch date, they have amassed three pretty major strikes against themselves*:

  • They bungled the launch and seriously mislead consumers with their pricing shock. After leading everyone to believe that the device would cost about $350 they came in with a price nearly twice that.
  • They don’t have the controllers ready. Buyers have to make do with an X-Box controller which hobbles the experience. HTC are providing their handset with the right UI hardware from the start.
  • And now it appears they cannot even ship the headset. It is not clear how many people (other than journalists) got them, but it looks like most punters are being told they won’t get theirs yet. It is a launch that is not a launch.

The race for the VR business is just beginning, and already Oculus are coming across as shifty and a laggard compared to the competition. Much of this may be because – Oculus is backed by the deep pockets of Facebook, but neither has ever shipped hardware before. HTC for all its troubles in the handset business is experienced at this.

In the next year or two we may see the market discussion go the way of the console wars where Playstation and XBox sales figures are compared every quarter. But just as the PS4 soundly thrashed the XBox One in terms of sales, I think the same is in store for the Oculus – despite the price difference.

Once I have sold the kidney to pay for it, I know which one I will certainly be getting.

* And now Eve Valkyrie, which was a launch exclusive title for the Rift will be available for the Vive later this year. That was something of a killer app for me. Now it is coming to the competition that’s game set and match to the Vive.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblr

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