Apple does have a crawler of its own, which feeds into Siri's knowledge. But, there's no public front end to use it as a search engine, though there was up to about 2021 or 2022, provided as a bit of fun by some enterprising third party.
"Unlike Hubble, Webb isn't designed to be fixed by astronauts. But it can be refueled robotically. Zurbuchen says that 'once this telescope is deployed, I'm going to put all the effort towards developing that technology, and so within the 10-year lifespan, we can go refuel it'"
The astronauts had some serious, unexpected difficulties fixing the Hubble in orbit, and had to improvise. I'm skeptical that blasting a fuel coupling into space, and then trying to figure out how to connect it to a robot, will end well.
I don't know. If the fuel coupling design is compatible with robotic access, it might be doable. That would seem easier than the dozens of repairs that astronauts did with Hubble. I assume we learned a lot with the Hubble servicing missions, some of which will be applicable to robotic work. The full list of Hubble service/repairs is quite remarkable if anyone is interested:
For a good example of how such a mesh network can indeed function well, consider Ricochet, which once offered service in a few metro regions, including the Bay. The relay units were typically mounted on utility poles, by arrangement with the relevant agencies.
True, 128kbps wasn't anything that'd compare with 4G, but this was 1999. It wasn't great at handoffs either, but still, I was able to use it on BART regardless. Imagine, connected to the net - on the move!
I had Ricochet. It was OK, but slow. It used little units bolted under street lights, with a little spiral antenna pointed down. It was abandoned in place some years later. You could still use it to talk to nearby locations, but the connection to the external Internet was gone.
It's certainly possible to build a 900MHz mesh network, but it can't deliver much bandwidth. Email and SMS, yes. Voice, only on slow days. Today's web, no way. It would be like building a network for Blackberries.
One of the more successful off-grid comm systems is SailMail.[1] This is worldwide email, over 10MHz, for boats. Down at 10MHz, radio can cross oceans. This was a side project of Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems. He's seriously into sailing and holds records for crossing the Atlantic, sailing around the world, and such. So he developed this for the long-distance sail community. They maintain about 25 fixed stations around the world, and if you can connect to any of them over HF, you can send and receive email.
Out of curiosity, do you know if some units are still around? The Wikipedia page isn't clear as to what happened to the existing hardware after the last acquirer's liquidation - was it just left in place, did the municipalities explicitly remove them or repurposed them for something else?
Some were around for years, but I haven't seen one in a while. I suppose they were removed as part of normal street-light maintenance. There may be some nodes, somewhere, still trying to connect.
This give me hope.
I have been struggling with starting a small scale city wide mesh wifi... that shit is hard.
I don’t need the bandwidth, just some connectivity.
It’s pair really well with the bare bone internet that I would like to see back. ( HN being a fancy exemple of that )
Some are -- they pop up on local government auction sites (and even ebay) from time to time. The modems themselves are actually still quite useful, you can direct-dial between two of them using AT-style commands over the serial port, or they can be operated in a packet-radio style mode using tooling like strip: http://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-6.0/strip.4
(STRIP was actually in the linux kernel, though I assume long gone or defunct -- the only things I still have talking via Ricochet are 2.4-era)
I have a couple of the lightpole radios (they listen for the modems on 900MHz and speak amongst themselves on 2.4GHz) and scored a single tower radio (talks to the lightpole radios and has an ethernet downlink) and have gotten them to speak with each other, but haven't had time to figure out the route mapping steps -- IIRC the deal is that the packet routing path information is stored upstream and delivered to the downstream radios. No idea if anyone ever decoded that format.
I messed around with this a lot in the immediate post-Ricochet era in between flashing silver WaveLAN cards to gold... fun times. It seems like it would be entirely possible now to run a simulated node using SDR.
In that case, the spectrum was used as a replacement for the cable, in a 2 point system.
A mesh network is a completely different beast, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of nodes, spread around, and a good chuck of bandwidth being used for forwarding data between nodes.
It's not necessarily a limitation of bandwidth possible at 900MHz, it's a limitation of the normal equipment deployed and inefficiencies of mesh routing.
Those 900MHz analog phones were also usually low power, low distance, analog only devices with a few number of channels. Try having dozens of those phones all in the same room and see how useful they all are at once.
Both are ad-free, other than local community orgs and the occasional local independent business plug, and funded by listener donations. Big bonus: huge variety in their playlists, with the DJs playing whatever they feel like.
I didn't forget you guys, thanks these are all great and added to my combined playlist of radios. I didn't get around to CHIRP until this morning and was greeted with some Sisters of Mercy love as soon as I tuned in, that's a win right there. :) Much appreciated for pointers.
I rather wish the 3DO version of The 11th Hour had seen release, but the publisher canned the project quite late in development.
There, we had about an hour of video - on CD, it should be noted, not a cartridge - at 288x320 (using an interlaced display mode, which virtually nobody used beyond splash screens), with a perfectly solid 30fps. Left unregulated, the decoder yielded around 40-70fps. All ARM assembly, and a huge amount of fun to write. ^_^
No hardware acceleration, needless to say, other than page blitting to copy the previous frame to the current buffer.
Indeed - from the earlier, pioneering home computers like the PET and Apple II, through to the generation that followed, with the likes of the Commodore 64, VIC-20, and BBC Micro, the 6502 influenced a boggling number of programmers, myself included.
(And without the BBC Micro, would Acorn have eventually designed the Acorn RISC Machine, itself having since proven quite influential?)
https://www.waterstones.com/book/digital-design-and-computer...