>AST SpaceMobile does not seem like they are operating a viable business model. They have been publicly traded for several years and the market seems to agree.
Why would the stock price for a pre-revenue company with massive capex needs and high execution risk do great in a challenging macro environment?
Back-of-the-envelope approach that should eliminate most branching:
int table[256] = {0};
void init() {
table['s'] = 1;
table['p'] = -1;
}
int run_switches(char *input, int size) {
int res = 0;
while (size-- >= 0) res += table[input[size]];
return res;
}
Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years.
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US.
AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation.
Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here?
> it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech
If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable)
> I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from
> What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks?
- falcon 9 - $2700/kg
- falcon heavy - $1400/kg
- ariane 5 - $9000/kg
> If the current one works - why would they?
This is just low quality flame bait. If any of the before-mentioned (US) companies succeed commercially long-term, they will transform world-wide internet access especially in less developed countries.
For clarification: as a European citizen, I want the EU to stay competitive in the space tech sector.
...and that's probably with a considerable profit margin for SpaceX and at least some amount of "we're happy for any launch that keeps the wheels spinning" subsidy for ESA.
Last time I checked launch costs, and tjose are incredibly hard to come by, SpaceX prices were the LEO-launch equivalent of Ryan Air's 20 Euro tickets. So hard to compare. Also, for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was already a couple of years ago competitive with SpaceX launches. And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
> for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was already a couple of years ago competitive with SpaceX launches.
Ariane 5 is in no way competitive against SpaceX in anything, and hasn't ever been. The only customers launching on it at all are the ones that have some good reason to avoid SpaceX, and the ones that bought launches early as a hedge. It has very real issues attracting any competitive commercial launches. This satellite constellation plan is, among other things, a way of bailing out Arianespace because they will fail unless they get more launches.
> And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
SpaceX launched 60 reusable F9s last year, of which 37 were internal Starlink launches (of which some had additional customer payloads). In comparison, Ariane 5 launched 3 times.
At the very, very lowest prices that Ariane 5 ever offered, they were close to SpaceX in only one specific very hard to find setup. They needed 2 Geo sats that wanted to launch at the same time and likely only the cheaper of those two actually had a price comparable to SpaceX.
Ariane was lucky that space launches were contracted so many years in advanced in the past. They had many years of contracts already lined when SpaceX was only just scaling and had huge backlogs.
Even by 2014 it was totally clearly to literally everybody in space, that Ariane 5 had to go. It had no future, even with all possible help, ESA and national launches and insentient launches from EU firms it cost would wildly spiral out of control.
That said, Ariane 6 is only a slight incremental improvement (in reality its mostly upgrades that were already planned for Ariane 5 anyway). It was designed to compete with SpaceX as it was in 2014.
Hence why European space people are already planning and pushing for more money to build a next generation rocket. Despite Ariane 6 being a new rocket then Falcon 9, its already outdated.
However Europe (and everybody else) was incredibly lucky that Amazon decided to compete with Starlink and to do so they had to basically buy every single available heavy lift rocket launch for the next half decade. Lucky for them nobody everybody outside of SpaceX sucks, so nobody sucks. Ariane 6 can compete with ULA even when they can't compete with SpaceX.
> And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
Its kind of funny when people claim things that are so easy to verify to be false:
SpaceX has already flown 2 commercial flights to low orbit this just year and its February. And their re-usability is not just for low orbit, they reuse the rockets if the go to GEO as well.
Ariane 5 flight rate was never more then 7 a year, SpaceX is planning more then 10 purely commercial LEO, MEO and SSO missions just in the next few months.
- Transporter-6
- OneWeb Flight #16
- OneWeb #17
- O3b mPOWER
- WorldView Legion 1 & 2
- O3b mPOWER 5 & 6
- Transporter-7
- SARah 2 & 3
- Ax-2
I'm sick of doing this, you get my point. Ax-2 is planned for May. You can continue down the list for the rest of the year.
So your statement is almost hilariously wrong, and totally wrong.
The problem is just that SpaceX is launching so often and so many Starlinks that people get confused by it in comparison to what was normal the last 20 years.
Its seems you have formed your opinion based on a bunch of Arianespace propaganda. The have been focused on spreading a a bunch of false narrative the last 5-10 years.
Falcon 9 Success Rate - 173 / 184 (94%) - Most of it LEO
Falcon 9 Max Payload - 22 tons LEO, 8 tons GTO when all the conditions perfectly align and then it still kinda sucks.
Falcon Heavy Success Rate - 5 / 5 (100%) - No track record
Falcon Heavy Max Payload - 83 tons LEO, 26 tons GTO
Ariane 5 Success Rate - 110/115 (95.7%) - 7 to 10 tons GTO, Most of it GTO
Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical, when it has barely launched anything in orbit. Ariane 5 works, extremely well. Self flagellation about EU space tech serves no purpose.
This is one of the most confused takes on EU launch that I've ever seen.
Your Falcon 9 success numbers are completely incorrect. The success rate is 100% on current models and overall having only 1 launch failure (or 2 if you count a pre-launch failure).
Falcon 9 launches primarily to LEO because that is where the market is. There are just very few satellites that want to go to GTO, but those that do generally launch on Falcon 9. It's launch costs are substantially less than Ariane 5, to the point that Arianespace is now thinking of rushing Ariane 6 to end of life sooner than planned to focus on a future reusable vehicle.
Falcon Heavy was primarily designed for the US DoD as it's primary customer.
Falcon family: 208/210 --> 99% (if you want to include AMOS its 98.57%)
> Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical
Its cost is unknown (so is that of Ariane 5), but its price is pretty well known. And costumers care about price and not cost.
> Ariane 5 works, extremely well.
Ariane 5 is end of live. It was incredibly expensive to the point where even Arianespace itself flew more missions with Russian rockets. It had a peak launch rate of 7 per year. Anybody with a brain has known Ariane 5 needs to be replaced since at least 10-12 years.
Outside of the Arianespace launched mostly Russian rockets, they just had a string of recent failures. Not to mention that they had issues with Ariane 5 that grounded the rocket for a very long time and the Swiss government had to provide emergency funding so they could make the launches leading up to Webb happen.
Arianespace will also consume more then 5 billion for the Ariane 6, a rocket that is mostly a slight upgrade over the Ariane 5 built with part that have been in development for a long time. This is more then the complete cost of the Falcon 1/Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy and reusability program have cost SpaceX.
The first step in improvement of European space is to not delude ourself of where we actually stand.
That Falcon 9 success rate is for the first stage boosters landing. The current gen of Falcon 9 is 149/149 for launch success which would be comparable to the Ariane stat.
Looking at both recently they basically have a 100% success rate.
What are you counting here? Booster landing success rates? Then Ariane has a Zero here.
According to Wikipedia Falcon 9 Block 5 has a success rate of 100% (149/149) for launches.
Also I don’t understand your comment when the parent talked about commercial success and that American space companies are/will be cheaper than Ariane.
> Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old..
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen
Thats not their job.
Their job is to build infrastructure for Europe, Tonnels, GPS, bridges, etc, like the massive tunnels they are building through the alps.
Now they decided thay just like modern military and government needs a GPS, they need satellite based internet.
I am sure war in Ukraine has helped sharpen minds there.
Their remit is not to invest in speculative projects ala hyperloop.
How is 5G mobiles connecting to sattelites relevant to EU?
Thats 100% commercial operation, if it is relevant, it's the job of European mobile operators to fund it, not for tax payers.
6 years ago the ESA and Arianespace were ridiculing reusable rockets, even as SpaceX was getting closer and closer to the non-RUD landing. Ariane 6 yet to launch, now trying to retrofit some level of reusability. Too slow, too stuck with their views...
From my perspective, the 40ms I get from Starlink is worlds better then the 900ms I got from my 128kb/s Iridium Pilot (now in the skip).
This direct to device tech is going to suck based on everything I’ve read so far. The radios in phones are so weak and undirected that getting 128kbps is going to be a challenge, let alone anything near what’s required to watch video.
Look at the gymnastics you have to do to use SOS on iPhone now.
Let's see. ASTS claims to have solved this problem. Apparently their satellites have 30mbit+/s throughput with regular 5G smartphones at <100ms latency. If this stuff works (big if), it's going to disrupt the cell tower industry over night and bring broadband to remote places where towers are too hard and too expensive to operate.
Also, I imagine 5G satellites will be of interest to the DoD.
Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is: EU competition is so far behind (even conceptually) that they are playing catch up with 10 year old tech instead of looking where the puck might be going.
Java is the goto language in more conservative environments (e.g. insurance, banking, government) and I never had to justify using it there.
In small shops/startups it’s different. Hype is a real thing and running your backend on “25 year old tech” often does not attract the right kind of people you need to have in this space ;^).
That being said, I’ve been shipping stable and performant backends on the JVM for over 15 years and I could not be happier with the state of Java in 2019.
The ecosystem is amazing. Tooling, too. Talent and jobs are available everywhere.
Also, there is an active effort to modernise Javas syntax and I think it’s going into the right direction.
I don’t have the enthusiasm for Java I did 20 years ago (the alternate for employment in Sacramento was largely C++ back then, mind you), but I think what you said is accurate.
Personally, I want to see Java retire, but downvoting people who are pointing out legitimate benefits, even if there are counter points to be made, seems rude.
It has been ranked the most liveable city in the world for some years in a row.
Cost of living is low compared to the European average; you can rent a medium-sized apartment for 600-700€/month.
Everyone speaks English. Co-workers from Spain never bothered with German, because they can get anything done in English.
Viennas public transport system is cheap (30€/month) and excellent. You can get anywhere in the city in a reasonable amount of time. Generally, all public infrastructure is in great shape.
The tech-scene is so-so. It's certainly not London or Berlin, but there are some startups if that's your thing. There are plenty of enterprise IT jobs in banking, insurance or government.
Education and healthcare are free and nature is close. It's a 1 1/2 hour drive and you're skiing in the Alps; 2 hours and you're in the Salzkammergut swimming in mountain lakes.
As a Pole who moved to Vienna from the UK, I disagree very strongly.
1. Most (as in, over 50%) young adults smoke cigarettes in Vienna. You will inhale the smoke basically everywhere, in particular inside most bars or clubs, but also on the streets. On a windless day, the entire city reeks with smoke.
2. The public transport may be cheap, but the quality is poor. Not very punctual and the trams/buses/trains generally lack conditioning which in the summer turns them into 40+ degrees sweaty, stinking meat containers. To remedy this, they were handing out deodorants at the stations (seriously).
3. You won't be getting a long-term apartment without paying ca. 7 months worth of rent upfront (3 mo fees / 3 mo deposit / 1 mo first rent).
4. Any kind of self-employment is prohibitively expensive unless you charge of the order of €100/h. As a result, if you want to hire, say, a low-end personal trainer, expect to pay of the order of €100/h.
5. The typical level of customer service is really bad and could be described as "the customer is always wrong". It reminds me of Poland pre-2000s.
I have no idea why it is considered the most liveable city. I see very few advantages over, say, Warsaw/Wroclaw/Krakow/Bratislava/Budapest except perhaps the general level of safety on the streets.
Vienna would be a lot nicer if they didn't still allow smoking in bars and restaurants.
"Just don't go to the smoking places."
A very large percentage of the adult population in Vienna still smokes tobaccco. When I was there in 2017 it felt like there were no non-smoking places.
Wow, when I saw Vienna mentioned the smoking was the very first thing that came to my mind. Funny to see others have shared the same experience. A real shame as it's such a beautiful place otherwise.
As a Italian who came to Vienna to study and started to work his 4th year (besides university) I can confirm those points.
The city is also quite clean, as there are a lot (but still reasonable) amount of trash bins.
Also you have a lot of parks, public "beaches" on the Danube and it's side channels (those which aren't used by ships) and the big Danube island in the middle, where you can escape from the city into nature quickly.
There are also a lot of nice woods and hiking trails around Vienna. I'm also owning a mountainbike, because I can cycle to a forest/nature reserve, with a lot of really cool (down hill) trails, at the city's border in half an hour from my workplace.
I'm from a small town from the alps, and will move back there because I'm not a city person and just love my hometown - but Vienna is the one (bigger) city I could imagine living in, if I had to (considering cities >1 million people and offering at least a metro and university).
> Education and healthcare are free
It comes naturally with a price, i.e., you probably have a bit more tax then in US I'd guess, but the benefits are really great, and even if I wouldn't need it now (no health problems, no real social/money) I don't have a problem paying those taxes. Also, at the end of the month I have >2/3 of my salary left over for leisure/saving/investing/... so I really cannot complain.
How international the workforce is there? and How hard would it be for a -non religious- middle eastern family to work/live there? from my experience in Germany it seemed with the exception of Berlin and Cologne people won't view you as an equal in the workplace until you work very hard to prove otherwise.
It is comparatively cheap compared to SF, London, NYC and Sydney though...
Everything is relative. Personally I find it a very affordable place to live for a number of reasons:
1. I don't need a car (~$10kAUD+ a year) because transport is sufficient.
2. Queen Vic and South Melbourne markets are very accessible which make buying fresh ingredients for home cooking very affordable.
3. Entertainment is cheap, tons of cheap live music acts, art exhibitions, markets, etc.
4. Public transport is cheap (~$20/month, more if you don't live in CBD though)
5. AUD is declining against USD, by mid-2019 it's likely to be around 0.65 USD so if you make USD it's great.
6. Rent is relatively affordable. ~$1600AUD/month get you a 1 bed place in the CBD.
Those are just the money factors.
As I said, it's not "cheap" but it's "relatively affordable" meaning that you can buy an awesome life here with a bit more money than traditionally cheap places but achieve a better $/Quality of Life metric.
€700 is certainly cheap compared to just about any US city but what are the tech salaries like? Even in small US markets a senior developer or architect can get the equivalent of €87-110k. If the highest paid devs are topping out at €65-70k that's an important point.
My sister lives there (though she doesn't work in tech) and massively prefers it to Budapest. Her main issues are that the summers are hotter than she find pleasant and that politics is moving in quite a right-wing/anti-immigrant direction (the latter was also one of the reasons she moved from Budapest).
Our politics don't represent us as a nation, if you are from somewhere else come spend some time in our coastal cities and you will be accepted as one of us.
Only the indigenous are Australian by heritage, the rest of us are immigrants too even if some people would object to that classification through their ignorance.
Being an immigrant doesn't make you less of an Australian, we are a country of immigrants and I hope one day our politics reflect that.
I object to being called an immigrant. I don't have any known relatives outside of Australia and I consider myself only Australian.
Everybody in the world ancestors came from somewhere else at some point in time (even the indigenous Australians). Does 10 generations of ancestors living in one country make you less of a citizen than 200?
(Global) notifications are sometimes the only sane way to deliver a message from one part of your application to another one without explicitly wiring them together. If you're working with some kind of plugin system they're also incredibly useful to deliver state updates to plugged-in components.
Once your codebase reaches a certain size, an event bus is a very powerful pattern that, if applied correctly, will keep your classes/functions/... decoupled.
Naturally, there is a huge potential for misuse, but that argument probably applies to any design pattern.
Degrees only matter for "serious companies" and are used as a filter by often clueless HR employees without technical background. As long as you can prove practical experience, you should be fine.
Your network, on the other hand, becomes more important as you get older. Hiring an unknown person in his/her 40s or 50s has a much lower risk/reward ratio than hiring a random developer in his 20s who will a) do whatever you tell him without questioning anything b) work himself to death and c) work for almost no compensation.
Stay away from oDesk and online freelancing in general. Most of what's outsourced online is low skill, low risk and low reward work (landing pages, analytics integration, etc). Almost everyone can do it, so suddenly you're competing with everyone on the planet instead of just a couple of 100-1000 freelancers in your city. One of your biggest advantages over 2nd/3rd world freelancers is your location, language proficiency and cultural background. Use it to your advantage.
Also, hiring is really tricky. No one has really figured out how to do it right and so you have these hiring rituals with IQ tests, personality tests, weird screening procedures etc. In the end no one wins, because interviewees have gotten insanely good at playing the hiring game and employers have become overly careful just not to hire a random guy who will mess up their code base in 6 months and then leave for the next gig.
My personal advice to the OP: if there are tech/startup/... meetups in your region, go there. It's a good starting point and it's fun most of the time! You can get to know some interesting people and that might open some doors!
One of the biggest problems -- speaking as a former technical hiring manager myself -- is that a lot of those "serious companies" have HR policies that explicitly forbid hiring managers from pursuing candidates on their own. They are 100% at the mercy of whatever recruiters find for them, which is an awwwwwwwful, horrendous situation.
Really? All the big corps I worked at had a referral program. Friend want a job? Send his resume to HR. If he got hired, some kind of referral bonus (500 to 5000 depending on job market)
Not the same as a direct hire of a friend but I know referrals were assumed better qualified than a random who applied online.
I think that was the point. Referrals has to go through HR, who reserved the right to review and reject the candidate. The hiring manager was not allowed to bypass the HR filter and pursue a candidate they wanted.
Not always true, I work for a fairly "serious" company without a degree.
What many other posters here has said is true, you need relevant experience in place of the degree. This is either projects you've worked on or jobs that are appropriate.
I don't get the point. Ad-blockers are available for Android and most non-tech people don't even know that ad-blockers exist. So for the large majority, nothing will change unless Apple ships with ad-blocking on by default (which they won't).
I also think that blocking ads is everyones right just as it's your right to record stuff on TV and filter/fast-forward ads. If business models based on advertisement don't work out anymore because of blockers (which i highly doubt), companies will adapt and start monetising their content in another way.
Apples search integration is a different story, though.
Why would the stock price for a pre-revenue company with massive capex needs and high execution risk do great in a challenging macro environment?