I would say don't buy this -- but if you had $45k to spend on astronomy, you'd either be extremely passionate and know what you were doing, or you wouldn't care about that money.
Some of the fun of amateur astronomy is that you can take incredible pictures with cobbled together bits and pieces, and rigs are entirely upgradeable and modular. I don't think you can upgrade this thing at all. I don't think you can debug it, tweak it, or otherwise modify it. Hell, it has me to believe that Zicral or whatever brand name for 7075 aluminum is entirely impenetrable.
I've had a blast carefully selecting bits of equipment and incrementally upgrading my rig as I developed new skills.
Also, for $45k, I'd do a fuckload better than this thing. Holy shit would I do better than this thing. I bet I could get better space pictures with $10k than like 12 of these things stacked on top of each other. And if anyone wants to give me $10k, I will happily bet $45k that I can come up with a better picture than this thing.
If you're interested in starting with astrophotography, check out cloudynights.com, the warmest & friendly astronomy forum you could hope for. And the best part about it is -- it's not trying to rip you off!
If you're looking for the Craigslist of astro gear, check out astromart.com
And if you want to see some amazing space pictures by amateur astronomers who spent way, way, way, way less than $45k, check out astrobin.com
As a former head of engineering for a mid-sized IoT company with many tens of thousands of devices deployed in the field using a competing product (no, not the AWS one), seeing this made my stomach churn.
This was my second biggest fear after waking up to a ransomware attack.
It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again. I will certainly put them at the bottom of my list for any other infrastructure I develop against in the future, and ensure that we have a documented exit strategy should it come to pass.
The idea of having just one year to develop against a new IoT core, test it, update all deployed devices, and then coordinate logistics and budget to do truck rolls when things invariably go wrong is really grinding my gears.
I feel for all of the startups having to deal with this. To the folks who are invariably scrambling, I really hope you either got advanced notice, or you're getting an extension far beyond what is publicized. Edit: The more I think about this, the more I want to believe there must be contracts in place for certain customers that extend the lifetime of this product beyond what is public. There must be.
IoT is not an easy business. Designing and programming hardware is hard. Supply chains are hard. Maintaining working inventory is hard. Building logistics networks for installation and maintenance is hard. Courting and explaining to investors why you don't have the profit margins of a pure SaaS business is hard. Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part.
Some of the fun of amateur astronomy is that you can take incredible pictures with cobbled together bits and pieces, and rigs are entirely upgradeable and modular. I don't think you can upgrade this thing at all. I don't think you can debug it, tweak it, or otherwise modify it. Hell, it has me to believe that Zicral or whatever brand name for 7075 aluminum is entirely impenetrable.
I've had a blast carefully selecting bits of equipment and incrementally upgrading my rig as I developed new skills.
Also, for $45k, I'd do a fuckload better than this thing. Holy shit would I do better than this thing. I bet I could get better space pictures with $10k than like 12 of these things stacked on top of each other. And if anyone wants to give me $10k, I will happily bet $45k that I can come up with a better picture than this thing.
If you're interested in starting with astrophotography, check out cloudynights.com, the warmest & friendly astronomy forum you could hope for. And the best part about it is -- it's not trying to rip you off!
If you're looking for the Craigslist of astro gear, check out astromart.com
And if you want to see some amazing space pictures by amateur astronomers who spent way, way, way, way less than $45k, check out astrobin.com