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.
This is something that has been a source of frustration for me.
There are many wonderful and incredibly in-depth communities on Reddit. They only get that way with substantial investment by passionate volunteers who spend the time to moderate, create on-topic original content, and cultivate a community. Many of these bemoan when they appear on the front page because of the sort of attention it attracts.
Yet the direction that Reddit is going with its design and new features is all about optimizing drive-by clicks and shallow engagements. I understand why. That's more ad impressions, and it's more revenue. But it makes the site generally insufferable, and I suspect, reduces the quality of user-produced content.
And on the subject of content, that is what draws the eyeballs, what produces the ad clicks, what drives the revenue. Am I crazy to think that there is a complex, nuanced ethical relationship between those profiting from the content and those producing it? Providing a place to put the content has value, little point in creating content if you have nowhere to put it. But creating content also has value, little point in creating a platform for content if there is no content to put there.
You can see this play out in another format on Youtube (which for a platform is hell on earth as far as I am concerned, even if amazing content can flourish there). At least they are able to share revenue with the content creators, and many folks make a living creating content.
I don't begrudge Reddit for seeking revenue. I want them to not just sustain, but to flourish. And I have no idea how revenue sharing would work in the forum medium. And to be honest, I don't really care to get paid for the words I write there, or the other OC I share. I just want to know what the balance is going to lead to. I have no agency over my content.
So here's a similar question -- as they continue to push the slider further in the direction of more ads and more dark patterns, I can't help but ask, how much is enough? Reddit users are both producers and consumers. I started using Reddit well over a decade ago, and I have a decade's worth of content I have given them. Meanwhile, I agreed to give my eyeballs to some ads, where the word some has a hazy quantification. I get the sense that some number of ads value is being ratcheted up. And I never agreed to that. We never bargained. I can't get my eyeball time back. But I want my content back. The content that Reddit is getting revenue from.
I have the same question for paid online newspapers. I'm more than happy to pay real fiat money from my credit card or bank account for the news. But these news sites, beyond their paywalls, still show ads. Tomorrow, will they show twice as many ads? Maybe. We never negotiated this. I never saw ads mentioned in the rate card. No guarantees were made. Measuring the value of the content is qualitative and a fool's errand. I can quantify the number, type, and size of ads.
I guess the most important question is: do people even care? If there was a forum that users (customers) paid for with a modest fee, transparently described, instead of some exploitative ramping up of ads, would that be an alternative that consumers would to choose?
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