We got ourselves some Hubble Trouble. The US House of Representatives isn't a fan of SpaceX and Blue Origin. And cryptocurrencies keep taking a beating.
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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And it is Tuesday, June twenty two, twenty one. Time for some tech news, and time for yet another cryptocurrency update. I should probably get like some music or a sound effect to go with that, so you might remember that. Earlier this year, the Chinese government began to shut down bitcoin mining operations within the country. It has continued to do that. And bitcoin mining involves running very fast computer networks to essentially guess a very large number before any other computer system is able to do it, and doing so, being successful in guessing that number, or which happens every ten minutes or so. Nets use some bitcoin well. China has been one of the top regions for bitcoin mining until recently. Bitcoin mining requires an awful lot of electricity to run those powerful computer systems they are, They are in need of quite a bit of electricity, and that can actually have a pretty massive environmental impact, and that might have factored into China's decision. But bitcoin also is a decentralized form of currency, and the Chinese government traditionally isn't super keen on stuff that you know, isn't directly under its own control. Anyway, there are likely a lot of different reasons that the Chinese government shut down bitcoin mining. The fact that bitcoin also is associated with a lot of black market activity maybe part of it. And now China is also requiring the financial sector to stop supporting cryptocurrencies, so banks and aim at services within China are all to halt support for any cryptocurrency, including any and all transactions through cryptocurrency that are made within the country. Consequently, the value of bitcoin has taken yet another hit. Early in the spring, the cryptocurrency hit an all time high value of nearly sixty five thousand dollars per bitcoin. Today, it dipped below twenty nine thousand dollars, although as I record this it is slightly recovered to around thirty thousand and granted, thirty grand for a single unit of currency is still a lot of money, but bitcoin has lost more than fifty in value since its height this spring, and some analysts are worried that more countries might follow China's lead and further restricts bitcoin mining and bitcoin transactions. That would likely cause the currency to suffer yet another hit to its value. And as Bitcoin's value drops, so do other cryptocurrencies. Ethereum, which had hit a high of more than two thousand, five hundred dollars earlier this year, was trading at around sevent d dollars earlier today, and the poor doge coin, which enjoyed a brief spurt of popularity, is hovering around sixteen cents per coin right now. Cryptocurrency investors are feeling the squeeze and they're all screaming hottle at the top of their lungs. Hottle or h O d L stands for hold on for dear life, and essentially it's saying, please, don't dump your cryptocurrency now, because that's going to drive the value lower and then my own investment will get even worse. That's essentially what hottle is. Ostensibly, it's if you hold on and you wait out the bad times, the good times will be even better on the other side of it. But really I think it's more of please don't make me regret this investment more than I already do. In related news, however, gamers might soon have something to celebrate because Bitcoin mining benefits from massive parallel processing. That's when you have a bunch of processors that are working together, that is in parallel, in order to solve specific kinds of computational problems. That's something that GPUs or graphics processing units do really, really well, and for that reason, bitcoin miners often scoop up GPUs as quickly as they possibly can, which reduces the overall supply and it drives up prices, which makes it harder for gamers to get a GPU in order to build out a gaming rig. But with the price of bitcoin falling and with entire sectors shut down due to government regulation, we're seeing a reduction in miners going after GPUs and it just doesn't make sense to spend an enormous amount of money purchasing graphics cards if the return on investment is starting to look bad. Over in China, the price of GPUs has plummeted. For example, the Asus g Force r t X thirty sixty had been selling for around two thousand eighty seven dollars in China but for the clamp down, and now it's being sold at around seven hundred sixty three dollars, which you know, obviously that's still expensive to buy a computer component for seven sixty three dollars, but it's less than half of what the price had been just a few months earlier. Hopefully this means that it will be easier to find and less expensive to buy a GPU if you want to build out a gaming rig. I kind of want to build out a gaming rig, so I guess this is good news for me, particularly since I don't have a bunch of money sunk into bitcoin. In space news, the Hubble space Telescope has been struggling this month. On June, the Space Telescopes payload computer, which controls the various scientific instruments aboard the Hubble and also monitors them to make sure that they're working properly and you know, they're in good health. Essentially, it went offline. NASA has attempted to restart the computer a couple of times, but with no success. This week, the agency tried to switch the computer from one memory module to another. It has four, each of them is an independent unit, and it's there for redundancy, but that also hasn't worked. There is a second onboard computer, again for the purposes of redundancy, so NASA might be able to rely on that while trying to restore the primary computer to operational status. In the meantime, the scientific instruments connected to the computer are in safe mode. The Hubble Space Telescope has been in service for decades, and the last maintenance mission took place way back in two thousand nine. The James Webb Space Telescope, which in many ways is this successor to the Hubble, should launch this November. If all goes well, and this particular space telescopes launch date has slipped several times already, I am very eager to see it actually enter into orbit. Also in space news, it's time to talk about the intersection of space politics and money. All right, So here's the deal. NASA has the Artemis program, which is supposed to send astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. The last moon landing with astronauts was in nineteen seventy two. The goal is to do this by twenty four, which is right around the Ding Dang corner. But the agency is to do this with very little in the way of additional budget. Setting a lofty goal with little financial support seems like it's a recipe for failure right anyway, Faced with this seemingly impossible situation, NASA chose to work with SpaceX to develop a lunar landing module that could land on and take off from the Moon's surface. It's pretty much what NASA could afford. Then the US Senate approved an additional budget of ten billion dollars to help NASA fund the development of a second lander so that the agency would not be totally dependent upon SpaceX, And all seemed to go well until we got to the House of Representatives, that's the other half of the US Congress. US there, NASA saw some opposition, with the House Science Committee skipping over supporting those extra funds. The heart of the matter is that NASA would look to Blue Origin, which is the Jeff Bezos private space company, and that you know, the representatives aren't necessarily a fan of using taxpayer money to make the world's richest man even wealthier. And NASA wants to pursue a fixed price contract, while Congress would prefer a cost plus contract. Fixed price means what it sounds like, the parties inside the contract they all agree ahead of time as to how much goods and services are going to cost right at the front end of the agreement, and even if the materials or the services increase in the amount that they you know, are required, the cost doesn't go up. The cost is fixed at whatever level it was said at, and same if the cost goes down, like if materials suddenly get cheaper, well they're still gonna cost the same because that was the agreed upon price. Cost plus reflects the actual cost of production, which can vary over time. So at some points in the project it might be that you're paying more per unit, and at other times you might be paying less. And in government jobs, the cost plus approach typically means that the government has some leverage when it comes to where these projects can happen, and that can mean jobs. And congress folks love to make sure that the regions they represent get lots of jobs. That's the way you get a lot of voters is you deliver jobs to that region. And that makes sense, but it might also mean that it might not be the best thing for the actual project. This is complicated because you've got a lot of factors that come into play. At the same time. You've got a race to meet deadlines, you've got the desire to be efficient with use of taxpayer money, you've got the desire to bring jobs to your constituents. All of these things aren't bad necessarily, but they don't necessarily work together in harmony either, and that's where we see friction. Also, there seems to be a lot of disdain being directed towards the private space industry in general, like SpaceX and Blue Origin. But really, once you strip away the veneer of the space industry, you've got to admit that it has always depended upon private companies. It's not like NASA is filled with engineers who are actually making all the rockets and stuff. They do play a big part in design and making the specifications and all that, but NASA signs contracts with various aerospace companies that end up making the actual stuff that goes into space. So, in other words, NASA has always depended upon the private sector, just you know, through government contracts. So I find it a little disingenuous to specifically point out the private space sector. They're just doing essentially the same thing, but in a different way. Over in Ohio. Here in the United States, we're also seeing politics, money, and tech conflict in another way. Over the last twenty years, various communities within the US have attempted to build out local community broadband infrastructure. Some places have been wildly successful. Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's a jewel in the crown when it comes to community broadband. Right now, in the US, the national metric for meeting broadband speeds is twenty five megabits per second. That's actually pretty low when you look at things globally, it's definitely low. When you look at Chattanooga, they're looking at ten gigabits a second. And there are many places that have tried to build, you know, out a broadband connectivity on a municipal or regional level, only to meet resistance within local politics. So why is there resistance, Well, it's probably because really big telecommunications companies would rather they're not be regional options for folks in order to get their internet service, because those regional options usually mean that the big companies are going to have to invest more money to build out infrastructure and to service those communities in order to be competitive with the local option. And competitiveness is something that the big telecommunications companies traditionally aren't big fans of, particularly when it comes to I s P s NOW. I've spoken before about how in my own neighborhood the options for internet services are really limited. There's only one provider that actually offers a service that's faster than twenty five megabits per second. Anyway, in Ohio, some politicians inserted an amendment into the state budget that would limit community broadband to areas that had less than ten megabits per second as a download speed. That means that would restrict communities that weren't even at the low national standard for broadband. If that community was between ten and twenty five megabits per second for downloads, they would be ineligible to set up their own broadband network. It also limits how communities could actually fund those initiatives. It would ban them from seeking federal or state aid. They'd have to just fund it locally. Such an amendment is um let's say, incredibly unpopular, and now the politicians who introduced the amendment aren't really willing to step forward and you know, vocally support it. There's a general avoidance to holding public forums to discuss the matter. This, by the way, is nothing new. There are other areas where we've seen exactly the same thing, where these sorts of amendments get buried into otherwise unrelated bills in an effort to preserve telecommunication companies dominance in a region. So we've seen it over and over again, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out in Ohio. There are some places where this just hasn't come out in the telecommunication company's favor, like Chattanooga. Now let's go underground, as in the London Underground, the famous subway system that makes getting around London a breeze, that is, if you're paying attention to all maps and stuff. Now, I love the Tube as it's also known, and I always mind the gap, but I need to get to the story, all right. So the Transport of London, that's an agency in charge of these things, has a plan to provide mobile phone connectivity throughout all of the London Underground by the end of two Much of the Eastern Jubilee Line, one of the many lines as part of London's underground, already has a lot of coverage. So to provide this kind of service, the Transport of London authority actually has to work with providers to build out the equivalent of cell towers underground, and collectively these provide uninterrupted service as you wind your way under the city streets of London, and considering that some of these trains feel like they've been around since the subway first opened, I think that's pretty darn nifty. Boston Dynamics, the robotics company famous for viral videos showing four legged robots either being mercilessly shoved or engaged in dancing routines, as a new owner, Young Day, the South Korean car company, announced it has completed its acquisition of a majority stake in Boston Dynamics. This was a process that began last December. Day has a division focused on mobility, and presumably Boston Dynamics will play a part in that regard moving forward, and I'm sure we'll continue to see more adorable and or terrifying videos of Boston Dynamics robots. In the world of virtual reality, Facebook saw a bit of a hiccup as a company that had previously agreed to host ads within the Oculus VR experience has since backed out of that agreement. The developer in this case is Resolution Games, which has a paid for title called blast On. So blast On is a game that players purchase with their own dollar dollar bills. Y'all and once it became known that blast On would also act as a pilot for Facebook's AD project. In VR gamer's got a wee bit upset, they provided let's call it feedback to Resolution Games on the matter. My guess is that people felt that it's not really cool to see ads in a game that they had already actually purchased. Some of them are may be likely concerned about Facebook's rather shoddy passed when it comes to data collection and advertising, and surely when the experience involves you wearing a headset that provides everything you see and hear, the idea of targeted, personalized advertising kind of gets pretty darn creepy. Anyway, the response was strong enough to commence Resolution Games to back pedal on the agreement, though the company says it may use a different free to play game as the testing grounds for ads. I think many gamers would be somewhat mollified by that choice. No one is super eager to see advertisements, but there does need to be a revenue model in place for a company to continue to make games. We'll follow up on this story as we see how the ad project unfolds, and finally have be twenty five birthday to the first person shooter computer game Quake YEP. Quake launched on this day, June twenty two. Way back in the title revolutionized the computer games industry. While there had been other first person shooters before Quake, like Wolfenstein three D and Doom, it was Quake that introduced not just three dimensional environments, but three dimensional characters as well. No longer were you running around and shooting the equivalent of a cardboard cutout, and the underlying game engine would become an incredibly popular one for video game developers over the following years. While I was never a big Quake player, I mean I played a lot of Doom in Wolfenstein, I definitely recognized the incredible contribution the game made to the entire industry. So happy birthday, Quake. And that's it for the tech News for Tuesday, June twenty two, twenty twenty one. If you have any topics you would like me to cover in future EPISO SuDS of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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