Flying Toasters, they're coming for you

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders, episode 90 with your host, Mike Wise and Steve Rogers Flying Toasters, they're coming for you, duck, they're coming for you. Do you remember this? They're worse than magpies. No, that'd be an interesting screensaver, do you actually in Windows 10 have a screensaver these days?

Do you remember on PCMag you used to be able to buy flying toasters? You could buy all sorts of screensavers in the good old days. But is it a thing now? Do young people know what screensavers are?

It's like cassette tapes, fax machines and screensavers. Well generally your screen just turns off nowadays, doesn't it? It just blanks off. Or goes to your lock screen for some more advertising.

I can't remember anyone telling me about their screensaver and how awesome their screensaver was. Oh yeah, Maze, Pipes, Time, you see a lot of the time. You see the Flying Text one in a lot of banks and stuff which gives you great confidence in their IT systems that they're still running a PC that has the Flying Text screensaver available to them. That could be a general assertion on their hackability if you sort of see a certain type of screensaver.

They probably spent $10 million to get a backwards compatible screensaver that works with Windows 10 so they don't have to actually upgrade any of their systems. Right. That's generally what happens, I think. Doesn't have a screensaver.

No, it doesn't. It just has a lock screen. Well the lock screen's kind of changed. So this week, obviously if you've been under a rock, maybe you have, maybe you're friends with the rock.

Who knows? The iPhone 10, not X, but 10, was released. The iPhone, we can't have the same version number as Samsung so we're going to skip one. No, they did in Angular, they said, oh no, it's their choosing.

No, well if you think about it, there's kind of like a series now because the watch, so the iPhone... Just more product lines to confuse the end consumer and make sure they buy a product that they don't need. Yeah. Apple released...

I mean, that's Apple in a nutshell, isn't it? Yeah, that's true. After all of the speculation, all of the rumors, even we've been sort of subject to that and I think this time around it's kind of disappointing because the rumors were kind of like spot on. You know, even the design of the phone, for heaven's sakes.

I'd rather just... I wouldn't mind it being a bit of a surprise. But anyhow, the iPhone X is here or iPhone 10, I think I was calling it X ages back but I was just listening to the rumors, what did I know? So they've released a new series of iPhones, so you've got the iPhone 8, there could well be an iPhone 9, you know?

They could keep the X out there. Well, it means if next year they do an iPhone 9 and an iPhone 11, it's going to be a bit awkward if they still announce that in September around, say, the middle of the month. The new iPhone 9 and 11, yeah. So they have the new iPhone 8, it's really a spec bunk on the iPhone 7.

It's the iPhone 7S. Yeah, but it's got the 11X bionic. It's the iPhone 7S, it's the iPhone 8 and then the iPhone X is, or the 10, is what should be the iPhone 8 but I maintain that they just don't want the same version number as Samsung. They're doing the thing that Chrome did a few years ago when they were in lockstep with Firefox version numbers, so they started to do a major version release every single release and now they're up to version 763 or something.

Yeah, it kicked off Tuesday for us and, or Wednesday? Wednesday. Wednesday, sorry. Tuesday for them, where they had- Tuesday for those people in the past.

They had a special announcement and they were able to, and I think it was really nice that they could hold it at their new Apple Park, much talked about Apple Park and- It's the first time it's probably been open, or bits of it anyway, open to journalists. They just got approval, yeah. I mean they did it just in the Steve Jobs theatre part, which is a very nice building somewhere in the park, very nice entrance way and then you kind of walk down a curved staircase into the actual theatre and then they've got their product demo area underneath the entrance. It's a little bit like the Louvre entrance in Paris, where it's got a very nice glass, almost sculptural entrance way and then you go down into the actual building proper.

Yeah, you've got an absolute beautiful entrance and an area where you can, it seems to just, you know, they've kind of got like a replica store but an area where they just lay things out and then behind that or forward of that you've got the actual presentation theatre itself. And I think it was interesting to listen to Tim, they had on the presentation an intro where they had Steve announce the Temple of Steve, the Church of Steve, everyone at the moment- Cult of Steve. Debating whether or not Apple's got a cult and they spoke about all of the new Apple store in Chicago and there's been much debate whether or not the Apple stores represent the new church. It's the new place to go and pray, Steve, where you can go check out, see and touch Apple stuff.

And then they got into the announcements, which was a new 4K Apple TV, which I'm excited for, that's pretty cool. Hopefully they've fixed the controller because you don't know which way the controller points by touching it, you always tap it on. But they had that and then they had the iPhone 8 and the 8 Plus and the Apple Watch Series 3, which they've now got. It's getting closer to, it's got some LTE function in it, meaning it can be a phone.

And I think the SIM is built in, they were saying, and so the software switched the SIM to whatever provider. And so, yeah, definitely a new Apple Watch. Now Apple Watch Series 3 seems to me, like I've stayed away from Apple Watches, it looks to me like this would be a watch worth having because you could actually leave home without your phone and still be contactable and have a watch. I mean, it's one step closer to Knight Rider, isn't it?

Didn't he have a watch that he spoke into, old David? No, Dick Tracy had a watch. No, Knight Rider spoke into his watch. Did he?

I'm sure he did. Dick Tracy's the most famous. Yeah, no, look, you Google Knight Rider and the first picture that comes up is David Hasselhoff talking into his watch. Is he?

Oh, there we go. Look at him. Well, it's obviously clearly... Beautiful 80s David Hasselhoff with hair and everything talking into his smartwatch, talking to Kit.

All right, so we'll put a link in the description. And of course, someone's done a screen for the Apple Watch with the Knight Rider skin on it. So there you go. All right.

So that's the thing. So if you're wearing an Apple Watch, you're probably happy about that and just be happy that there's a Series 3 now and you can probably sell off the other one and get your Series 3. It's distinguished. The only way you can tell that the watch...

Sell it off to that enormous second-hand Apple Watch market. Yeah. Well, you would be. But they hold their value.

Yeah. I don't know. The only way to distinguish that you've got a Series 3 is it's got a red digital crown. A fancy red button.

A fancy red button on it. So you want one of those. Anyway, so the new things that are coming out that's of interest to us is like there's the A11 chip, or they call it the A11 bionic chip. And what they've done is built in a lot of machine learning, bibs and bobs processing.

But looking at the equivalent power, like the A11 is now pretty much the equivalent of a MacBook Pro, the 13-inch 2017. So it's pulling the same Geekbench scores as having a laptop. Well, it would have to be, Mike, because you're essentially paying for that. Now, let's talk about cost.

Almost the price as we determined the other day. It starts at, in Australia, what do we work it out to be? There is pricing on the Apple Store for the Australia. Oh, I've got an Apple right now.

You'll hear me type this in. And we're looking for Australian. So the iPhone, what are we buying, an X10 or the 8? So this is your big debate, because you're in the market for a new phone.

I am, because my 5S is dying imminently. So for the starting price, the 64 gigabyte version for $1,579 Australian dollars, which is stupid. That's officially stupid price for if you want $256, because there is no $128, which I reckon is sort of the sweet spot in phone storage, $256, you're paying $1,829. You're almost paying $2,000 for a phone.

You could build a reasonable spec gaming PC for that price, even in Australia, where PC components are stupidly expensive as well. So the reason they've done it, of course, I wouldn't have been surprised if until two weeks ago, their prices were like $300 cheaper than that. And then Samsung came out with the Note 8 at basically that price. And so Apple went, oh, we can put our prices up as well, because Samsung has.

So let's do that quick. Even though the Note 8 is a much bigger phone and is more of a phablet than a phone, kind of stupid. Yeah, it's interesting how they've now got this diversity in the price range. And I think that's what's going to set people apart.

Oh, I'm just going to get the 8, or I'm going to wait, but I think most people will probably go for the 10. They'll get their fair share, but I mean, there's issues with it. It obviously doesn't have a headphone jack. And we spoke about it a few podcasts ago.

So you know, you fellow space welders are in the know about Qi. We spoke about wireless charging and that they were going to, they actually did adopt. That's one thing, that they actually are using the Qi standard, not some proprietary Apple thing, which wouldn't have been surprising if they had. So they are using Qi wireless charging.

And it's got the little cut out thing at the top for the face ID camera, which is it's got a visible light camera and an infrared camera and the earpiece speaker. And then the kind of notches either side, which is sort of not playing that great with a few apps. So there's some creative ways and means of dealing with that, that have been showing. And when they were showing it off in the thing, some of the games they were showing off were actually getting cut by the notch because it thinks the screen width is the full width underneath the notch.

And then the notch was cutting into it. So it would be up to the developer to code in the UI of their game to not be overridden by the notch. Probably what they're going to do is, if phone rotation equals landscape, margin left equals 20. That's what I would do.

Just put it in, fix it, who cares. So you're going to, so what are you saying, you're going to, as a programmer, code your way around the problem? I'm not even going to bother. I'm just going to put in a margin left of 20 pixels and who cares, I'm not going to deal with it.

Just pretend it's not, pretend it's full width cut out. Black background. I think, yeah, the CSS people are going, whatever, deal with that, you know, tough as nails, we can sort that out. So yeah, there's the 8 and the 8+, and it's wireless charging I think is the biggest thing of interest in there apart from the spec bump.

Obviously the iPhone X, which now has no front button and it's full width display, or edge to edge display as they call it, and it has a little notch at the top and it has various cameras and sensors and things for providing what would be 3D depth for face recognition. They call it Face ID. And the idea is that it sprays 30,000 infrared dots over your face. It uses multiple cameras to capture these, probably a time and flight calculation to work out the 3D projection, point cloud equals and add that to your machine learning, take a drink and you've got your face.

And then they store that information into the secure enclave, and that's used as a part of your new fingerprint or your new ID to get into your phone. And you can basically sort of, look at the, you've got to, there's a couple of things you've got to do. One of the things is you've got to have your eyes open, so it won't activate if your eyes aren't open. It also has a thermal depth map on it, so if you have severed someone's head off and use that, then obviously they're going to be a little bit colder than a normal head, sort of Game of Thrones style.

You can't use that. Not unless you do it straight away. Well, it's the classic, you know, cut the hand off, put it on the hand sensor. Yeah, you just got to do that.

You just got to do it quickly, so it's still warm. I was using that head. I wonder if more decapitations would occur because of this. Maybe.

Who knows? And so, it's a big mess. Is there going to be a statistically significant increase in the number of decapitations after the iPhone X? Probably.

No one's going to do that. I'll just, like, just have my hand, no one's going to, have my thumb. You can't even use that. Anyway, so that's really interesting, but the statistic they're saying is for thumb ID, there's a 1 in 50,000, this is a part of the conference and one of the data points from the conference, from the presentation, 1 in 50,000 chance of your thumbprint being duplicated, but in face recognition they're saying it's 1 in 1 million, so it's a more significant or it's an improvement overall as far as they're concerned.

So this is why I do it. So they're trying to now give you the data points as to why this would be much better, but basically if you move from the series 7, 8, 9, whatever that's going to be, to the 10, the 10 moves to face recognition. The 8 still has the ability to do AR as well, so I think that's still on the cards. There's plenty of new improved AR demos out there as well to prove the point.

So yeah, I like this announcement. I think there's a lot of people who are sort of doing the usual, oh, Apple's lost the plot and doing X, Y, and Z, but I think in terms of the Apple Watch and in terms of the lineup of iOS devices, iPhone, it gives everyone a chance. They've reduced the price of the entry-level phones, so now the entry-level phone to get into the ecosystem is cheaper than most other phones out there. So they were able to spread...

Barely. Yeah, well, barely, or they've done at least something to try and answer the question. There is a technology starting point, or there's a price starting point for everybody to get into the Apple ecosystem, I guess, is the way that they put it. Yes, well, so the Pixel 2 is set to be released beginning of October, so we'll see what comes out of that.

It hasn't been officially announced yet, so there's still the... I kind of went off it a bit. Some of the design leaks were great, and there was talk of it not including a headphone jack, but nothing... Are you happier because there are design leaks?

Do you think this is... Do you think Apple should actually kind of say, rather than let... Because they said it was this time around that it was the biggest leak ever. It could be...

It could go both ways, because you don't know if the leaks are official or not, although the iPhone ones pretty much were, and so the Google ones probably are as well, but nothing is official until some executive walks out on stage with it in his hand and shows it off. So we'll see about Google, but then you'll have all of the flagship phones, the Pixel, the iPhone, and the S8 to choose from, and then you choose. Yes, so they're talking about the availability now being in September, so there's a launch of September 15th, so now you should be able to put in your pre-order. That's probably why they're updating the Apple Store.

Yes, and I think pre-orders for the X will be October, a little bit later, so if you want to get your hands around a X, I guess it'll be in an Apple Store near you at some stage, so, you know, interesting. Apple's come out and done the announcement, and obviously for Apple TV, they've made some changes to the Store, so you'll now find that iTunes is now the orphaned son, orphaned child. They've gotten rid of a lot of functionality now in iTunes, which is... Now they just need to get rid of iTunes.

Now they just need to get rid of iTunes, and I think they'll be in a good place. But as far as the Store is concerned, you can now start downloading 4K HDR content. I didn't know there's actually, there's the Dolby standard, and then there was 10, we've spoken about HDR 10 before, and, you know, all of the different file formats we've spoken about before, but it's interesting to say they had been supporting this and trying to get the Hollywood into line to be able to support, like basically at no cost, if you've already bought standard definition and you wanted to go and get a HDR version, there's no cost to you to get it, which is a really interesting how they've achieved that. So I guess, you know, it's at a point with Apple where it's either, you know, they gave you the chance to, you know, play along, but now it's kind of like no more Mr.

Nice Guy, they're just making, you know, the movie companies supply their content, and, you know, they've got the eyeballs and the greatest amount of control since they've got the market to do it in. So anyway, Apple's released a new series of iPhones, and, you know, we'll see what comes of that. I guess AR is going to be the biggest thing out of this, and machine learning on Core ML, they've now got the processing power to do it in your hands. So yeah.

I don't know why they're banging on about AR, like a 3DS from five years ago could do AR. It doesn't need that much computation power. I think there's the additional lighting and various other things like animation and, you know, all the things that go into it. Again, do something with it!

At least VR is starting, you're getting doomed, fallout soon. AR is just... do something with it. Goddammit.

Besides Pokemon, although Pokemon was cool. Speaking of doing something with it, you may have been seeing floating around on your, I think it came on LinkedIn, or maybe it was on Twitter for a little while, there was a chap, Tate Brown, who's a UIUX person, he's obviously a coder, and he's put up on Medium an article, and it's also on FreeCodeCamp.org as well. We read great articles. And it was interesting because he basically came out with this headline-stealing article called How I Replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code, speaking of AI.

Then he proceeds to describe how he went about this. The Victorian police force basically commissioned a system where they had, I think it was like a total cost of $170 million. Part of that was license plate detection. And he basically goes through the process of how he can recreate this solution using a bunch of open libraries as such.

Now OpenALPR, in fact you can download and get, and you can also buy online the access to the OpenALPR. I mean, there's hundreds of image recognition programs. Hundreds of these things. The headline's a little bit disingenuous because he didn't replicate it in 57 lines of code.

He replicated it in 57 lines of code and probably several thousand line open source project which the government who spent the 50, 86 million dollars on probably wrote their own image recognition program because I suspect they weren't allowed to use an open source project because it would have had to have been verified and ensured to have worked before they could use it for law enforcement and sovereignty and well yeah, all of that. Even just making sure the actual, that it works so they can prove that they validated it that they're not going to send out bills to the wrong person. So yeah, it's a little bit disingenuous to say that, you know, it's cool that he was able to do it but it doesn't really mean that much, let's be honest. Well, OpenALPR have a basic plan of 39 bucks per month and you can get a high accuracy ALPR with the license plate recognition off any type of camera.

You've got up to five users, you've got a search, you've got books and all sorts of stuff. So you basically just upload an image and it will tell you the answer to the question. There's a cloud version which you can download and train it. In the OpenALPR GitHub repository, which is available, which is nice, the main .cpp file, because since C++ of course is 395 lines, that's just for the main, essentially the program .cs file.

So yeah, it's slightly more than 57 lines of code to do this sort of thing. I think what's interesting though is that quite often we see these things and then we try to work out what's often involved, like, what's not really, like, it'd be more interesting to revisit this article and talk about, sure, how much, like, do we give it a consulting golf clap? Surely someone... Oh yeah, most of that money does not go to the developers.

We know this for a fact. That money goes to the project managers and the managers of the consulting company and the planners and the ministers and all the other people that get kickbacks and then the people that do the work just get, you know, whatever, whatever's left. And they probably work on a fixed price project that changes three times. See Brisbane Council versus Technology One.

Love your face, Tate. Love everything you've done here. Five minute read. It's great.

It's a great article to read, of course. However I think Tate... But let us know when you successfully bid for a government tender. Tate would obviously like to be paid.

And it's interesting, like, you know, if you look at a consulting company, if they've got developers on staff, senior developers, principals, even juniors, and they're all, you know, resource based and costed out, you know, he's probably wanting to be on a wage of like $120 to $140 or something like that. You know, and then you take out his super and everything else and then you have to, you know, keep him employed and occupied. That's a significant amount of cost. And if you attach that against all the various projects of the consulting company in order to hire a person like that who is capable of delivering something like this, then you start to work out how you get to $86 million, like a million bucks is not a lot of money, in order to burn development time.

So you know, on average, most projects cost around $220,000 a month just in, you know, a team of developers getting stuff done. So it's easy to see how you get to $86 million. So this is more of a commercials discussion. So he does quite rightly point out all of the issues and certainly the technology that he used and the solution that he's come up with.

And also he gives a caveat to say, you know, how this concept would work. But I mean, it does shine a light on these problems. It's like the, we previously talked about, the left and right queue app that was commissioned that worked half of the time. So you know, this comes back to like, what did the money get spent on?

I mean, if you then, his argument was from a point of view of the cost per vehicle to the, you know, the value of the project. But that won't be how it will be calculated internally, I'm pretty sure. So yeah, a very interesting article, generated a lot of discussion on the LinkedIn's and various other social media platforms. And it was excellent work done by Tate to pull together something that, you know, does highlight the obvious impedance mismatch between the consulting dollars versus the solution delivered and the business outcomes that happens, and this is quite a regular thing.

So anyway, you can go to OpenALPR, there's a GitHub repository for it. You can go to OpenALPR, there's a cloud API, you can buy access to it and have fun playing with it. The API, playing with APIs, it's API economy, Steve. So guess what, Steve, lo and behold, there is now a plethora, a plethora, plethora, plethorous?

Plethora. Plethora of UI kits out there. And if you've noticed... Do you know what, Mike?

I kind of wish there was one more. Really? Well, you're just in luck. Wow.

Because our favorite, your friend and ours, Atlassian, who are not a sponsor, Atlassian... If you want to be. Can be. Let us know.

Come on, Mike. So Atlassian have now a new Atlass Kit. And Atlass Kit is a UI framework for delivering the sorts of applications that Atlassian wants to deliver. The ambition, the drive, the vision.

And it's the same as every other UI kit in existence. And it's the same as everybody else. It's got components. It's got nav bars.

It's got lots of documentation, most of which is described in text, which is odd for a UI kit. Have you got different kinds of buttons? Oh, yeah. Red and blue and yellow.

Is it responsive? I should hope so. So you can remove buttons. Let's just assume that it is.

If you resize... What was the library we saw where you resize the browser too often? Don't know. Oh, there's one you can put a trigger in if someone's there resizing the browser and you get it to flash up a nasty message.

Yeah. So Atlassian, if you've not noticed, they've been updating Bitbucket a lot. And Bitbucket recently has given you an opt-in, opt-out option for a beta to try out. That's gone.

And now... That's it. Today they've forced you to... You can now have to suck it up.

I don't like it. So therefore I'm going to love Atlass Kit, aren't I? Suck it. Yeah, you're going to suck it up.

You're going to like it. So there's new Atlass Kit. Go check it out. I have a link to it.

But I'll also have a link to another video. There's an excellent video, which basically talks about presentations by a guy at a conference around affordances and UI kits and why UI kits exist and what's the cost of a button. And he goes and drills down the politics but also the business behind why there are kits and why there's a necessity to have kits and so on. Yeah, so Atlassian have got a new Atlassian kit.

I think a couple of weeks ago we were talking about ReSharper and them having a kit as well. So I think it's just sort of in the wind at the moment for everybody to have a UI kit. I think it's interesting to... I love all the names people give components or the different types of components, but the components which are kind of like the same but a different twist on each of them.

Like, you know, things like the lozenge as opposed to label and things like that. Anyway, so that's just interesting. If you're using, you know, your JIRAs and your confluences, you'll probably see the change in the wind where Atlass Kit puts the menu on the left hand side and then you've got your, you know, glorious open space on the right hand side, I think, is their approach going forward. So that's super duper interesting.

Steve, just recently CIO.com came out with an article, which I thought was interesting, and they were talking about the, you know, everyone sort of says, oh, the job you'll be in is the one that's not invented yet, that sort of thing. You've heard that before? Sure. Sure.

Anyway, so they've come out with a bunch of new ones, so there's ones that are kind of obvious. Well, that means they've now invented them, so that I can't do them. No, well, this is, no, we've been talking about jobs for a long time on welders and things for people to do, well, future welders will be doing. And now there's one, there's the obvious one, which is Chief IoT Officer.

So that I am the CIOTO. So you could be the CIOTO. You can be the CIOTO. You can be a Data Protection Officer that comes with a badge, and a whistle, and a light to make attention.

And a baton to whack people. And a baton to whack people. DevOps, of course, that's just a cheap way of saying that the devs actually do the testing and the operations. It's that mythical full-stack thing.

It's that mythical, yeah, the full-stack thing. So we can get one person to do the job of three. DevOps Manager is becoming mainstream, says Sungards. You don't know anything.

It's a person who doesn't know what they're doing, managing a bunch of people that don't know what they're doing. It's strange here, though, they've also got Penetration Tester, who has been around for like forever, and they're saying, well, that's not a new thing. It's probably going to be mainstream. No, well, it's mainstream.

You could be at, you know, you could be at Mum's and Dad's group. And then, you know, someone asks you, and you can say, well, I'm a Pen Tester. As opposed to you. You write squiggles all day.

Yeah, well, you could be, yeah, you're just going to imagine a scenario in which you could be at a bar, and you go, I'm a Data Protection Officer, baby. Or, you could be at a conference, and say you're a Chief IoT Officer. You could be an Innovation Manager. You could be, like, yeah, that's pretty genuine.

Someone needs to manage that innovation, Steve. It just doesn't manage itself. You don't want that innovation getting out all over the place. You'd have to mop it up.

Yeah. It's horrible. You'd have to call on the Automation Architect. He has to come out and design how that automation works.

Like it needs to be done. So, you know, there's those ones. I think my favorite out of these was the Cloud Cost Containment Officer. It's the CCO, C-C-C-O.

So the Cloud Containment Officer obviously does the work of containing that cloud there, and keeping all of the cloud sealed in, all them costs. Well, you only need a Cloud Cost Containment Officer because the Automation Architect and the Innovation Manager get in a room, and then the DevOps people who don't know what they're doing put too much shit into one thing, and then it goes viral, and then the Penetration Test hasn't done their job, so they all get in, and these jobs just all exist to prop each other up. Which, I mean, that's IT. You don't have to be a Cloud Cost Containment Officer, you can be a Cloud Cost Containment Negotiator.

Slight twist. It means you get to wear sunglasses. Yeah, that means you just take a bat and ball to Azure and beat it with a stick until it gives you a better price. And Microsoft will say, no.

I reckon that you know how to use Amazon Cost Calculator. I think you're the only person in the room who knows how to use that page. That's it. That's your job.

That's an awesome job. Because, you know. You're going to be the one telling the people, no, you can't have that EC2 instance, you've got to have this lesser EC2 instance because it's cheaper. No, it doesn't matter that it's not going to be able to run the software, it's cheaper.

So you look, I'm containing the cost. You have to redeploy those 80 EC2s that you've just purchased because they were on the wrong series and they've released a new one which is cheaper and uses different storage capacity and the IOPS on that are completely different and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it's a thing. So to contain your costs, there is now an official titled role.

You can use it at work. The Cloud Cost Containment Officer. I think I'd like to be on the, what's the office kitchen? You could be the more low.

The Dish Fairy Officer. Yep, they exist, they're real. That's mum's role, Steve. Mum does cost containment.

Everyone knows, doesn't need a role anyway. Speaking of things going away, Cassini, we'll let you know about its disappearance but it's actually going to disappear. By the time you listen to this, it's gone. It's gone.

It's gone. They've just basically turned on the webcam and just said stream away baby and they're uploading pictures near real time anyway. So there's many. I mean, it's taken like 13 hours to get here.

So it's probably gone by the time. No, it is. It actually is already dead by now. We're about to hit five hours to go.

This is the Cassini probe currently in orbit around Saturn or it's not in orbit anymore actually. It's plunging rapidly towards the surface for lack of a better word. The cloud tops the planet itself. It was launched in 1997.

So pretty close to 20 years actually. October 15, 1997 was the launch date and September 15, 2007 is the last death date, I suppose. And it arrived at Saturn in 2004. So it took eight years, seven years rather, to arrive at Saturn and then has been merrily flying around, flitting around, flying past Titan and Iapetus and all of the other ones and Dione and Hyperion and et cetera, et cetera.

This is, if you've seen a fancy pants picture of Saturn in the last 20 years, it came from Cassini basically. It is now running out of fuel and so they decided to de-orbit the probe into Saturn itself rather than risk it land on one of the moons, some of which may contain the conditions for life. So they don't want to potentially contaminate any of these moons and so they are de-orbiting it and they're using the opportunity to get some data and some science about the upper atmospheres of Saturn as it disintegrates in its last dying moments as it reaches out to the little blue dot millions of kilometres away. Help!

It's very exciting. They've got all their telescopes trained on it. Oh yeah, it's all coming. So we've just ticked over five hours to go.

It's gone already. It's, yeah, five hours real time, in Earth time. But yeah, since it takes like 13 hours for light to get to Saturn or something, it's gone. Zed's dead, baby.

Cassini's gone. So that's a bit of a shame, it's one of the very early great probes, really, that's just been going for such a long time and has had quite a profound effect on the science and the knowledge of the outer solar system in Saturn. It's taken some fantastic pictures. It's been studying the hexagon at the poles of Saturn.

It took the Huygens lander, which was the first lander to land on an outer solar system body when it landed on Titan and conducted quite a bit of good science from there. It found rivers of liquid on Titan and of methane and ethane, actual like liquid methane on Titan. Not something you'd want to have a dip in, but interesting nonetheless, and lots of stuff. So it's a shame, but that's what has to be done and hopefully they'll probably get some science out of the final few moments as it plunges into the atmosphere and then breaks up and just becomes part of Saturn.

Yeah, well, how far down will it go? Like how low can you go? It won't be that far before it breaks up, just because of the thickness of the atmosphere and the speed at which it's going, and then it will just... Well, the friction would break it apart.

Yeah, it will break apart fairly quickly. So what will happen is the thrusters will keep the satellite dish, or not a satellite dish, the communications dish pointed towards Earth as it re-enters Saturn as much as possible, but eventually the thrusters will run out of propellant and it will just begin to tumble and as soon as that happens it will just break apart, because it will be travelling very, very quickly and Saturn obviously has a very thick atmosphere, so it won't take long to break apart. So it's currently sending back real-time pictures, we say near real-time, and eventually those pictures will just stop arriving. Well, you can kind of think from this day it's important, because like two or three hundred years into the future when you're sort of parked outside on the interplanetary tour bus, or your signpost, here's where Cassini went down for the last time.

Just a quick one. I've been playing with IBM's Quantum experience. No idea what I'm doing, learning how it works, but what IBM have done, they do have a RigiDig reel, you can use it, plenty of videos, plenty of lots and lots of YouTube content you can go and find out more about it, but it gives you access to a real-time quantum computer. If you've never used one it's as confusing as AF to use, but what they give you is a basic user interface to be able to put the various gates and then run the programming quotes and then they give you examples of different types of programs or problems to solve.

One of these is, well now the famous Grover problem, and this is to do with finding an element, a specific element in a random array of elements. So the classic example they give you, and generally for four elements it's 2.5 inspections or turns to be able to find the element of interest if it's randomly sorted. So the example they give is a bunch of cards, and they have a queen in these cards, so you go jack, twos, ace, queen, and then you sort the cards, and then you shuffle the cards and you say where's the queen, and generally a traditional program. Programmer would be well, I'm just going to loop or I'm going to you know, guess and loop and then extract from a guess So if you do a guess it's probably more optimal to guess and then say if you got it on the first try great So how many tries would take and take about two point five if you randomly move the cards, right?

This is interesting the and it makes you kind of go Well, how the hell did it do that and then they've got examples and they teach you how to use the machine and then you run your you get execution time on the machine you press the run button it goes off and runs it comes back with an answer and It's able to find the Queen in one turn and bugger me How does it do that? And that's the bit you'll try scratch your head on for a little while as to all right Well, it's quantum it finds the Queen before you start it. It actually had run all options beforehand. It's like Okay, I don't know how it did that but that's cool.

And how can I use it as an API? And so there is an API and there's various other bits and pieces for it So I'll keep exploring it, but I'll give put a link if you're interested in playing with it There's the quantum experience dot NG blue mix net And you can register and get an account on it. There's quite a few people coming on there's forums and things and there's people trying to explain how it works, but you can get your hands on a rigid edge usable Quantum computer IBM's provided it in the cloud and you can do stuff with it It is real and it does do the freaky thing of Finding the Queen in a deck of shoveled cards with one turn It's that's nuts and not many people explain it, but I'll put links in the description So you can go do it for yourself and then be freaked out by how the hell did it actually do that? That's kind of amazing and cool.

So and it's not it's not sort of this is not science fiction This is kind of like the world in which we live in which we don't very much understand the quantum level how things happen But that's just the way it goes. So really interesting. I'd like to say it's good. It does combine normal computing with Quantum computing and they there's plenty of documentation you can go and read about that.

So it's very exciting. I liked it I actually tweeted out my first experiment I ran it just was like how did it do that and then trying to teach myself on the forums the process of How a quantum program works, but they give you five qubits to play with And it's just freaky how it can do stuff. It seems to just work out everything at once It's like running a loop and it's worked out all the answers Immediately, it's weird. Anyway, that's that's kind of fun Media Steve I've been watching and they've just released and I know I'm late to the party expanse to It's awesome.

Whoo The Rossin ante is out there doing its thing. It gets lots of holes put in it It's not really a spoiler because they've got that in the ad but Again, just amazing quality amazing Everything is just a joy to watch watch it with headphones on the audio is even better this time and the plots pretty decent So, yeah, I'm absolutely Enjoying that as I'm making my way through I will also give special mention I was watching I had been binging on YouTube John John H K. There was a guy who put a compression a video out of 30 days of traveling across you know that they do sort of sped up video of time on a ship of a Container ship and this guy actually is a officer on a merchant ship Traveling around the world doing amazing things. His whole channel is just quality and he obviously it looks up to other youtubers And you know puts a lot of that time and effort into his videos, but he sits there and explains every inch of the ship So if you're really into merchant seaman boom-boom Then he's he's got an excellent YouTube channel.

I'd urge you to sit there. You can just sit there and watch every video It's just enthralling to watch like even from the you know, how do we? You know How big is the engine? All of the terminology that's currently used he explains everything from you know, how did the anchors work?

Someone and so forth so that that's excellent. I love that So if you wanted to tell the space world is about the new job that you're working on in the future How would you do that? Just make up a silly job title and then write a blog post and everyone reads it and everyone's like yeah I'm gonna do that job Alternatively head over to www.spacewilders.com You'll find the show notes for this episode all the other episodes We've done with links to all the stuff that we've talked about so you can play follow along with the space welders at home Why not join win with your friends? You can subscribe to the show on iTunes stitcher and soundcloud just do a search for the space wilders podcast while you're there leave a rating and a comment Tell your friends and a share and a tweet and a smoke signal and a raven message You can follow us on twitter twitter.com slash space Walters facebook.com slash space Walters Mike's on twitter twitter.com slash Michael underscore wise.

I'm on twitter twitter.com slash the skeptical dev Make sure you check out our merch store that's available on the website. You can also buy a sick badge and Finally if you have questions comments or feedback email us info at space Walters calm So guys this episode 90 over and done with we're on the way to 100 We'll have to talk about where and when the space welders will sit down in the country Probably somewhere in Brisbane, Australia. So if you're in the region, we'll let you know and we'll try and catch up with everybody when we do the episode 100 so Looking forward to that. We'll keep doing more Welders as we are busy, but we will try to get them out.

So it's Mike out Steve You