Have you looked into AWS Ground Station? I don’t know if it’s economical, or has enough locations for 24/7 access, but it might be better than once an orbit.
All ground station as a service are limited by radio licensing, you need to apply for transmit license to the country that the groundstation is located to legally transmit to your cubesat. Its not as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance
Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.
When I was about 15, my dad and I volunteered to help strip cable and waveguide off giant dishes in a decommissioned radio-free zone north of Boulder. The material was donated to a local amateur radio club and was mostly recycled as scrap metal.
I was given some wrenches, a harness, a few carabiners and some rope. I have to say, hanging off those bottom supports with nothing below me was one of the most exciting times of my life!
> If the fork() call succeeds, this means the OS has guaranteed that all the memory in the child process is available to be written over. i.e. it has had to allocate 'lots of memory' x 2 in total, even if only 'lots of memory' x 1 will actually be used.
That isn't the case anymore, at least on Linux and BSD. fork() uses a copy-on-write scheme so the OS only allocates/copies the parent memory space if the child attempts to write to it.
You jut repeated the parent's point while thinking you disagreed with it.
The point was that after you fork() in a copy-on-write scheme, the OS now has promised that more memory is available to write on than may actually exist. If the OS avoided overallocating, it would have to right there and then reserve lots of memory (without necessarily writing to it) just to be sure that you wouldn't run out at a later date.
