partial_accumen

Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.

There’s an old joke in the telecom world:

Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?

A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.

The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.

“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.

The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it’s Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.

From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.

Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.

First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people

The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”

There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.

1. $1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.

2. $500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].

3. $1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.

Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.

A couple of case screws and an old EVGA power supply and I’m yours for the night.

A plastic snap-case from the 90s, and old EGA video card, and a power supply is the best I can do.

“That’s them, officer, right over there”

Ohio also has a town named Versailles. Imagine the worst way to pronounce the name of the historical palace in France. That’s right, they pronounce it (VUR - SAY- els).

The only way Kobo really locks you down if you buy books from their store, which I wouldn’t recommend with any eReader.

What do you do when there’s a particular book you want to read (and you want to buy it to make sure the author is compensated for their work), but its only available from one of the big 4 ebook ecosystems (Amazon Kindle, Kobo shop, Apple Books, Google Play (or whatever the hell they renamed it to this week))?

I had one such book recently and specifically chose Kobo shop as it seemed like the least evil choice between those four.

$110k/year and still paycheck to paycheck with an unreliable car?

BI and Data Governance are generally pretty good career paths right now in the IT space.

Do you live in a HCOL area? Have you explored the differential about moving to a MCOL or LCOL area and how much impact that would have on your potential salary?

But I’ve also never understood why anyone works longer than they need to if they have the means to live comfortably in the first place.

In the USA one of the best reasons to keep working is the healthcare gap before Medicare kicks in.

Also, when you’re approaching “early retirement age” you’re likely at the peak of your earning potential. Working 1 more year could be equal to 3x or 4x a single year of retirement spending.

Another thing happens when you’re still working but you don’t absolutely need to. You recognize working is optional and you can take the risk and push back on work you don’t like. It gives you the power to take the risk. If you get fired, you’re already set up to continue life without working. This makes the work itself usually much more pleasant/tolerant so there’s a lower desire to quit early.

High end IT in the last 20 years has paid exceptionally well. Lots of these workers saved enough and simply don’t need to work anymore.

The price point for electric cars in America is 25-30k. 70K is mentally ill

Chevy Bolt MSRP is $28,995.

Being an American wanting an electric car must be a nightmare! Not many options, and all of them are too expensive,

Chevy Bolt MSRP is $28,995.

Though given how it scales with voltage I can’t think of of any use cases where weight saving is that desperately needed where it would be viable…

It may not be a weight savings benefit but potentially cost savings. Copper prices are volatile and currently pretty high. If this new technology can be scaled to be produced cheaply, it could replace some expensive copper is specific applications.

I already have almost a dozen original and remake Commodore 64s. Also Plus/4, C128, and so on.

We’re similar then. I am a long time user of VICE, built parallel port (IEEE 1284) to 1541 interfaces to read my old floppies onto PC in the 90s, and even bought one of the c64 Minis when it came out. I also have 3 original C64s (in various states of function).

All of the “modern” c64s have always been just a bit off from the legacy hardware experience. I still love them, but they don’t compare to the experience on the original hardware.

I don’t know who the target market of the new Commodore is

Well, me, I suppose. I bought one of the new Commodore Ultimate units (breadbin model). There are absolutely hardware limitations to the legacy c64 experience using in with modern computing in 2026. Sure there are workarounds for most of them, but those workarounds add up in cost, and even then aren’t always the best solutions. Even then SID chips were never all identical, and many continue to fail with age. Certain revs of original hardware have specific bugs (which sometimes are beneficial) so having the option to use or avoid those would mean owning multiple original hardware in working order. That still won’t get you HDMI, Ethernet, USB or flash storage access without lots of extra addon hardware.

The Commodore Ultimate has on that baked in. Currently I’m still using my original hardware more because of some projects I’m working on that require the TTL signals of the USER Port, but more regular use I am glad to have the Ultimate for better interoperability and maximum compatibility to the original 6510 CPU and SID (from its FPGA).

The new slimline Ultimate units are actually made from the original CBM case molds which were found in a warehouse!

, but it doesn’t feel like its me.

Thats certainly fine. This is a hobby after all, and there’s no requirement to buy something you don’t find interesting.

I want a retro computer with new Herdware in it.

You’re in luck! It was their first product of this reborn company. They sell that right here: https://commodore.net/computer/

The dual boot is the default install. The installer is a single terminal command in OSX with the installer being the guided setup. The installer is right on the front page of the distro web site: https://asahilinux.org/

It is literally just:

curl https://alx.sh/ | sh

The biggest decisions you have to make are how you want to partition the SSD between OSX and Linux.

I’ve been installing Linux in various ways since the late 90s using Slackware, and the Asahi installation experience was the easiest and seamless installation of Linux I’ve ever experienced. It on only occurred to me later why the installer could be so good. Asahi only runs on M1/M2 hardware. The developers knew exactly what the hardware would be and could tailor the experience around it.

I wouldn’t really recommend Asahi if you only have 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in your Mac. It will certainly run, but is cramped in daily use.

A quick question before research: is it fully working by now?

Is every hardware function in the laptop that works in OSX available in Asahi? No.

I’d like to have a functioning display

I think you’re asking about “DisplayPort Alt Mode” which is where you can plug a dongle into one of the USB-C ports and output the local GPU to DP or HDMI. The answer to that is “yes, depending on how adventurous you are”. There’s an experimental kernel that does support it today. I don’t think its in the main branch yet. I intentionally run version 43 (1 behind the current 44). However, I use a USB-C DisplayLink HDMI adapter for an external display and it does most of what I want right now without the experimental kernel. I do want “DisplayPort Alt Mode”, and will use it when its available though.

If you have an M1 or M2 Macbook Pro with HDMI port built-in, those work right now. The challenge being worked through is a display port that gets unplugged, which only happens on the USB-C port Display Port.

I’ve got an impression that Linux can work on Apple Silicon, if you’re ready to abandon some things here and there.

I wouldn’t use the word “abandon” but rather “wait for”. Power management efficiency doesn’t come close to native Apple OSX, but under Asahi it has enough battery for my needs. I only charge to 80% (supported natively in Fedora KDE) and get about 3 hours of runtime on battery for light to moderate use. I also read that this has improved a chunk in version 44, but again, I’m not running that version yet.

Another piece of hardware not supported on Asahi yet is the MLX engine. I’ve been experimenting with running local LLMs, and they do run under Asahi Linux, but the hardware includes MLX in OSX. There are some models specifically made to utilize MLX which result in significant performance improvements in inferencing speeds. The unified memory of the Macbooks means system RAM is available for LLM use, so I can run 16GB models while still having 8GB of RAM left over for other applications and OS functions on this Macbook Air. The RAM footprint for LLM works in both Asahi and OSX.

Keep in mind, this is a dual boot system. I still have OSX available if I need one of those Apple OSX specific function or extended battery life only one reboot away.

My daily driver is an M2 Macbook air running Asahi Linux. There are certainly some hardware parts I wished worked better right now, but its fully for my needs usable as is. Improvements are occurring regularly by the development team. Apple hardware really is solid, and I’m very happy that in the rare cases I do have to use a commercial OS (Netflix streaming for example), I don’t have to use Windows. Its a dual boot machine (Linux/OSX).

Overall I’m pretty happy with Linux on this M2. Theres a handful of us here on Lemmy running it. You can find us at [email protected]

I’ll just leave this here: