Indeed. It's very cheap ($5?) and is fast enough to do 1080p YouTube with unlimited data. It's speed capped so if you really need it it's best to upgrade the plan that month.
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
I for one think this is a great marketing opportunity. Even if you have the best gigabit fiber, at five dollars a month, this is a no brainer for a lot of people. If you can have monthly recurring revenue for starlink doing essentially nothing, why not? Also, it is probably easier to upsell to existing customers.
B. You don't have a child and decide to never have a child. To make up for the decline in population that year the government issues a working visa to an immigrant. The immigrant relocates to your country and sets up their life there.
There are but who is producing them? Adults drive consumption and production. Children just drive consumption.
From an economic perspective increased immigration is better than births. Why have non productive people around when you can just import productive people that pay the government income taxes?
<sarcasm>If there are no children around then we don't have to worry about the children anymore and can worry about important things like the economy!</sarcasm>
Some will argue that consumption drives production but according to the common definition children don’t contribute to GDP.
Assuming governments are going to address population growth/decline then it’s a choice between incentivising births or issuing visas.
Even in countries that have free healthcare births are in decline so it’s not the cost of children alone that is causing this situation. I would argue it’s the economic crutch called immigration.
My guess is B because that person can produce goods for export while consuming local goods. Children (at least for the first few years of their life or so) do not contribute to production. They only contribute towards consumption. You could argue that they motivate the parents to produce more but increasing skilled migration in the parents industry can do the same.
Except that this is the most Linux brained way of approaching it: Here's a shell! It's running a funny text editor! IF you need anything just use bash :)"
This is intended for people who want to use a laptop as a single use device for the purpose of writing. So basic file management and a word processor is all that is needed.
WriterdeckOS is not meant to be an OS for general computing.
Purppose built writerdecks are quite expensive. WriterdeckOS is a practical, inexpensive and resourceful alternative to a purpose build device.
This is the main reason I keep my PS/2 around with WordPerfect 5.1. Sure I can go browse the web with Minuet, or I used to before https everywhere, but that means saving and exiting WP. And 30+ years later I'm still waiting for a word processor with a decent Reveal Codes.
Personally I like Latex as it reveals all the codes and lets you type them, change them, find-and-replace them, define new ones, etc. But then, I'm a mathematician, so it's designed for my stuff.
AFAIK, the current version of Nota Bene -- a direct descendent of XyWrite -- still has this; the current feature list explicitly mentions "Editable Show Codes view so you can see exactly where commands take effect, and edit them as desired". Nota Bene has survived into the present day by moving pretty firmly into a niche academia market, though, and carries a pretty stiff price ($349).
Meanwhile my mind first jumped to the old, pre-USB connector used for things like keyboards and mice, and was wondering what wizardry they had built to turn a PS2 keyboard into a complete text processor!
I'm also in the quaint demographic that believes WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was the apex of distraction-free writing. Switching disks to change the application was just the right amount of intentional friction to stay in the zone.
I keep a Mac IIci that I purchased at a thrift store for $12 to remind me that we haven't progressed that far. It's not fast, but it runs Photoshop, Illustrator, and Vim. Not bad for a 35+ year old machine that will do 80% of what you need. No GPU, but I think that's losing the plot when people can't afford to pay their electricity bills while billion dollar companies continue to scale out the data centers that jack up prices for AI slop nobody wants.
It’s been 30ish years, so I can’t be 100% sure, but Ami Pro 3.1 for Windows had an easy-to-use equation editor that gave great results. And I think its Reveal Codes equivalent was pretty good.
If anything the "highest hacker to user ratio" has diminished since then.
Hardware compatibility was a major issue. Even if hardware was compatible with Linux it often wouldn't work out of the box. Most homes had only a single internet connected device so if you borked your system you had to have friends that would know how to guide you to fix it over the phone or you had to travel to someone else house to check the internet then come back and try what you wrote down. Users who had no patience for this would get filtered out of the userbase.
There are far more mainstream Linux users (and "serious" business users) today than back in the day, but it still has the highest ratio among all modern-day systems. The statement still holds.
That too can be swayed if you define it realistically. The modern Playstation operating system is based on FreeBSD, which isn't entirely pure but feels like fair game considering the BSD license.
Right, so how did the "highest hacker to user ratio" diminish then? You or I are probably misunderstanding something.
If they just meant "the hacker to user ratio" diminished, they should've said that, but it seems like a weird way/phrasing to acknowledge that linux-using-hackers sell to non-hackers (and is a no duh).
Carmack's point was that linux was a good place to get hackers, so it's good for him to target as a business, but maybe it's better to get them on mac now (in 2025). I don't know: I use a mac laptop outside of my office, but I mostly just use it to browse the web and remote to my linux desktop inside my office. I wonder sometimes if it is important to target mac to get smarter users, and so I might believe mac has the "highest hacker to user ratio" now when in 1997 Linux definitely did. Depending on what I'm doing the bsds might be a better focus.
That is, I suspect that Linux might not actually have the "highest hacker to user ratio" anymore, which is what I think the person I am replying to meant as well. I don't know; and I don't have good reasons for believing such a thing that beyond my own experiences, but I'm curious and willing to be convinced, and so I ask questions.
My point was that computing in general hit the mainstream and running Linux became much more accessible and practical. So this influx of people now using computers diluted the ratio. Also non Linux based OS's became much more friendly to hackers or would be hackers.
I'm pretty sure that there were such drives more than twenty years ago (not popular though). I have to ask, what's the point today? The average latency goes down at most linearly with the number of actuators. One would need thousands to match SSDs. For anything but pure streaming (archiving), spinning rust seems questionable.
Edit: found it (or at least one)
"MACH.2 is the world’s first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently."
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