It is. I'm just commenting on why it isn't that straightforward that the FSF presumably wouldn't care. Copyleft is an exercise of copyright. The FSF doesn't believe in permissive use of works - they believe in using copyright licensing to force others to share the way they believe others should share.
I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me.
Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly.
The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish.
The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you.
Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.
> Random equivalent-time sampling takes advantage of the nature of a repetitive signal by using samples from several trigger events to digitally reconstruct the waveform. Since sampling occurs on both sides of the trigger point, pretrigger capability is very flexible. Because repetitive signals are being sampled, the bandwidth of an equivalent-time scope can far exceed its sample rate.
Even if it's the same data, the bit stream will be a variety of 0 and 1s. The period of that waveform will then be 1 frame length / data transfer rate (or rather 1/4 frame length / data transfer rate as this is a QSGMII link). I wonder how the scope triggers on that. Trigger criterium would be a bit pattern, say the Ethernet frame preamble of 7 octects (* 10/8) spread across four streams ...
Otoh, at 5Gbps, a sample rate of "just" 10GS/s would be sufficient (barely).
I rather suspect the oscilloscope is capable of 1TS/s equivalent time sampling, but that mode wasn't used.
Here's a more specific example: PicoScope 9400 series supports just 500Msps per channel, however it's advertising "70ps transition time and 1TS/s (1ps resolution) random equivalent-time sampling", this sort of "equivalent sampling" is presumably where that seemingly crazy spec comes from.
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop.
“You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").
I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.
I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.
I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).
So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.
Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.
It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.
Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).
It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.
Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.
Complete nonsense. They didn't start in 2015 and didn't get investment into Starlink from Google because hopefully some presidnet would want Goldon Dome in the future. Starlink is a good business and has plenty of military value without Goldon Dome.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.
In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).
They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.
Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.
For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.
I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
I have had very similar experiences. I am not a professional software developer, but have been a Linux sysadmin for over a decade, a web developer for much longer than that, and generally know enough to hack on other people’s projects to make them suit my own purposes.
When I have Claude create something from scratch, it all appears very competent, even impressive, and it usually will build/function successfully…on the surface. I have noticed on several occasions that Claude has effectively coded the aesthetics of what I want, but left the substance out. A feature will appear to have been implemented exactly as I asked, but when I dig into the details, it’s a lot of very brittle logic that will almost certainly become a problem in future.
This is why I refuse to release anything it makes for me. I know that it’s not good enough, that I won’t be able to properly maintain it, and that such a product would likely harm my reputation, sooner or later. What frightens me is there are a LOT of people who either don’t know enough to recognize this, or who simply don’t care and are looking for a quick buck. It’s already getting significantly more difficult to search for software projects without getting miles of slop. I don’t know how this will ultimately shake out, but if it’s this bad at the thing it’s supposedly good at, I can only imagine the kinds of military applications being leveraged right now…
This is an interesting way of presenting a topic, I like it. Especially if it’s got included datasets that allow others to mess with said topic. I don’t want to suggest bloating it up with any complicated UIs, but a Jupyter notebook could be nifty. Maybe not for this specific topic, but other data-heavy subjects.
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