Satellite phones have existed for decades. They are expensive and data speeds are slow but if you are talking about for emergency use then a satellite phone is smaller, cheaper, and more practical than Starlink.
If you need high speed data in the middle on nowhere then Starlink is great
For emergency communications (i.e. calling SAR or maybe getting a doctor's opinion on whether you should), satellite messengers do just fine, and they're much cheaper. Newer iPhones even have this built-in!
Data speeds are measured in a handful of bits per second, though.
I've been using Linux almost exclusively since 1994.
Lack of drivers was definitely a problem but it made me spend a lot of time researching whatever I bought first. Lots of reading Linux HOWTOs and Usenet forums about whether a particular card was supported or not.
I had to install from 30 floppy disks because my brand new IDE CD-ROM wasn't supported for another 6 months. Same with my new Diamond Stealth 64 graphics card. I had to wait 6 months to be able to run X11
Those both came with my new Pentium 90 PC. After that I bought hardware specifically for Linux like my BusLogic 948 SCSI card
Usenet in the early 1990's is still superior to modern forums. Threads could go on for years, the newsreader programs automatically marked posts as read and would only show you new posts in the thread. Compared to today it is hard to find what is new and then discussions die after a day on places like Hacker News and Reddit after it is no longer a top post on the page or subreddit.
My roommate in 1992 would run this on his 386DX with the 387 math coprocessor. It would take literally days to run to create a small 640x480 image.
This was in the days of DOS where you could only run one program at a time. It would run all night and then in the morning he would stop it so he could use the computer for other things. But he had some kind of Targa .tga file utility to merge the files together.
Then he compiled povray for our Sun workstations and he would split up the rendering so that each machine would render 50 lines of the image and he could merge them together with that utility.
I remember how happy he was that he could render stuff 20 times faster.
I wish governments would incentivize working from home. We've already seen that this can be done effectively for a huge percentage of the population. In 2019 I was spending about $250 on gasoline a month. In 2020 with mandatory work from home that dropped to about $50 a month. When I did go out there was no traffic which lead to even less fuel wasted. Instead we have politicians and business leaders pushing for people to return to the office. I work in a huge office park with huge parking lots. That is so much land that could be used for apartments, condos, single family homes, or anything more useful than half empty offices that very few want to go to.
I'm on some reddit tech forums and people will say "I need help storing a huge amount of data!" and people start offering replies for servers that store petabytes.
My question is always "How much data do you actually have?" Many times you they reply with 500GB or 2TB. I tell that that isn't much data when you can get 1TB micro SD card the size of a fingernail or a 24TB hard drive.
My feeling is that if you really need to store petabytes of data that you aren't going to ask how to do it on reddit. If you need to store petabytes you will have an IT team and substantial budget and vendors that can figure it out.
I personally don't but our computer cluster at work as around 50,000 CPU cores. I can request specific configurations through LSF and there are at least 100 machines with over 4TB RAM and that was 3 years ago. By now there are probably machines with more than that. Those machines are usually reserved for specific tasks that I don't do but if I really needed it I could get approval.
I can only think of about 3 people that completely changed profession. I'm 48 and I could list hundreds of people that have been engineers, scientists, doctors, and lawyers since they finished college and are either still doing the same type of job or retired.
Yep - that is the issue. You can define it however you want so it's fairly arbitrary. To answer your question - given it was a major life direction change, I consider it a career change. I'd say a career change probably involves a similar life change in all cases.
If you need high speed data in the middle on nowhere then Starlink is great
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