Katydid

I think you missed the point of the article.

As someone here in the heart of it let me elucidate:

1) Residents here on the ground were told Starlink is already active in your area. Just connect through the site with your address. No one was worried about getting "retail dishes" they were told Starlink was providing free satellite internet across the devastated areas, all they had to do was open a website, enter their address and type $0 and boom, they're connected.

2) No one here even COULD get a dish delivered on the fly if they wanted to. Most roads are still to this day broken and impassable.

3) NO ONE HERE THOUGHT THIS WAS A STANDARD "FREE TRIAL" SITUATION. THEY THOUGHT IT WAS ACTUAL RELIEF, NO STRINGS ATTACHED, NO PERSONAL HARDWARE OBLIGATION.

Ultimately, you're making the mistake of thinking this is an article explaining a free trail for those with power, existing internet, passable roads, or existing hardware. The point this piece is making is that it was false advertising to people desperate to let their families know they weren't dead.

It's probably easy from the comfort of your mother's basement out of Helene's wake to spout all of this but a) you missed the point of the article and b) no one gave a fuck about retail dishes. They were told it was available via a website as HELP. As a kindness.

I'd love to see your source on 2000 free dishes. Ask anyone local here when the storm hit if they knew that, how to connect to them (without internet already). I guarantee no one knew until days later.

This came as a huge shock to those who only got the "free Starlink" through word of mouth here on the ground. We were told, "just go to starlink.com/activate" and type in your address. It was complete horseshit. The worst part about it was phones were in SOS mode, there was no internet anywhere, yet we could load that page to activate, which meant THERE WAS INTERNET. Just not to those who didn't pay for hardware and delivery (to places that are impossible to deliver to even today a week out). Infuriating.

Good question. It's because some extreme scale computer science and application work can only be valid with the high core counts/networking available on what is now just one single supercomputer in the U.S. - That machine is now booked, leaving many unable to complete research or have to wait until 2024. Some research can only be done with that scope of system, and people have been waiting years to test exascale software on this machine. I hope this answers the question.

This is why I wish this thread hadn't gone more mainstream.

It's nuanced and specific to how things work for researchers at labs.

I do not expect non-HPC folks to get why it is a big deal and why the strong language was needed. Intel failed the science community in the U.S. that relies on the limited systems large enough to handle the very few applications that consume massive numbers of cores/parallelism. That's not the whole of science, but this system was central to some of the grandest-scale problem solving that exists (think planet-scale climate simulations in high resolution).

I respect your opinion but my opinion wasn't for you. It was for the HPC comm.