Yes, it's not just homeless people with this bootstrapping problem. When I first arrived to the US in the nineties as a student I needed a social security number, for this I needed a P.O. Box (they did not accept the dorm house as address). For the P.O. Box I needed a social security number. Most international students ended up breaking the deadlock by making up a social security number.
I had a similar issue living abroad. My wife had a work visa (which was the reason we we moving) and I was allowed to go being a spouse, but once there getting a permit to work for myself was impossible without a job, and a job was impossible without a work permit.
There were ways around it, but it took finding a job at a really big company to make it work - they had dealt with it and had HR people that specialized in it. Once "on paper", I was pretty free to move around. I would not be surprised if their method was just putting in all zeros in the system or something until the permit number came back.
Yes. I’d like to think having a mobile phone would be enough but there’s still how work can write you a check and how you can deposit it. Not sure if any bank will go without a fixed address.
Well the only problem here is that general delivery is still not eligible for any of the main things people need an address for, like ID, tax docs, etc. Even if you want to pay for a PO box (which also doesn't satisfy those requirements), you need an address to register for one.
I really wish there would be more work to try to at least add some kind of alternative path here, given America's growing homeless population. Leaving things to the goodwill of family or friends seems to me like a dereliction of duty by the state.
When we were making a long move and temporarily without a stable address I looked into getting a PO Box and it seemed impossible without a real address.
I ended up finding some kinda sketchy-feeling services aimed at people RV living, and not much else. I wasn’t able to find an official solution to the problem of “I need to receive mail but have no address” (there may be one, but in solid 60-90 minutes of searching I didn’t find it, but did find a lot of people complaining about the problem)
I'm not sure if you need an address to sign up for a private mailbox at places like UPS Stores.
But a lot of people might receive mail at a friends' address with permission. But, you still need to have a friend or family with a stable address who is willing to help.
In the past this was pretty lax (I've had a long-term box at a Mail Boxes Etc. that then became a private mail boxes place that then became a UPS Store) and they didn't really care when I first opened it. Now there's a push for KYC also; we got a sheet the other day asking to verify our physical street address, something I never personally got in the years I've been there. Apparently new regulations or something, they said.
Sometimes people download it because there's no alternative. E.g. the YT app is not available in the play store in their country on that specific hardware, so the only way to be able to view YT is to use an alternative app like this one.
I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0].
It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9).
Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm.
They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
N800 and other Open Source Software Operations' devices were not allowed to have cellular connection because of Nokia internal politics. N9 development was also hindred by the Maemo->MeeGo and the GTK->Qt transitions. And it was killed in its infancy in the Microsoft takeover.
There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.
Both Maemo and WebOS were better UIs than iPhone and Android, and eventually both iPhone and Android had pretty much adopted a Frankensteined combination of the two. Android's process "card" UI is indistinguishable from WebOS, and I think it was designed by the same person.
Nokia could have competed, they were just internally a mess. So, the board wanted to sell to Microsoft, and brought in a guy whose job was to wreck Nokia and shepherd the deal (and pretend like it wasn't intentional.) The N900 showed too much potential, so I assume part of the wrecking was to force them to rewrite Maemo into Meego for the N9, which would be buried on release.
The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
You had an N900. How was the screen worse than any contemporary (or current) capacitive screen? I still an N900 as an mp3 player daily, and I still don't understand.
I had a N810 and a N900. Had a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 before that, and an iRiver H340. The iRiver was fantastic, but heavy (due to HDD), single purpose, and offline. Also, 40 GB ended up being too little but back then it was _huge_. Nowadays, I use Airsonic Advanced [1] on my server with gigabit fiber. Client can be whatever, for example Android smartphone over 5G (won't saturate the gigabit fiber). Caching works well, as does it with other streaming services. I could also use Jellyfin on it. I self-host as much as I can, including agenda, but I cannot be angry at people who to Google, Apple, or Microsoft cloud because it Just Works (tm).
On N810, GPS was meh. The keyboard was OKish although I believe Psion Series 5 devices had the better (bigger keys). If you got small fingers (esp. young people) you may like the smaller keys more or are OK with it. Back then, websites weren't written yet for capacitive touchscreen (responsive started to after iPhone release). As a DAP, I find N-series Maemo lousy. Turns out physical buttons are great on the move. But the beauty of the these Maemo devices as well as Sharp Zaurus was that you could use them for so much. In theory... cause in practice, you did not have 24/7 internet (until N900 or if you tethered). Battery life was meh. Many websites worked badly. Storage was limited.
> The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
Resistive and capacitive each have their pros and cons. On N900, the gestures (like in Fennec) were innovative but still at infancy. N9 was better gesture-based, as is SailfishOS, though I never used either as daily driver. A resistive UI requires a pen, or large UI whereas a capacitive screen can be used at any time with finger (those 'special' gloves and pens are sold everywhere these days, and is only an issue when its cold). What was needed, for the mobile market to massively succeed, was a different UI than desktop: a user-friendly, capacitive UI with larger interface, and gestures.
It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
I've been using Rancher Desktop as an alternative to Docker Desktop, https://rancherdesktop.io/ on macOS and Windows, it's pretty solid.
It has some kinks to work out but I got it working with IDEs too (e.g. the Intellij IDEA Docker Compose integration to work with it).
What I also like is that existing scripts and etc that use the docker-compose cli work with Rancher Desktop too, as it uses nerdctl https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl
Rancher Desktop is great, because kubernetes just works. Not only that, you can "docker build" an image, and then immediately spin it up as a kubernetes pod, without spending ten minutes googling the correct commands to correctly "load" the image.
We just completed the switch to Rancher where I work. 1200ish engineers, mostly on Macs. So far it's worked out pretty well..fewer hiccups than I expected.
My last job we ran very significant public workloads on windows containers. I don’t know the number of requests but it’s a multi million user application all around the world.
Interesting; I may be biased because I've been involved in helping teams containerize as part of a cloud migration and only one or two cases has there been a real 'need', basically for running a Windows service that was eventually retired in favour of a lambda triggered by consuming a message in a queue.
We were waaaaay too big to fit in lambda layers. Our containers were 8GB when I left, and that was using all sorts of tricks on the host infra to share data between running containers.
The root of the problem was we had third party tools which were windows only.
> unless you run osx on a Linux kernel, it will always be so
Linux is not the only OS that has container like things. FreeBSD had jails years earlier, Solaris had something else which I don't remember any more, and for all I know macOS may have their own native equivalent as well.
Bear in mind that Apple introduced an official hypervisor framework a few releases ago, so they could be doing something similar for containers. It wouldn't be a bad idea. :)
The original was “Ultimate Soundtracker,” and it was so influential that derivatives often named themselves ___tracker (noisetracker, screamtracker, impulsetracker)
The term probably arose from the naming, starting with the very first one: Soundtracker (1987) on the Amiga, obviously a play on the word soundtrack. From there we got Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker, Fasttracker (MS-DOS) and so on.
I can't say much about the early history, but trackers have a unique UI compared to other DAW software. Instead of a staff or piano-roll, the tracker UI looks more like a spreadsheet, with each column being a channel, each row being a step, and each cell containing a note or effect.
This representation meshed well with early demoscene music storage and code, and evolved into its own subculture in the late 80's and early 90's.
> "That's the Catch 22 that loads of homeless people are in."
Breaking this systemic barrier would make life easier on a lot of people.