A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
Yeah bud, maybe if you get just a little more money, you’ll finally be complete. Just a little more money…
“Hopes”, more like will be doing a bunch of anti-competitive bullshit to ensure that this is your only option.
Good luck with that.
Signed,
A person who has recently started pulling all their files from cloud storage like Google Drive and Dropbox
I demand you give me control of your entire life, you can trust me.
IMHO this is no different than Neuralink. My computers do a great deal of my thinking for me. That’s why FOSS is so important.
Nothing is ever enough for these greedy fucks
They have OCD that manifests as economic hoarding. They are mentally ill, and are damaging society worse than any mass shooter. They need to be separated from society, forced to undergo mental health treatment, and their fortunes confiscated.
Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.
Reading the article, the analogy with an own generator and the power grid kind of makes sense at first… until you also make an analogy with broadcast and cable TV for example - you don’t get to choose what’s on, and in the latter case you’re practically paying for ads and some programming in between. So… how about no.
My fear is that those shortages (artificial or not) might at one point really drive us in a different direction. My only option for now is to vote with my wallet and use my stuff for as long as practically feasible.
When AWS had the major outage recently, my self-hosted services kept on running. The programs on my Linux machines and other devices I own were also not impacted. Thanks, Jeff, but I’ll stick with my “antiques”. Also, fuck you.
Yep, I’ve had one power supply fail in like 15 years. That and power outages was it for downtime on my own equipment. Can’t say that about other services I’ve used.
Friends of mine complained they couldn’t watch stuff and I replied “huh, my Plex is working fine.”
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
Fuck you Jeff.
lol, no.
Sometimes renting from the cloud is a perfectly acceptable solution. However companies leap to using AWS and similar cloud solutions WAY more than necessary or advisable. It is easy to rack up thousands in bills outstripping the costs of buying some hardware and slapping the software onto it. The cloud can scale and do a bunch of cool things but much of the time companies don’t need it, or the complexity it brings. There is also the small matter of data sovereignty - if I were a company using the cloud I would be extremely wary of one which is operating outside of my legal jurisdiction and for governments it just a flat out bad idea.
Fuck that shit. Switch to Linux.
It never was a thing that kept quiet…
Sure, we’ve all seen how the de-centralized internet became centralized around a few big-tech and what that does for availability. When he turns off the cloud-pc I’ve got nothing, and all I can do about it is … also nothing. So if my data isn’t on my hardware at a location I can access 24/7 it really isn’t my data!!
This is actually terrifying. Switching to Linux will help us for a while, and the community can take us a long way, but eventually the hardware in physical PCs won’t be able to perform basic functions. Maybe it’s because cloud PCs use vastly more power and web designers inefficiently update to a web 4.0 that won’t be accessible on older hardware – this has happened before. Or it’ll be because the cloud PCs have access to Wi-Fi cards or a new technology entirely to connect that physical hardware won’t have access to – already a standard practice with cell phones’ arbitrary gsm phaseouts.
A phaseout of physical hardware would also entail a phaseout of physical accessories, so you can’t data-horde your way out of this one unless, maybe, you invested in the now-rare M-Disc format and the drives that make them work. You can buy external offline storage for a while, but eventually it’ll all get bought up on the used market or otherwise fail in 5-10 years after the last hard drives get made for consumers. Eventually you will lose all your files and have no way to back them up. No Jellyfin server for movies you legally ripped, no GOG installers for games you legally bought, no music library or ebooks either, they’ll all be gone, stolen, so you buy it all over again in perpetuity.
Our only hope, really, is small businesses continuing to build physical PCs with equal power as the cloud devices. But would parts manufacturers let them? The current situation with data centers, SDDs, and RAM shows that parts manufacturers are increasingly only interested in selling to other large businesses. Consumers can’t boycott that.
I fully expect to be unable to access my bank or make appointments or get meaningful employment if I don’t switch over in 10 to 20 years.
This is why tn EU needs to invest all into developing a RISC-V hardware chain asap. Proprietary CPUs is the ultimate chain and shackles.
Why should we need “equal power” to some hypothetical “cloud pc”? We did video cutting, 3D rendering, webbrowsing, videochatting and so on in the late 90s with PCs whose CPU speeds where measured in Mhz not Ghz… with the PCs build in the last ~15 years i really, really see no danger of running out of useable devices within my lifetime (i am slightly over 40 now).
If there will be some time in the future when its only possible to get “meaningful employment” or “make appointments” using some cloud based shitstain i will happily spend my last days doing my part in helping to burn down this dystopic society.
