5,702 karma · joined June 9, 2017
I do think it's more than just emotional, though, but most people, even technical people, haven't taken the time to truly consider the problems that will likely come with centralization. That's a whole separate discussion, though.
People who write that, well...
If you're greatly impacted by performance problems, how does that become a physics problem that has as a solution which is being closer to your users?
I think you're mixing up your sales points. One, how do you scale hardware? Simple: you buy some more, and/or you plan for more from the beginning.
How do you deal with network latency for users on the other side of the planet? Either you plan for and design for long tail networking, and/or you colocate in multiple places, and/or you host in multiple places. Being aware of cloud costs, problems and limitations doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use cloud at all - it just means to do it where it makes sense.
You're making my point for me - you've got emotional generalizations ("you lose all credibility"), you're using examples that people use often but that don't even go together, plus you seem to forget that hardly anyone advocates for all one or all the other, without some kind of sensible mix. Thank you for making a good example of exactly what I'm talking about.
What's the market share of Windows again? ;)
All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding, but serve to introduce doubt to non-technical people and to trick people who don't examine what they're told.
What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points. They don't seem to care much about data or facts, just that they love cloud and want everyone else to be in cloud, too. This happens much more often on sites like Reddit (r/sysadmin, even), but I wouldn't be surprised to see a little of it here.
It makes me wonder: how do people get so sold on a thing that they'll go online and fight about it, even when they lack facts or often even basic understanding?
I can clearly state why I advocate for avoiding cloud: cost, privacy, security, a desire to not centralize the Internet. The reason people advocate for cloud for others? It puzzles me. "You'll save money," "you can't secure your own machines," "it's simpler" all have worlds of assumptions that those people can't possibly know are correct.
So when I read something like this from Fastmail which was written without taking an emotional stance, I respect it. If I didn't already self-host email, I'd consider using Fastmail.
There used to be so much push for cloud everything that an article like this would get fanatical responses. I hope that it's a sign of progress that that fanaticism is waning and people aren't afraid to openly discuss how cloud isn't right for many things.
I found a Motorola Starmax desktop (not tower) in the trash in Manhattan in the early 2000s. It chimed but didn't show video, so I installed a disk, installed NetBSD and used it as server for many, many years. It was very decently performant and incredibly stable.
These days I think it'd need a recap and the 160 megabyte limit would make it less useful than it was, but I still have only good things to say about it.
I still run a Bulldozer 8150 from 2012 as a full time server. RAM is dirt cheap so it has 64 gigs. This isn't even an old server by my standards, but it's the oldest server where I'm running the same kinds of things I'd usually run on newer hardware (SearXNG, Akkoma, qemu with multiple VMs, et cetera).
It's trivial to max out memory on old systems with a small spend on eBay, and lots of us have had VMs with ancient JVMs to deal with shitty, insecure IPMI that requires Java from the turn of the millennium.
It's funny how old servers, like my AlphaServer DS25, have no problems doing things correctly - yes, the OOB management can be made available via the network, but by default it's accessible via serial. I personally don't want a system that defaults to insecure if the CMOS battery dies and default settings are loaded. But unfortunately, most IPMI is both insecure and defaults to on. So, for these reasons, I'd trust an AlphaServer, but I wouldn't trust most newer machines with IPMI, particularly ones old enough to possibly have a CR2032 that could be nearing end of life.
Also, there's the Floodgap Public Gopher Proxy:
Here we are with many orders of magnitude of computing power that we have to ourselves, 24/7, and mostly we're using all that power to browse the Internet :P
Calculating the first 50,000,000 primes takes less than ten minutes (using no memory - that is, not a sieve). The 50,000,000th prime, BTW, is 982,451,653. I wonder what the author of this paper would've been able to do with the kind of processing available to us.
A compiler for AmigaDOS binaries running on AmigaDOS would be cool, too :)
I'll have to give this a try :)
Granted, we're a somewhat technical bunch here, so I have to ask: do regular people not know that Microsoft is so bad at security and self awareness that they literally can't do something like protect users from their own products? Do people still think, "Oh, well - 80% of the world can't be wrong"?
I bet they're going to make it exceedingly difficult to disable or uninstall, like Edge, once it becomes a mandatory part of Windows, aren't they?
Now I'm curious about how others see it. I work with several people who are younger than computers I actively use for testing, and I just pointed out an article on The Register (1) because it talks about the same machine I use for email server load testing, which is a Macintosh LC III+ (2). I wonder what the youngsters think about that, so I think I'll ask :)
1) https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/apples_design_reverse...
For some people, they lack the resources to run an LLM on a GPU. For others, they want to try certain models without buying thousands of dollars of equipment just to try things out.
Either way, I see too many people putting the proverbial horse before the cart: they buy a video card, then try to fit LLMs in to the limited VRAM they have, instead of playing around, even if at 1/10th the speed, and figuring out which models they want to run before deciding where they want to invest their money.
One token a second is worlds better than running nothing at all because someone told you that you shouldn't or can't because you don't have a fancy, expensive GPU.
Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.
These days, a charge pump device costs just a few dollars from Ali-express, so even though things work fine this way for many things, it wouldn't hurt to make them work for most if not all things.
When a replacement power supply does provide negative voltage, I try to use it, even if it does mean adapting -12 volts, which is what most ATX power supplies provide, to -5 volts, which is what, it seems, many 68030 Macs want.
Funny - I just did an ATX power supply for a Quadra 630, and it seems that most of the 68040 machines were using -12 volts instead of -5 volts (except the Quadra 605, which happened to use the same form factor and power supply as the LC / LC II / LC III).
So if your hosting provider accuses you of an illegal activity, you want your hosting provider to have to take you to court. That makes perfect sense.
Your idea isn't bad, but execution is. If we had to go to court for literally every little tiny thing, society would fall apart. If a neighbor is blasting their stereo at 1am, we'd file a petition in court, because we can no longer go over and simply ask them, because literally everything is anonymous.
See, it's the lack of basic comprehension that I don't respect about you. You want to be anonymous AND you want protection that requires court orders to do anything. If we had that, to that extreme, then anyone could make anyone else' life hell. Someone could start harassing you, and the methods and means they use to harass you would be 100% protected, and you could never get them to stop unless / until you go to court to sue them, or you convince a district attorney to bring charges. That's untenable, yet you'll happily overlook that because you either don't understand this, or you choose to ignore this as a possibility even though we see evidence of people constantly trying to do these same things.
There's a reason that literally every illegal activity in the world doesn't lead to a trial. You're just pretending that reason doesn't exist.
Cloudflare protects these organizations. Cloudflare goes far above and beyond what most other companies do, and I personally can't wait to see Cloudflare held liable for content they host for which they ignore legitimate complaints.
Imagine if I were to call your phone every hour, on the hour, and my position was that it's not illegal until someone reports it as a crime and the police or a court contacts me to tell me to not do it. That's Cloudflare. They're assholes, and insisting that they're not responsible for anything, any time, until there's a court order is just them being assholes.
I think the -5 volts is only there in case an expansion card needs it.
It's mostly marketing fluff. The people who made Apollo claimed for ages that FPUs necessary, then finally provided an FPU. They want people to target their proprietary extensions, but they don't even offer an MMU and emphatically claim, just like with the FPU, that it's not necessary. They spin way too much.
I can't take them seriously. There are plenty of other projects that are much more interesting, like:
https://www.buffee.ca/back-to-fulltime/
https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
They allow for much more flexibility, the option to run on actual m68k motherboards and compatible extensions, such as an '060 emulation that includes support for instructions the '060 would otherwise need to emulate.
I can't wait to see the kinds of programs we can run on a machine like that, along with discussions about tricks when writing programs for serial memory computers :D
NetBSD doesn't have GPU compute capabilities, plus browser DRM is a PITA, so I run macOS, too. If I have to choose between not doing a thing at all and doing it in a less enjoyable environment, it's only my own foot that suffers were I to choose not doing it at all.
What really matters here is that systems shouldn't crash or panic at all, ever, or if they do, the filesystems used shouldn't lose data or otherwise become corrupt. We left the lack of memory protection in the '80s (some of us the '90s), so there's no excuse if the hardware isn't faulty.
So I have to wonder why the OpenBSD folks, who prioritize security over speed, for example, wouldn't prioritize stability over everything except possibly security (I'd rather a panic than a compromise) and spend some energy looking in to these issues and fix them?
Why wouldn't any filesystem corruption (which could have security implications if the corruption can be controlled) and/or data loss be considered a sign of other deep issues and be made a high priority at OpenBSD?
Perhaps Solène's writeup will be a good wake-up call for the OpenBSD people.
Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.
Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?
It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.
They gave the impression at the time that they really couldn't be bothered with open source. This just happened to be not long after 2010.