Interesting article (the one on website obesity). For some reason it got me wanting to dig into my stored books and pull out the copy of Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls (and its sequel).

Cheers...

I agree with this also.
Cloud is only hype.
I want to have also server at home - maybe when I learn so much Linux that I can do this.

I guess just storing it online is more quick and easy, having a physical copy was necessary in the past more than today, but sure, it could get lost or corrupted. I haven't ever used any online storage, don't see much of a point. It all depends on who a person is at the end of the day, it is useful, but shouldn't be used as a sole backup long term, if there is no physical back up.

It's also the availability of your data no matter where you go. Not everyone can figure out or cares to figure out how to give themselves a vpn to a home server. I also don't think anyone has mentioned cost for this either. Pay a small fee to someone online if you have to, $2.00 US per month for 100 gigs on Google Drive. Much less expensive than keeping a machine on full time at home and paying for a static ip or dyndns services on top of figuring out how to get it all working the way you need it to.

Can't help but think the barrier of getting your own personal storage at home and available anywhere is mostly learning how to do it. People don't want to learn anything anymore. I asked my wife's 13 year old cousin the other day if they let him have a calculator in class. He said he's been allowed to have one since 3rd grade. I wasn't even allowed to have one in high school if I recall. General dumbing down of humanity.

Our future - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

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In at least some respects, we are sadly at least half way there already...

Funny about calculators. They were only being invented in the last years on my equivalent of high school, but were fantastically expensive. Everyone used the few calculators owned by the rich kids until the batteries ran out.

In their place, we learned

• Formulae
• long multiplication, & division;
• solving equations
• log tables.
• Approximation techniques

The latter allowed you to skip the messy sums, round stuff up or down, turn equations around, and come out with a ballpark figure. This would validate your work. If your ballpark figure was an order of magnitude out, your answer was wrong.

Anyhow, on cloud services, it's lose-lose online these days, imho. If you put a server up you need the up-to-date knowledge of security exploits, attack vectors, etc. You can still be caught, as we have daily proof. And you're a sitting duck. And you have to fart about with routing issues, bandwidth loss, bottlenecks, dns, etc.

If you put your data up in the cloud, all the disadvantages above still apply; the differences are that the cloud will be hacked instead of you. And you're not indemnified or compensated, but all your data goes online. Routing, bandwidth or dns issues impact you while the cloud sysadmins fart about. Does anyone remember the days when hotmail ran Windows NT? Every hacker two weeks in the game hacked it. Only there was nowhere to sell the data, because everyone who wanted the data had it already. IIRC, hotmail now run BSD.

I'm sure you can put limited facilities online, as long as you don't need public access. But when even vpns and encryption methods are vulnerable, what are you to do?

Hotmail originally ran on BSD or whatever it was, it wasn't NT. Then mickeysoft bought Hotmail and tried to run it on NT, but it crashed everytime someone turned around. Finally, they went back to BSD, or whatever it was.....

I remember these M$ reps sounding so superior and saying how their 'hotmail servers ran on NT.' M$ always failed teetotally on security, didn't they?

Here is a humorous explanation of "the cloud."
IIRC, it is from Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFdZWgiAj8I

That was really nice!
Reminds me of The internet doesn't weigh anything.

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Hilarious!

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This one from years ago was funny.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

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Did M$ buy hotmail? I never knew - I wasn't that interested in pcs back then.

The story going around here at the time (early '90s)was that M$ sales reps wanted NT on hotmail so they could hawk NT as a server system, when, in fact NT was an expensive joke.You were nobody in hacking until you had hacked a few million addresses & passwords from hotmail. Then it had to go down as well. Finally, some guy ended it by finding all hotmail customers, and everyone they had ever sent mail to, and came away with a gazillion addresses, credit cards. So from then on, if you got a million hotmail addresses, nobody cared. Shortly enough, word came they were on BSD.

The only thing I was curious about was this: I'm sure there were scripts to hack hotmail, but did anyone do a M$Dos .bat file to do it? That would be the ultimate insult. I was glad M$ pensioned off NT.

Yes. As I may have said before, Hotmail was an independent.....
Well, here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com

From the above link,

Good one!
Thanks.