I can't say I would blame them.

And further tilt the balance towards on-prem.

I'll be sure to tell my very real clients their infrastructure doesn't exist.

At the rate the shutdown is going, perhaps we should take a cue from the billionaires and just stop paying.

So those funny things that look like desktop machines are not? and there's no LDAP or domain controllers involved?

That's funny because the places I'm familiar with have desktop machines, domain controllers, often a NAS or two, and a router with a firewall.

Cloud servers may have more than one user running things on the same CPU. God only knows who the other users actually are. In a corporate environment, everyone running jobs on the server works for the company. It doesn't reduce the risks to zero, but it does reduce them a lot.

Actually, the cloud remains more expensive and less secure. Remember all that meltdown, spectre, row hammering, etc? All largely irrelevant to people who use their own servers in their own environment.

You still need an ISP with the cloud. Somehow, you have to be able to launch and monitor, do updates, etc. Smoke signals won't work for that application. You still need IT guys for the office LAN, server admins for your office infrastructure, etc.

If you decide to go with anything but very vanilla virtual hosting, you still need developers to run on the 'upgrade' treadmill as cloud providers update and EOL things nearly as quickly as fashion designers.

If you go with the vanilla virtual hosts, you need pretty much the same people you need for self hosting only they can't touch the physical hardware and just have to sit nervously twiddling their thumbs when things go down.

VMWare is not the best choice these days since the licensing IS a ripoff.

Swapping a failing disk is easier than it ever has been before.

But you can "Rent to own, Right on the phone!". Well, minus the "to own" part, that is.

How is it that so many fall for a deal WORSE than what most people knew was a deal for suckers in the '80s.

Sorry, but ruining your kid's future by sending them off to an unlicenced school where any nonsense could be taught as fact by entirely unqualified people, without even so much as basic child protection assurances is not a thing in any civilised society.

That's how child abuse happens, that's how religious indoctrination occurs, that's how kids get to adulthood and realise they have zero useful qualifications or skills and their best opportunity for education (and quite literally "learning how to learn") has been squandered through no fault of their own.

Yes, sure, what's wrong with a closeted billionaire running a unannounced secret school for children and not licencing, meeting child protection obligations, or even telling anyone that the school exists, let alone who's teaching it, and keeping the whole thing hush-hush and off the record books? Can't imagine THAT going wrong at all...

Try paying the authors to read the books they spent decades of their life trying to write and get paid a pittance for them.

My local ISP switching to CG NAT was the last straw that made me actually switch to Comcast/Xfinity. Not only do you have all the aforementioned issues, you also can't connect back to your computer from the outside even by using Dynamic DNS services. I don't run websites or anything from my home network, but I do like to be able to get back in via SSH and retrieve files and such from my devices at home.

With Xfinity at least I'm back to having my own IP (and honestly the connection is more stable and faster).

If they ever switch I'm going to have to break down and just buy business internet. Hopefully though we just eventually make it to IPV6.

...we should be finished with the IPv6 switchover by the end of the 1990s.

My prediction, raising prices even to break even will cause "interest" in AI to plummet.

But without AI, how are the automatic doors going to sound authentically self-satisfied when they say "glad to be of service"?

If Linux can achieve sufficient critical mass to get native ports, I'll start gaming on it (I already use it for day to day usage). Even if a game works on Wine though, I don't want to have that nagging question in the back of my mind that if there's a glitch or a crash, is it truly a bug in the game, or is it a Wine incompatibility issue?