There are very VERY few things that are cheaper in the cloud. You're just trading one expense for another, not eliminating it.

To date, the most cost-effective thing in the cloud is still DNS hosting, because who the hell wants to run thousands of DNS hosts globally distributed, with all the maintenance that comes with it?

But for compute, or storage, or bandwidth: on-prem will always win in cost.

"full-size electric pickup"

That's your problem. And you even admit it.

"the arrival of a cheaper midsize EV truck undermine the business case"

MOST PEOPLE DON'T WANT A "FULL-SIZED" FUCKING TRUCK. THEY'RE TOO GODDAMN BIG.

A friend of mine has one, and its been nice for a few very VERY niche things we've needed to haul, otherwise, the thing is a goddamn massive tank that is far too large to easily park in any tight parking lot. It is a total pain in the ass getting around town in the thing.

Back in my day, the F-150 was a small to mid-sized truck, not an overwhelming behemoth. Release a small sized and mid sized electric pickup. That's it. That's the business plan. YOU LITERALLY just admitted it. So just do it yourself !?

ssh [hostname]
shutdown now -h

(just wait until they learn there is a security flaw in most computers that allows them to be remotely deactivated as well)

Basically the examples I just gave: using hardware crypto or hardware vector instructions are the main thing, or things similar to these. The code usually has raw C/C++ fallbacks anyways, so its just a matter of getting the proper #ifdef [arch] gates in place, and sometimes adding in the crypto/vector instructions for the given platform to ensure it operates optimally.

I'm someone who's handled a few hundred packages porting to ARM, not at google, but in the F/OSS community. The reality isn't "porting to ARM", its "porting away from X86", removing or gating x86-isms. The work to port to ARM is 95% already the same work needed to port to RISC-V. The main difference in hardware platforms is when dealing w/ hardware level crypto instructions or vector instructions, but again these are gated in libraries, and adding in the gates for ARM gives the vast majority of the work already needed for RISC-V.

To add some insights into this, granted I'm a sample size of 1...

2.4GHz spectrum from my unit is fairly crowded.

But 5GHz lack of ability to penetrate many walls means it is almost entirely clear. And as of right now, I cannot see ANYONE else using 6GHz from my scanning, so I have 100% availability currently of this spectrum. Granted, 6GHz devices are much newer, as 5GHz goes all the way back to the original 802.11a spec, but even then, I see minimal usage on two channel ranges at 80MHz channel widths, with the four others entirely clear for my usage.

It isn't 5G. They're point-to-point fixed wireless bridges operating at 60GHz. I've had the service in the past without even realizing they were using fixed wireless in my previous apartment building. The service was solid, reliable, and maintained speed at all hours. But I do agree that the name is highly misleading at this point.

I've been negotiating with ISPs to get better internet service in my building. "Google Fiber" (which isn't even fiber, its fixed wireless access in my area), wanted to charge a reduced-rate-per-unit to deploy access into my building. The problem however, is that a large number of units dont need/want it. We have several elderly retired people who have no internet access at all. Anyone who would want/need higher end access, such as business w/ static IPs, would still need to get their own separate ISP, and pay for both. Anyone who would need higher bandwidth would need to pay for both. Anyone who would want cable television and/or telephone service would need to get those separately with no option to bundle. Its literally all about getting vendor lock-in and a single bill from the building, rather than one-bill-per-unit. They want to simplify things on their accounting department, that's about it, but it doesn't matter that it absolutely removes options from consumers.

Kids say dumb shit, film at 11

Battery Life.

Nuf said.

PCs still cannot even remotely compete w/ Apples actual real world battery life on their laptops. This is their killer selling feature. Everything else is just fluff. "I'll just sit at my desk all day plugged in" - well, good for you then, I guess? The rest of us will enjoy our portability.

But but but
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Oh, and
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

And there are plenty more, but i'm too lazy to google more than 5 seconds

Because there are essentially only 2 or 3 SMS gateways, which all have really damn good filtering at scale.

Not talked about much, but the backhaul SMS network (known as "aggregators") is similar to the internet in that there are large backhaul providers and then "last mile" providers (such as cell carriers, or companies like apple / google / twilio) that all run through the same aggregators.

The aggregators are pretty damn good at processing / filtering spam. Also, when you see text messages that say you can respond w/ "STOP", this is handled at the aggregator level, and will block that originator from issuing more messages your cell number.

100% the same setup here too. I've had a "catch all" email address that Gmail polls and fetches, then sorts based on the destination email address. Without this now, and due to other shit Google has been doing, I don't see a reason to keep Gmail as my email client anymore. There are plenty of feature-parity-enough web based email clients in the world now, I don't need them anymore.

Gmail being the email client effectively makes it a "single machine" - and this has worked well for over two decades until now.

Replying to myself since I was curious and had to look it up:

The International Space Station has about 100 kilowatts power generation capability.

The article says "datacenters" - plural, but for now, let's just assume a single gigawatt datacenter in space in 20 years.

That's about 7300 days.

A single gigawatt datacenter would consume about 10,000x the power generation capabilities of the ISS.

Starting today, we'd need to launch more than 1 ISS PER DAY to reach this goal in 20 years, for a single gigawatt datacenter.

I think this brings the absurdity of the situation into a little more crystal clear of a picture.