I can't say I would blame them.

If a store does this and they give you any guff at all about being let out you pull out your phone, call 911 and report a kidnapping in progress. Because that's what it is. The store's within it's rights to deny you entrance, but to deny you exit they have to have reason to believe you've broken the law in some way. You haven't. Their policy isn't the law. Let the authorities explain this to them.

This likely violates fire code. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice abruptly ends.

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.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

...The AI will grow sentient, irradiate the crabs to make them larger and stronger, merge with their nervous system, and these Bionic Crabs will then hijack ships and battle the humans for control of major cities. An injured renegade Google employee will gave a child a special fob that can stop them, but only if...

Microsoft owns the word Word.

My competing product is Macrohard Wad

Ironically few of their products are "visual" any more. They got rid of WYSIWYG in their dev tools so now devs have to play fiddle faddle to get stuff to look right, and even then DOM shuffles them around in drunk ways under different conditions. It's a time-drain.

WYSIWYG isn't evil, it just needed a few tweaks to adapt. But fadsters were too quick to toss it out with the bathwater over buzzword addiction. Gittoffmylawn!

If there were no solar contributed to the gird, would they charge for power? Yes.
If the power company had excess capacity on their end, would they give it away for free? No.

The only reason there is excess from solar is because they haven't invested in storage to handle it. They won't have money to invest in that storage if they're giving it away. Why is that up to them anyway? It's not theirs to give away. The only reason people are OK with contributing their own excess back to the grid is because they get back credits or money.