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.

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"?

Gen-X. Check your math.

I was in 2nd grade then. We loved it, in part for the novelty and in part because we were allowed to take flashlights to school (relly cool when you're 7).

Unfortunately, that in itself is a punishment. You miss time from work, often have to pay through the nose for an attorney, etc.

It may be the only recourse left, but it can be a costly one that wouldn't be necessary if law enforcement would be more conscientious.

The root cause here was a cop more interested in having a power trip and dumping on someone than in actual justice, law enforcement, or keeping the peace.

It's kind of a knock-on effect. *IF* we could actually trust cops to look at the evidence before they go accusing, threatening, and inconveniencing people with this bs, it might be something like acceptable. But we see over and over that we can't.

And that's BEFORE we consider the nefarious uses that could be made of the data. Unfortunately, we sometimes see evidence for that in the news as well.

See also, high school kid with a bag of Doritos.

That's the point, No I do not. Bitlocker protects against the wrong threat.