My cousin sister lost all her files to a malicious script on her pendrive, and I am fixing it right now (at the time of writing this). The unreliable pile of crap called OneDrive didn’t even back up properly, and well, Windows has gone so bad, it’s terrible,laggy and slow on a Ryzen 5800U with 8GB of RAM. I wish she was open to learning Linux desktop environments.
I set up my 90 year old grandmother with Ubuntu; she was extremely open to learning. If somebody’s got to learn something, then why not the more useful skill? That’s better for the user, the teacher, and society at large.
Or I click a link to story about a cat stuck in a tree and it takes me to small, local newspaper I’ve never heard of called “The Sawfly Gazette - serving South Western Maine since 1975!”, then it immediately tells me I’ve hit my “article limit” and must subscribe for $14.95.
I don’t think they do, most of the MS doomerism I see implies they probably never tried to turn any of it off. I uninstalled one drive years ago along with turning off the ads and telemetry and its all stayed that way ever since, but I keep getting told all of it will be back with the next update. I update when it prompts me to and it never undoes my settings.
The cloud is a shitload of computers connected in such a way that it’s far more reliable than any single computer, and so you don’t need to care about which computer is doing what.
Yes, those computers physically exist somewhere and are owned by someone, but saying the cloud doesn’t exist is just ridiculous. May as well say clouds in the sky don’t exist either because they’re just water.
That’s just it, the “cloud” is just a fancy name for a cluster that’s owned by someone else. Everything you’ve described as what a “cloud” is, has already been defined.
The term “cloud” is a marketing vapor term that loosely refers to a cluster of hypervisors. That’s how hypervisors at large scale are pretty much always organized.
The hypervisors in use are not something most people have ever heard of. The most commonly known contenders are hyper-v (which is the basic technology that Azure is built on), and VMware. But most major “cloud” providers, with the exception of Azure, are using something else entirely.
The same description you’ve provided can also be applied to modern super computers, mainframes, and pretty much anything that lives inside a datacenter.
A personal computer has a multitude of single points of failure. A single power supply on a single circuit, a single processor, with all memory controllers in that same processor, a single OS drive, a single network interface. Servers generally have multiple power supplies, multiple CPUs, multiple disk drive controllers, connected to multiple disks in some kind of raid or equivalent. Basically all single points of failure, with few exceptions (such as power management/distribution, and the motherboard) have been removed.
Then you take the servers and scale up to a whole cluster of servers and you get so much more redundancies. A cluster, when done properly is basically bullet proof for failures. Making it larger both increases capacity and redundancy. Without increasing latency. Again, when done right.
In all, “cloud” is a marketing buzzword. I don’t know of anyone in tech that calls a “cloud” by that name unless they’re talking to someone who doesn’t know that a “cloud” is fictitious.
Thing is M$ is showing you the cloud as the first option to make you use it and buy more space when you need it.
Google got sued for making the google the default chrome search engine without asking the user. I think M$ is doing the same with the cloud storage but asking you with a pen about to mark their option. And the programs don’t even remember you didn’t choose the cloud the last time.
In 2003 I could have made a living selling subscriptions to 5-GB cloud storage that was tightly integrated into Windows.
I understand why Windows is trying to capture you into it’s cloud ecosystem. Just saying that between M$, Apple, and Google you can do some robust backups, basically for free. And if you’re worried about privacy, just encrypt.
I actually don’t hate onedrive that much. I’ve used it for a while now and it’s one of the best ways to just share a folder with some people very easily. And they can even use the desktop app and you can all have a cloud synced folder, it’s really convenient for collaborating on projects. I know other things can do this, but few do it as seamlessly.
That said I’m trying pretty hard to ditch it because I hate how Microsoft are just making it the default behaviour without really making it apparent that all your documents just get uploaded to their servers. I hope proton drive gets the features I need soon,.
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