It's rather interesting that HN mods allow posts with this kind of language but the moment you are even mildly critical of a comment or commenter, you get a warning about language. I guess the thinking is we look the other way as long as its not hosted on the ycombinator domain.
Fuck the Cloud (2009)
81–90 of 235 posts
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
S3 seems great today, and is undoubtedly more technically reliable than any home solution, but history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible. Not to mention that billing disputes or legal action could also affect your ability to get data from them. (Jason Scott is speaking from experience here, as one of the people called in to do emergency…
> history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible That's absurdly unlikely to happen with S3.
Right. If that happens, I likely have MUCH bigger problems to worry about, e.g., finding the nearest VAULT-TEC vault.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#83>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
Do you control Amazon? No? Then you're not the captain - you're just a sailor and someone else is in control of your data.
Now go put your stuff up on S3 but please keep a backup of the things you upload there.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#84>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF. It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities. The degree to which people rely on others to…
The 3-2-1 rule is a rule for a reason.
3 copies
2 formats
1 copy off-site
The cloud is a great place for that 1 off-site copy.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#85>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
Do you control Amazon? No? Then you're not the captain - you're just a sailor and someone else is in control of your data. Now go put your stuff up on S3 but please keep a backup of the things you upload there.
I do keep a back up of things, but the back up is on S3 because that is the most stable storage option available to me. Everything else is the risky copy.
>Do you control Amazon? No? Then you're not the captain
This is textbook NIH syndrome. Rather than looking at the relative probabilities you look at something from an ideological perspective. Your argument isn't "Its safer with me" its "I want to be in control of it" This attitude is generally harmful. Think about your money. Are you in control of the bank? no right, but you still keep your money there instead of in a shoe box under your bed. Why? Because the bank is better at protecting your money than you are. They have big heavy metal doors and men with guns to move it from place to place. Amazon is like a bank for your data.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> demonstrate that ... on a number of cloud platforms ... that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage You seem to be missing the point. People are not saying "don't use cloud storage at all " They are saying "don't use cloud storage exclusively " You might trust that your cloud providers will never be hacked, that your individual account on them will never be hacked, that they…
>For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite. But the fact remains that where ever you choose to put it "offline and offsite" the odds of it being lost are orders of magnitude greater then its persistent and redundant storage on a reputable cloud provider. Even if you put it on the most stable storage you can find and lock it in a underground safe. You can't guarantee its integri…
Maybe ask the people of Greece if they "trust the banks". Shit happens, a local copy of your stuff does no harm at all in the same way as some cash on the hip is cool in case your card stops working.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#87When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account? I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities…
My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod. Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?
Both statements are correct. Remember that it was a personal computing 'revolution'. It would be a great step backwards to accede power to cloud service providers.
Computing at the whim of others aka timesharing.
Smile and nod but your mother has seen a few cycles of the industry.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our life's savings are not unique, and can be replenished from a different source. Our childhood pictures and personal correspondence are, and generally can not. Besides, banks are subject to rather a lot of external control, through regulation (oh noes!). Here in NL the government actually guarantees your savings (but not investments) should a bank go belly-up. I believe the US did something similar, although I didn…
> Our life's savings are not unique, and can be replenished from a different source. In absolute terms, they can, but no one I know of has a solid backup plan for life savings. Life savings come from saving over a lifetime. You can't really replenish them without replenishing someone's life and ability to save.
You gave me an interesting startup idea:
How to back up your savings!(.io)
Now to make it work...
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. Remember that next time you're red with rage because a cloud provider lost your data or a service you depended on is now bought/closed/gone.
My point was more on the quality of the article. The article's point is a valid one, if you can find it. To constructively disagree, though: I keep backups. I have a Synology NAS device that I really like. But for your average person, I have to wonder - are their digital photos really safer on their laptop than they are on Facebook? Facebook is a fairly stable company. Laptops are lost, stolen, and damaged all the ti…
Think about the future too though. Facebook strips exif and may have resized/recompressed your images. 20 years from now when we can do more super cool things with that data, the data won't exist in your FB photos.
Tangentially related, this is why I shoot RAW. Not because it might give me better pictures today, but because it WILL give me better pictures in 5-10-20 years. You can take a RAW today that was shot 5 years ago and pull detail that was impossible to pull when it was shot, and that ability will only improve.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. Remember that next time you're red with rage because a cloud provider lost your data or a service you depended on is now bought/closed/gone.
My point was more on the quality of the article. The article's point is a valid one, if you can find it. To constructively disagree, though: I keep backups. I have a Synology NAS device that I really like. But for your average person, I have to wonder - are their digital photos really safer on their laptop than they are on Facebook? Facebook is a fairly stable company. Laptops are lost, stolen, and damaged all the ti…
Safer on laptop vs. forgetting the password for facebook.
By making a technically inept strawman, it's reduced to an argument of which is more idiot proof.
The problem with idiot proof is that there's always a better idiot out there.
The argument here by the 'anti cloud' side is 'why not both?'. To argue for one side or the other exclusively is pointless.