Yes. All surfing is between your client and the server running the web services.

The problem is that many many companies/developers used cloud services to host their websites. It’s where they out their computers/services that determine the reliance on the big hosting platforms or not. Your client really has no say in the matter.

I use the Internet all the time without cloud platforms, but it’s because I host tools on non cloud systems. Having Cloudflare or AWS down doesn’t affect my own tools because I’m not hosting them on those platforms.

“trust is” says marketing.

This post feels like a bot wrote it as pro Microsoft spam.

AWS is mostly built on AWS.

Yes, DNS started failing to properly fill name lookups. So, DynamoDB started failing. That started making security and other AWS services fail. Which in turn made higher level services fail.

It truly was a house of cards kind of moment.

This kind of tech has been floating around the research world of smart home tech for over a decade now. Various forms of EM deflection and field deviation modeling have been used to be headcount sensors, gesture sensors, and body position modeling. Yup, it’s out there. Normally, it takes multiple antennas in particular positions to work, so it’s still a more controlled space kind of thing than the whole world. That said, it’s possible to do, so head’s up, we’re in for a rough ride going forward on the privacy and monitoring fronts.

Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.

I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can’t build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.

It’s been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.

Basically, I’ve been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it’s doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We’re a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.

Show me an ad in my own kitchen and that screen is going to be broken.

I moved to Germany. It’s been an experience because the tech status dialed back about 15 years. One area I don’t miss is the ever pervasive drive to have screens with ads on every surface.

The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.

I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.

It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.

Anything except dealing with the problem itself.

I left the US and took my kids. We no longer have to deal with active shooter drills and school shootings are a national tragedy here, with about one per decade.

Have your cyberpunk drones and children terror drills, but make sure you can still have your guns!

Come to the Open Source community for ideology, stay for the better life. It’s a learning curve to get in. After that it’ll open more doors and be much more relaxing to run OSS operating environments than you think.

The real fun is when you’ve been on Linux for a few years and are forced to do some tasks on a Windows machine. It’s amazing how bad the Windows UI and tooling is, but it’s hard to see until you can look with some perspective.

I usually start a desktop on Mint since it’s got at least some new drivers and a few more tools with Cinnamon desktop.

If the hardware is finicky or there’s odd devices a distro doesn’t handle, I often just try a different distro instead of driver hacking. It’s a very big hammer, but I’d rather have things work with the distro configs instead of maintaining it myself.

Servers? Debian.

Desktops? Mint (prettier Debian out of the box)

Otherwise? Use what works with the least effort.

The answer is: badly and inefficiently. It’s the American way!

Since 1998, baby! Found my RedHat 3.0.3 install CD recently. It’s been such a long road, but it keeps getting better.

Sample size: 1

That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.

According to one of our adjuncts: “Windows just works for dev, why are we teaching Linux at all?”

He didn’t last.

It’s not a conservative’s problem until it effects them personally. By then it’s usually too late, but at least they feel bad about that one issue for a while.

I did the same thing with the Linux machine there, but we got it up and running with a sweet potato using a patch set for the kernel and cross compiling it from the basic potato release. We did find the drivers for the VGA card we salvaged from a scrap pile too! Got it up to the full 640x480 supported by the card.

You could say it was a sweet setup.

I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.

It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!

I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.

Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/attiny10

Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.

They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>