Tech Pro - Hobby Aviator - VR Enthusiast - Homelab Selfhoster 🇵🇷🧑🏻💻🛩️🥽 https://techviator.com
For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).
I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I’m back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.
At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.
Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.
They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).
My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:
If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.
Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.
I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.
It’s already being used for security audits, so it is definitely possible to use it that same way in a malicious manner.
Also, there are companies like Lakera (creators of the Gandalf prompt injection challenge) offering products to sanitize and secure LLMs, so there is a market for it, because the risks are definitely there.
Yeah, but also no. This was reported last year, and the scientists studying it did not mention it was an attempt to contact us from another planet, but the “remains of a massive star’s death.”
From this article on CNN:
Flaring space objects that appear to turn on and off are known as transients.
"When studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” said study coauthor Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist, in a statement. “‘Slow transients’ – like supernovae – might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’ – like a type of neutron star called a pulsar – flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.”
This new, incredibly bright object, however, only turned on for about a minute every 18 minutes. The researchers said their observations might match up with the definition of an ultra-long period magnetar. Magnetars usually flare by the second, but this object takes longer.
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the object to see whether it turns back on, and in the meantime, they are searching for evidence of other similar objects.
And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don’t want you to leave, they don’t want you to “be done”, they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that’s part of what they sell to advertisers.