Within a few years Microsoft won’t allow you to store anything on your pc
 

So says my network guy. I was arguing over this latest MS scheme to get all my files on their cloud system and he says it’s unavoidable.

I am well and truly disgusted. Congress should be involved in this and protecting the American people.

Linux FTW.

I can’t imagine that. I work with files that are 11 Gigabytes and bigger regularly. I have 12 Terabytes of storage. No way in hell can that be done online.

All your base belong to us. MS new slogan?
Elon with“Let that sink in”.
Along with “GFY” are rather apropos…

I wonder if Linux will work with my EHR system

This... I've been using Linux Mint (at home) for about 5 years. Highly recommended!

:cool:

https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/solutions/business-solutions/briefs-summaries/migrate-your-epic-environment-to-linux-with-dell-technologies-intel-and-red-hat.pdf?ref=cpcl_modernized-health-learn-lib-20_cta_link_readsolutionbrief

Maybe before we all go and call our Congressperson, we should get some verification from someone other than "my network guy".


Then maybe we shouldn't be calling on the government to regulate the decisions of private business, but that's for a different forum...

Apple has the same dream. They seem to be going about it at a slightly slower pace.

I don't mind. When it comes to updating I'm always a couple of years behind. So all the bugs (and arguing ) will be over by then.

No way. Laptops have to work offline.

I can understand your skepticism. My guy was pretty big already (well into 7 figures revenues) then was bought out by a regional group a year or two ago and administers networks for big companies like price Waterhouse, etc. This isn’t the neighbors nephew who ‘took computers at the community college’.

You’d think so.

In the accounting industry the main bookkeeping software is quickbooks. They are phasing out desktop and will be moving completely to their online product. Anyone here use Adobe Lightroom? This is no joke guys.

The time is coming when we will have to ask permission to get to any of our own data. This is a fundamental change that benefits only large cos like MS, Intuit, etc.

They want all your data in the cloud to let AI roam through it. Lovely :eek:
But so convenient when time comes to give you a social credit score and hand that over to the government for controlling your digital currency…

It's bigger than just bot learning from anonymous data across the internet.
Every program (App they call it) will be sniffing through your proprietary records and data.
Already are actually..

Do you make a lot of good stock trades?
Suing a large company?
A pastor buying make up and ladies grundys?
Running for office somewhere?
Inquiring minds want to know.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-settles-5-billion-consumer-privacy-lawsuit-2023-12-28/
They said his turned Google into an "unaccountable trove of information" by letting the company learn about their friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" they seek out online.


The big companies will be able to immunize themselves. The little people not so much.
The laws are MIA.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/ny-times-sues-openai-microsoft-infringing-copyrighted-work-2023-12-27/
NEW YORK, Dec 27 (Reuters) - The New York Times (NYT.N) sued OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Wednesday, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper's articles without permission to help train chat bots to provide information to readers.

I really like the ability to store all my photos on the cloud. No charge for the service and they are instantly accessible.

Other than that, it doesn't really matter to me.

Not a chance said by Bob Kontak, January 4, 2024.

Everything is going SaaS [Software as a Service] in the cloud anymore. So lightroom, QuickBooks, SAP, M365........yeah, that stuff lives out there. I don't see how any vendor can REQUIRE home users to put everything in the cloud. There is too much risk for them. If I had my CC info in a text file, some health files, and tax reports saved locally with SSNs etc, and their systems got compromised, that is a lot of HIPPA and PII data they are on the hook for.

Back in the day I had my Keepass file synced with DropBox. I quickly realized he err of my ways and knocked that crap off. Keep everything synced on my local NAS.

Here's why it matters to me-

During the discussion over my desire to get off this one drive cloud **** i said 'just put my network back such that all my word and excel files are stored on my local server and not via this one drive cloud thing.

Do you want to know what i was told? By my 'friend' i've known for 20 years who owns his building for about $300k less than other offers the bank received because i hooked him into a deal with some other distressed properties...do you want to know what this guy says to me?

he says 'i'm not willing to do that'.

Think about that for a bit. This is big business operating ethos now guys. At one point he says 'i'm still trying to decide what i want to do here'. WTF? You're trying to decide what YOU want to do with MY data?

You can write this off as some oddball craziness that won't happen elsewhere but what i'm telling you is this guy is at the top of a company that grosses 10's of millionis of $$ annually managing networks and this statement is a window into the thought process of the industry.

It's already happening.
Ever notice when you go to save something it changes the first option to a cloud?
People are lazy and figure this is the easiest way.
The photo clouds that have been holding people's stuff for ransom was the first of many to come.

Everytime the shutter clicks on our Canon 5DsR it as we shoot oblique aerials it takes a 65 MB RAW file, and a 15 MB jpg file at the same time.It is easy to shoot 250 shots. Do the math, that is a lot of megabytes. Then I get to my office, and open the RAW files in Photoshop and process the RAW files into TIF files, and every single image is a TIF file that id 294,881 KB. No way can that be efficiently done on the cloud.

On the same flight for the nadir imaging we process that into a tif file that is 11,052,418 KB or pretty much an 11 GB file as the deliverable.

That is why I have a 2TB M.2 drive as my boot device, and another one just like it as my "work" drive.

So, yea people doing just email or sharing spreadsheets may well work on the cloud, it is not possible for people working with large data files.

Facebook didn't earn over $100 billion last year for nothing.

Do you remember how many times FB, Target, Amazon and other giants have been hacked?
Neither do I. Because it was a blip on the media radar. Single story. A non-issue.

Of course those affected got nothing for their info being put out on the dark web, permanently.
If something happens years later how would anyone prove correlation?
And Congress passed no new privacy laws limiting the collection and distribution.

My city recently mandated 'smart' water meters which only transmit usage continuously now.
The 3rd-party company talks about 'efficiency' and 'saving water'. BS.
Meanwhile city water bills have tripled at the very least. A class action was filed for fraudulent billing but dismissed for no standing.
And the meter company talks about maintaining 'profiles'.
What they are really talking about is tracking the personal habits of every citizen.

FWIW, Our water company notices spikes in usage and notifies us. We had a blow-out on the irrigation system, that saved us money big time.

Microsoft, Apple, the IRS, the FBI, and even the CIA have been hacked, and data stolen. I have never been hacked. The only things I put on OneDrive is our customer's deliverable file for them to download. All they can do is download that one file in the link I send them.

Recently one of the large local hospital and health systems, Integris, was hacked and email address, home addresses, and SSN along with DOB and health info was downloaded. Every doctor in the system asks for the SSN of a new patient. I always leave it blank, but they have it from some source. I have a credit freeze on all three credit bureaus. I have to hurry with my tax returns to prevent someone else from fraudulently filing a return, and causing a huge mess with the IRS.

I just went through this with quickbooks. We had a 2015 desktop version at work. I'm at a small private school. When I looked at their cloud version, it couldn't even handle our small business. I confirmed this with their sales guy who looked at our company file. We now have their 2024 desktop version. They do however now charge an annual fee and you just stay current with the software. It includes cloud backup of the company data, but the work and storage is on my local machine.

This will be interesting to follow over the next few years.

Yea, QuickBooks is pushing hard for cloud version. In the past, I went three years on a version, now I will have to upgrade each year. I understand that. My CPA warned me, once I put the files "on the cloud" you can never download that data again. All you can do is print reports. I will stick with the desktop version.

Government discussions can and do happen right here on this forum. At least....government policy bashing. Discussions of government as a solution may belong on the other forum, but I'm just guessing.

Sometimes businesses do things we don't prefer, contrary to the theory they always will do what we want. When those behaviors are nefarious, it seems to me there are just two potential remedies. Government or tort litigation. Our preferences may boil down to which of these we hate the most.

I see some scary observations here. Not sure what is the solution, but it seems to me that individuals....the public....should have control over data. This could be done, but I think we'd need to use one of the two remedies I mentioned.

I just bought my granddaughter a MacBook Air, which has only one port. USB-C. My older MacBook has several, including two USB-A ports. This gives me more flexibility, which i use. I recently bought a SSD drive, and transferring data from old fashioned external hard drives was easy, with both of them connected to my MacBook. Perhaps I will get the granddaughter an SSD and have this data privacy conversation with her. But.....in a few years the whole landscape will likely have changed. Probably not for the better. It seems we are not having a discussion about how much of our private data we can control....as much as we are having a discussion about whether we will have any control of it.

What he said.

I think software is headed towards subscription models, and that may be stored in the cloud as well - regardless no sub no play.. I hate that and stocked up on the latest "physical installs" of old photoshop, quicken, and others.. I want to pay one time and own something, and for my stuff to work w/o internet. But it's not like they're gonna prevent use of your hard drive. The cloud stuff has advantages in terms of backup (users suck, one of ours stored all their files in the recycle bin!!!) but when it's down (their end of yours) everyone's toast... I can't wait for the first serious cloud breach too...

At work I keep hearing about VDI year after year (cloud based desktop). Sure we have some, but 99% are local machines because a lot of stuff is not "one size fits all". VDIs have to be identical or fit a specific mold, or quickly become a pain to manage. Citrix stuff (lots of cloud based apps) is down a LOT, their support is useless, so we're partially coming back to locally hosted stuff.. IT is all cycles, comes and goes.. every 3 year we outsource, then bring it back in house... I suspect cloud stuff is here to stay but the momentum will swing as far as how far it reaches.

This is a nice example of why I love this place. 20 minutes later

The single USB-C can probably be plugged into a USB hub to expand the number of connections. USB-C has a higher transfer rate than the old USB. I'm sure the reason for the disappearing ports is 1 most folks probably only use one port at a time if they are using a port at all (my wife almost never uses a port). And 2 fewer ports mean, the laptop can be smaller, sleeker, and CHEAPER.

It probably depends upon the company. THe company that I work for is one of the biggest banks in the world. I think we've got well into the 90% range for VDI. But then that probably makes more sense for a company with over 250,000 employees. That's a lot of desktops, vs a bunch of big chassis. And then you can have fewer local computer support guys, and there's less downtime due to someone having a hardware problem.

I don't particularly like it. I held out as long as possible with my desktop. At least when I HAD to switch, I was able to request a "developer's VDI" (I'm not actually a developer, but I am a power user) which is more powerful. I knew some folks that switched from desktops to regular VDI and had issues due to being allocated meager resources.

You need a new friend. Kust saying.

In regards to VDI, we use them here as it makes it much easier to manage and when they wfh it is the same. Basically you have a parent and just save some of the appdata for specific programs like Office and Teams. When they login it creates a clone from the parent and copies the appdata. Or it can be a persistent clone and eliminate some data moving back and forth.

I think we know that Wayne pretty much developed the Pelican site for sales and established the forums using vBulletin. This goes back to circa 2000 and that's a lot of forum archives, many which are searchable quite far back.

Wayne developed his own proprietary software for the sales side. I can't tell you much about it and all that it does, but as a vacation stand in for a couple of guys that man the phones, I have used it. It's different is what I can say.

So therefore, Pelican has all your purchases stored along with information except your CC number. It's been awhile, but they didn't store that info. Still a lot of data. And Pelican has their own servers, or did.

What happens to a company like that?

The college I work for has a home-written ERP that does ALL of our stuff - student course/registration/etc, financial aid, hr stuff, payroll stuff, everything except the public website.

Right now we're in the middle of writing code to export/import data via csv or similar and we are moving to a new company for all of the financial aid stuff (keeping up with the government is hard for a two person team, especially when one of them refuses to learn a new language to replace the one we started trying to move off of almost 20 year ago) and a second new company for all of the HR/finance/payroll/accounting stuff.

But our student record side will never be out of our total control. Should we go "cloud" with it, it will be at the level of "well, we can spec this from azure/amazon/linode/whoever vs. paying dell for servers and drives and then having to cool all that stuff and whatnot" and then we'll be basically on someone elses VM infrastructure instead of our local one.

Yeah I don't see how thats even possible.

Early Linux adopter here.
You can make Linux act like windows. At least you used to **** Microsoft.

Started with Debian in 1997..... unsure why I'd want my nice Linux machines acting like Windows though :)

Well that's interesting. Thank you.

Yes he did, and when we were discussing the site from a technical perspective and guessing it utilized some sophisticated hardware he told us that if we saw the machine we would "laugh out loud." I think he said it was on the floor next to his desk. I formed the impression it was an ordinary desktop tower. I've been here almost 24 years. (sigh)