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> residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is

> residential routers plus a USB stick will make this more possible. This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is" At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely. It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.

mlyle 5y ago
Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of: * Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it. I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
- calsy 5y ago
  Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when? If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  > People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs. For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.
- calsy 5y ago
  Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd. Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'm not necessarily comparing them, I'm just pointing out that this line "people can't manage their own shit and so must contract with companies to do it for them" is ridiculous in it's face. You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it. Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.

mlyle 5y ago

Maybe read it a bit more generously, in the vein of: * Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it. I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.

calsy 5y ago
Most people use mobile devices and want the ability to watch content anywhere, anytime at press of a play button. That’s the benchmark. No personal hardware setup will match that convenience and people who are not aware of the security risks shouldn’t be hosting their own content from their personal network online.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when? If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.

ashtonkem 5y ago
> People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs. For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.
calsy 5y ago
Why are we pretending it's the early 2000s? CDs were used because that was the best option at the time obviously. To compare them to services today hosting infinite amounts of LEGAL content streamed over the internet to millions of people on all manner of devices at the touch of a button is rather odd. Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm not necessarily comparing them, I'm just pointing out that this line "people can't manage their own shit and so must contract with companies to do it for them" is ridiculous in it's face. You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it. Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.