I'd be shocked about but would strongly approve of this thread being allowed to stay up here.

Uh-oh did I say something wrong?

In a time of universal deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act...

But what's wrong with Drupal though? A bit convoluted, but worth it in the end... Took me a couple of years to get the hang of it.

Universal deceit?

You might not like it, but as you said it's your job. You're accepting payment for performing those duties. If you don't like them you are free to quit.

We all float down here.

Yeah but the point is the way all this is going. It won't be too much longer before you have to pay a monthly fee to use your computer.

Like you do for internet access? Or mobile phone service? Or electricity?

You've been paying a monthly fee for computer use for a long time...

Okay I'm not going to post anything else in this thread - let it go

where i work:no more my documents, all on one drive. moving to all- cloud devices no more proper laptops/desktops. MS 365. sharepoint replaced network shares. virtualisation of everything. ms teams. cloud everything. out-sourcing, off premise hosting.

as long as it works, i dont care tbh.

I know of a company that lives off a Google drive. It's surprising to me, but maybe it's become common.
It's been suggested that I could do IT for them. Not sure how I feel about that.
I'm more appalled by their sorry excuse for a "database". One of them is some outsourced thing that looks to have been sloppily "semi-customized" with obvious flaws and has no apparent documentation re the underlying tables. If it were me I'd start over, I'd hate dealing with somebody else's outsourced database that probably can't even be revised without getting the "provider" involved.
The rest of it is a bunch of disconnected spreadsheet files on their Google Drive. They don't even have an objective, systemic way (a functional key) for identifying the same person on different sheets. They rely on human intuition to figure that out.
But I don't think they even see that as a problem.

Yeah but the point is the way all this is going. It won't be too much longer before you have to pay a monthly fee to use your computer.

The modern expectation that we should depend on a bigger, more powerful external "provider" does bother me, even more on a personal desktop PC.

On my personal PC, I choose not to be as paranoid and nutty about some things as the world wants me to be. I think I have a good handle on where the risks are, and I know how I want my PC to be configured and how I want things to work. So I'd rather take responsibility to know what I'm installing or changing on my PC, rather than letting someone else gatekeep it for me.
I also don't want to follow UI trends, ads, updates, propaganda spam etc that some outside entity wants to push on me.

Loss of control is a major reason I've gravitated to linux on newer PCs. Not that major linux distros don't also try to "manage" our PCs for us, but at least in that world it's more viable to say no.

Writings been on the wall for a long time now.
My previous job was an outsourcing I.T. company that strongly pushed hosted servers in Colo's rather than selling servers.
I suspect the idea, monthly payment rather a one off payment for a single server was part of the motivation.
But once Office 365 was released even this company started pushing smaller customers to that, which I never understood. Sure we got a slight cut but the majority of the payment would go to paying the MS subscription.

Last year I started a new job for a in house I.T. Dept, The push is get as much into the cloud as possible, partly to reduce cost of support and renewal of hardware/software. partly due to better server redundancy, partly to have MS or whoever manage the majority of security/spam/etc defence.

Personally I miss looking after on premises server rooms with racks of physical servers, hell even backup tapes! but thats why I have a few retro servers at home.
Out in the real world it's hard to argue with the high availability of online services....until the internet goes down.

I guess this cloud nonsense is retrofuturistic, in that if we extrapolated from the mid 70s what computing would look like in half a century we'd picture terminals connecting to mainframes.

IBM pivots to microcomputers in the 80s, dies in the 90s. Microsoft dies in the 00s, pivots to minicomputers.

I refuse to have an account with either goog or MS. And yes, control of the internet being centralized to a few corpos is a bad thing.

Fully agree.

I have a MS account, but yet I never signed up with them. It's because I got myself a hotmail account back before MS bought them out. So, the hotmail account became a MS account.

Never had a google/youtube/apple account. Don't own any products of theirs either.

I really don't like idea of having an "account" in general. Every time I get some spam text about my account with Amazon compromised I just laugh - because I have never ordered from amazon.
That is just another way your information can be stored, hacked, compromised, etc. And what happens when your "account" messes up - how are you going to get in straightened out?
In an earlier message someone pointed out what is the big deal - have been having to pay for internet for years. Well maybe I am old enough to remember the day when software came on CDs that you could install and use without ever being online. No "account" required.
This is all a control issue and a privacy issue. Don't think for one second that any file that you put on one drive is actually private.