The first USB stick I bought, I saved up for and it was over $1/MB. It still works to this day but is so ridiculously slow and capacity limited there’s no reason to.

4TB in a little stamp is amazing.

I don’t like playing multiplayer or online games anyways. So I’m good.

Starcraft, the OG, with Broodwars on the PC

Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, or some tycoon game.

Super Mario World on the SNES

The US is a hostile place for online hosting. All small and medium businesses should move their operations out of the US. I did years ago, never looked back. Only the big ones with lobbiests will remain, just as our dear lord and saviour capitalism intended.

They’re like the last ones to the party lol

Issue is definitely corporate greed outsourcing issues to a mega monolith IT company.

Most IT departments are idiots now. Even 15 years ago, those were the smartest nerds in most buildings. They had to know how to do it all. Now it’s just installing the corporate overlord software and the bullshit spyware. When something goes wrong, you call the vendor’s support line. That’s not IT, you’ve just outsourced all your brains to a monolith that can go at any time.

None of my servers running windows went down. None of my infrastructure. None of the infrastructure I manage as side hustles.

I’d actually love to take some sort of sea train, underground tunnel or floating death wave train one day. It wouldn’t be relaxing, peaceful, or cheap. But it would be an adventure.

Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can’t give coherent output to save its life. Useless.

I’m fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I’m forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I’m good at it.

The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don’t need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn’t even then. You’re just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.

I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they’re in “private beta stealth”. Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.

Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The “cloud” has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It’s no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.

But calling it “the cloud” gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It’s the same stupid reason many companies don’t own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It’s all mind boggling stupid.

It’s a Google updates issue since they’re blocked. Apple isn’t but they comply with the Chinese government just as much as they do in the US as does Google. Remember Google is banned because it would not comply with China. How quickly the Americans forget.

Most likely the corporate spyware that Microsoft enables, requires very recent Google services and Apple services to operate. It’s pretty standard in the corporate spyware world. Usually just a few months out of date at most.

I don’t buy anything on ticketmaster. I won’t install their app.

I still see people I want to see. I just may have to travel to do so.

Yep, I thought of that too. I scrolled down all the way before doing a page search. So… That very much sucks.

Interestingly… Yes. Those words appear nowhere in the article I am looking at. Currently connected to a US VPN (from outside the USA)

What Led to the War:

The commercial restrictions that Britain’s war with France imposed on the U.S. exacerbated the U.S.’s relations with both powers. Although neither Britain nor France initially accepted the U.S.’s neutral rights to trade with the other—and punished U.S. ships for trying to do so—France had begun to temper its intransigence on the issue by 1810. That, paired with the ascendance of certain pro-French politicians in the U.S. and the conviction held by some Americans that the British were stirring up unrest among Native Americans on the frontier, set the stage for a U.S.-British war. The U.S. Congress declared war in 1812.

How it ended:

Peace talks between Britain and the U.S. began in 1814. Britain stalled negotiations as it waited for word of a victory in America, having recently committed extra troops to its western campaign. But news of their losses at places like Plattsburgh, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, paired with the duke of Wellington’s counsel against continuing the war, convinced the British to pursue peace more genuinely, and both sides signed the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. The final battle of the war occurred after this, when a British general unaware of the peace treaty led an assault on New Orleans that was roundly crushed.

Edited to add: I was not even aware that this was happening now. I find this even scarier. Revisionist history for Americans by IP address!

Read this for an example:

https://www.britannica.com/event/War-of-1812

Since you have an actual education and know that it was the US being a bully and trying to steal Ontario and Quebec when they thought the British were weak.

Notice how the encyclopedia (with American propaganda) it’s about trade violations. And the British stalled peace, then surrendered after being crushed in new Orleans. It’s Amazing how twisted Americans can make history.

Yes. The US teaches they won it. I protested that using the textbooks of my parents from other commonwealth countries which were clearly not as revisionist. History teacher failed to recognize he was wrong. This is the type of propaganda Americans are exposed to all the time. I was fortunate enough to have most of my education outside the US and then proactive parents that didn’t let any of that propaganda BS fly.

Proven every single year. It’s not a new thing either. Look at the real non-revisionist history of “the war of 1812” and you’ll see how the US started some shit unprovoked yet again, got their asses handed to them like Vietnam, and had to retreat. Canadians/British burned down the US capital as a f-off symbol and then retreated. The US views that as a victory.

I’m convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans. And they also have no idea. Only a few can see the reality. And they try to escape.

Because Americans like you are too stupid to realize a propagandist article.

Yes it is very important to say America does it too. Because most Americans have no idea.

So same with the people voluntarily visiting the USA right? Because the same laws already exist there.