featherverse

I wrote an article about this called Shared Hosting is Bad for Business. I pointed out that shared hosting as a business model depends on the failure of it's customers' websites. You can't run 1,000 high traffic websites on a single server, typically, but you can run 1,000 no-traffic websites on a single server.

You see this in practice because basically every shared hosting provider will disable your account if your website starts using more than it's quota of system resources.

Some providers go so far as to say their service is unlimited but obviously that's false, there are several physical limitations no matter what hardware is being utilized.

Have you looked at Pride Tech Design? Managed VPS and cheaper than hostgator.

Full disclosure: I am an employee

The right future is one where 100% of users use password managers or keyrings locked by some sort of simple but secure (and most importantly stable) biometric system.

Tho ignorance of technology concepts is not something to be tolerated, it's something to be cured with vigilant education efforts.

tl;dr, headline is false. Smartphones aren't killing people. Stupid behavior is killing people.

They know better, and they do it anyway.

Smartphones make it easy for everyone to record all of their phone calls, protecting them from phone predators. They provide location capabilities which make it easier for rescuers to find victims of accidents. So on and so forth.

Smartphones are great. Stupid people are going to find ways to kill themselves no matter what tools you place in their hands. It's natural selection.

This is the second time I've seen this story with a completely misleading headline, it makes a person wonder what the agenda is when creating the headlines.

Yeah I would rather have a php based webapp that I can download and install on my own server, than any sort of SaaS thing. I hate SaaS, I think it's a kind of gamble, I am gambling that the people providing that service will be successful and operational until I quit using it.

But in the real world that isn't always the case.

However with a localized application that I can download, install, and run without any reliance on "the mothership", if the developers should go belly up (obviously nobody wants that), I can at least continue to use the software for a length of time while searching for a suitable replacement.

That's just one example. There's other things, such as data security, short term outages, and so on. In general SaaS has always been a terrible idea. It's good for corporations, but it sucks for users, and computing is about what's good for the users.

Unfortunately there's a large number of business owners who think it's better to just have a facebook page. They think they're using facebook to promote their business, when really they're using their business to promote facebook.

A sucker is born every day.

Here we see an example of people who discovered the web long after high speed internet was commonplace, and they think it's "hip" to force everyone back into the dark ages when visiting their site.

That isn't a website, it's a text file. What's worse, it's not served as a plain text file.

A real minimalist coffee shop website would be something like a single column with a few photos of the interior of the cafe (which is what customers are going to care about), maybe a photo of a fancy latte in a mug, and some decent sized and centered text with the address. Lots of white space between elements, and responsive for all screen sizes.

"Sorry we're not interested in website design services", it says at the bottom of their "website". Well I hate to break it to you guys but you seriously need it. If I were comparing two coffee shops on google maps, I would pick one that shows me photos of the shop over that Too Cool For The Web nonsense.

This is a neat idea but unless I can operate my own private version then it's not really useful.

I've got a private wiki that provides essentially the same function. It's not as convenient to add new notes, but that convenience comes at the cost of organizational sanity.

I tried using Evernote for this purpose and what I discovered was unless you can control it yourself then it sucks. Eventually they're going to have money problems or they'll get DDoSed or whatever and suddenly this vital resource you've learned to rely on is not available when you need it.

You might as well use notepad & nextcloud.

There are only 2 things an app like this can offer to make it 'special' compared to the thousands of other available methods. Searchable tags, and a convenient UI.

Duh, Senator. We knew this when Experian got hacked.

Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, and any other credit bureaus are going to fail to protect people's personal data. There is no such thing as "unhackable", they are the biggest honey pots, and the majority of the Information Technology hiring pool is incompetent. The majority of competent candidates are underpaid or underappreciated and so they don't care as much as we need them to.

Put all these things together and you have inevitable disaster after disaster after disaster.

Credit Bureaus are old-think. They are unsafe, unsecure, and they don't fit with Future-Era lifestyle.

Something better is required.

Yes, not because they were hacked, but because their reactions after the hack have shown their technology department to be wholly incompetent.

First, that article is apparently a re-post, is it an old story? If so what motivation was there to re-post it if not political timing?

Second, nobody with a rational mind, nobody with critical thinking skills, would ever or has ever asked that question. Carrying guns is not about reducing crime.

The right to carry firearms is about empowering an individual to be less helpless in their own life in the case of a crime committed against them.

It is a constant fraud of the anti-gun crowd to suggest that respecting the right to self defense and the right to carry arms is somehow indoctrination into a public defense agency. And it speaks volumes about the way they really think about freedom or an individual's liberty.

It is a proven fact that carrying a gun visibily will reduce the risk of a person being assaulted in various ways by strangers on the street. If you want to fund a proper study we can doubly prove this. The visible presence of a firearm changes the way people behave. People who would behave in anti-social and criminal ways will think twice if they see their victim has a gun on their hip. I promise.

That's not saying there aren't occasional freak exceptions. Some people's lives are so rotten they are aching to throw them away and take a few of us out with them. You can't do anything to stop them. That's what being free is, people are free to turn into monsters. What you can do is remain empowered to put them down if they become so rabid.

Sorry for the lengthy comment. Protecting everyone's right to arm themselves is more important than any other aspect of this subject.

Well it's been a few days and no answer. That's a strange result for an "ask me anything".

Does anyone else notice a pattern of behavior with this guy? First he takes it upon himself to decide what websites get to exist, and now he says DDoS will die forever because HIS service offers mitigation. In other words, EVERYONE is going to join his network. Where he gets to decide who has internet access.

When you see people exhibit signs like this the best advice is often run away as fast as you can.

So are all major piracy operations in existence today and yet most of them operate without any real penalties. Look at The Pirate Bay and Giganews, both of those have been operating under enormous "legal risk" for over a decade.

Piracy is never going away and this re-run of corporations trying to control content created by people (corporations are not people) will fail the same way that every single previous effort has failed. Piracy will outlive the old fools pushing for these programs.

I'm not saying piracy is the answer, but once these troublesome corporate fools have all died sanity will return to the market and piracy will be replaced by pro-consumer models.

The only people who give a @!#$ about the DMCA are lawyers. It's going to be repealed eventually.

You nailed it.

The user cares about access to content. The user does not care about DRM. The user does not care about corporate interests. Ad blockers are proof of this. The user wants what they want, and the people who provide that to them with the fewest hassles are the ones who win.

Everyone needs to appreciate that "cost" is a gigantic hassle to most people, no matter how much money they have. The concept of owning their content is another big consideration for people, which is why we saw "rental" models for video streaming fail in the past compared to "ownership" models.

> They have no market influence.

In other words you have no idea what you're talking about, and why should anything else you say be treated any differently?

There's like 1,000 programming languages and we don't need most of them. If a new language is truly amazing, by all means use it, but if it's hated by everyone I don't know why you'd choose it over something like C or Python or Perl which most developers seem to agree are the "good" languages.

I don't know any of the above mentioned languages myself, so beyond that outsider perspective I can't form an opinion on it, I am just curious why this choice was made.

Well if you really want to get into the philosophy of this, it is important to first acknowledge that concepts like "society", or "property" are completely fictional, made-up ideas, that people simply invented.

It's not that different from kids playing pretend in their parent's basement, inventing any rules they want for their game. They can do whatever they want, because there isn't anyone else around to tell them differently.

A lot, I mean a _lot_ of people do not often think about this fact, they sort of assume that these concepts were handed down by some impossible deity (god is not real.) But the truth is they emerged from intelligent self-aware people who for various reasons simply decided that these things should exist.

So with that in mind, if property is make-believe, how can you "own" something? What precisely is ownership? Just more make-believe, using different words.

If it exists at all, it's a social contract, and when it's you versus everyone else, hate to break it to you but it means nothing.

but google will die under the mountain of lawsuits and justice for their various crooked enterprises, not to mention people are going to (again) get sick and tired of being spied on by f'ing corporations.

so that part of the headline is irrelevant.

Also SESTA is bad. booo SESTA.

Yeah, human beings en masse are stupid. And they are ruled by thieves, and they never do anything about it.

That is the single _biggest_ problem facing the human species.

You don't own the land you own, even if you bought it. You are paying the zombie tax. Which is to say the population is growing too fast, there isn't enough land, and if there weren't regulations humans would kill you and steal your land and eat your corpse because humans are animals.

So you pay a tax, that tax supports a system we call "society", which kills or controls the masses who would otherwise murder you and take everything you think you own.

I call it the zombie tax because the best way to imagine the alternative would be the unstoppable hordes of zombies we see in hollywood films.

The article false apart early because it is based on this premise: "There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense."

Stated in Paragraph 2. That's false, there's lots of solid arguments to suggest that your income belongs to you. To pretend that those arguments don't exist so that you can write a 3 page essay amounts to dishonesty.

Why did you choose to use Electron? It appears to be universal reviled by developers.

I would suggest not underestimating Mozilla's market influence.

It would be possible to create a browser that displays DRM content and ignores DRM. The only thing that content publishers could do is ban that browser. And then it would adapt to disguise itself as other browsers.

DRM on the web can only happen if all of the major players (that is, browser publishers) agree to play along.

I am very excited about this news, this is probably the most important news in weeks, and could impact the Internet for years to come.

It isn't crossing a threshold. The old iphones and their "affordable" price tags was crossing a threshhold. Apple was dipping their toes in the middle-america Market in order to grab market share. And now they're returning to what they've always sold, overpriced gadgets aimed at a specific niche demo.

I absolutely agree there are some loose ends. That's why there were a lot of court cases about 10-15 years ago, mostly spearheaded by large corporations who were late to the game and suddenly realized they needed to protect their trademarks in the domain name market.

It's safe to say that it has not been settled yet. But it is in everyone's best interest to do our best to adhere to the intentions of the original creators.

> America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.

That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

> Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies.

there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate.

and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.