There is an "Artwork Details" feature and in it a section "Paint residues from the act of vandalism", they are remnants of the act. I quote:
> The varnish applied in 1962 served as a layer to protect the polychrome and the red paint could be removed without damaging the original.
> At the present time, macrophotographs show reddish micro-residues, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. In some cases, this has entered the fissures.
Probably hasn't been thought through, but if it prevents automatic updates from being rolled out to users in the USA, then that's probably good enough for them.
> engineers may have to log into a jump box via a VDI to then use Jenkins to run a Groovy script to use Terraform to deploy containers to a highly customized version of AWS.
This hits too close to home. I'm sending you my therapist's bill for this month.
My main desire in trying NextCloud was syncing files with a handful of people, as a free software replacement for Dropbox. All of the other features were nice to haves.
I've tried several of the "budget" NextCloud hosts. I'm not going to name names, but all of them were very disappointing. File syncing frequently broke in hard to diagnose ways. And from a perspective of overall service, I would get 502s, 503s, or 504s far more often that I should have. This was with multiple budget providers. I didn't try any of the more expensive providers, because I couldn't afford it, so maybe this is a "get what you pay for" situation... But in theory, the size servers I was paying for should have been able to handle our traffic volume.
Anyway, after a couple of years of trying to make hosted NextCloud work for us, I gave up and bought Dropbox's paid service and haven't had any issues with it.
We use Cryptomator on top of Dropbox to ensure data privacy, by the way. Back when we were using NextCloud, we had been using their end to end encryption plugin until we discovered a silent failure mode in which it was uploading documents in plaintext to the "encrypted" folder. I believe nowadays the recommendation even for NextCloud is to use Cryptomator on top, rather than their built-in encryption.
I feel this. I recently ran into a problem with a kernel update breaking Bluetooth on resume from suspend. My Logitech keyboard and mouse that I use at my desk stopped working after each resume, and I had to go to the laptop keyboard and manually stop and start Bluetooth. On each resume.
Look, I'd love to contribute to the kernel, but the amount of time I have to play around with these things is now measured in minutes per day. So no, sorry, I don't have time to rebuild my kernel from mainline, and then bisect, and then cherry pick patches, and then test out proposed updates, and then help shepherd it through my distribution's patching mechanism.
So I just gave up on Bluetooth on Linux and plugged in Logitech's proprietary Bolt dongle, and re-paired my devices with it, and haven't had trouble since. I'd prefer to use standard protocols, but this isn't the first time a kernel update broke my Bluetooth setup, so I think I'll stick with what just works.
Naturally on the Internet there is an infinite variety. But using that Whole Foods site to filter the list to what's physically available at stores in my area, it reduces down to a list that's more or less Heinz and Heinz-like.
- Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage.
- Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.
I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even come close to a market of normies.
- The raw idea seems easy.
- The initial implementation seems like it should be of moderate difficulty, but is actually very challenging to get even close to right.
- The long term maintenance is a nightmare, but don't worry, you won't survive long enough to worry about that.
- The infrastructure and policy implications of getting and keeping it connected to everyone else are intractable. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531969 for some tip-of-the-iceberg examples.)
Yeah, as someone interested in this kind of thing, I've been hoping someone else would put something together that would work, but I think I share your assumption that this is probably not something that can be made into a product profitable enough to finance a company on.
I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never possibly work. And, further, that no one has ever implemented the kind of system that I have in mind that I've seen. But that's not because it's unique or complex, just that it isn't a good path to a minimum viable product, so it isn't a good way to spin up a company quickly.
But yeah; aside from burning through cash in order to build enough coverage (maybe a year of dev just on this; no product dev yet) for a product that you will never actually profit from, I don't see how anyone could bring something like this to market.
All of that aside, a product that can sustain a company is not the only way to have a product exist. Modular productization and loss leading are a couple of ways to envision this. But I'm betting some kind of fractional componentization starts happening that makes this kind of stuff more maintainable. YMMV, though!
This actually seems like a great use-case for FOSS. Lots of people have tried their hand at this, so why don't we all put a little effort in to get it done?
Makes me wonder how many weapons the other nuclear-armed nations have lost and not recovered. Like the US, Russia has thousands of them, and had tens of thousands more during the cold war. How many of them went missing?
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