Back from my holiday, I'm reading some tech news via NNTP on my
usual ~30 year old PC. I didn't bother to keep up with it using the
~15yo EeePC, which I instead used to download old docos/films using
the free (but patchy) hotel WiFi, emails, and to break my word
about my next ROOPHLOCH post being optically transmitted.
Windows 10 is about to go EOL next month and kill off a whole lot
of vastly more powerful PCs than mine, which M$ don't want to run
Win 11, by dropping 32bit support and adding completely silly
hurdles like TPM 2.0 support and an old CPU blacklist. Linux
developers are taking cues and talking about dropping 32 bit
support soon too. FreeBSD plan to drop 32bit in their next major
version.
But think about this for a moment. What are we all sick of hearing
about from the IT industry for the last decade? "The Cloud". "The
Cloud" does the processing now, so the hard work of running
complicated software shouldn't be on your PC in the first place.
Difficult data processing tasks and AI modelling are done "in The
Cloud", and absolutely everything you save, regardless of
sensibility, is supposed to be stored "in The Cloud". Your 4096K
HyperspatialHD+ video decoding and encoding for upload/download
to/from "The Cloud" is all done on GPUs now, so even that doesn't
relate to these minimum CPU etc. requirements.
So who needs to be upgrading? Why aren't we talking about how
Windows, Linux, and BSD don't need to support new desktop CPU
features because client-side hardware doesn't need to be upgraded
anymore? Why is that _new_ hardware support not spotlit as the
massive waste of valuable OS developer time instead of occasionally
tweaking old 32bit compatibility code every few years to keep it up
with other changes?
I know, I know, it doesn't really work like that. Half the
processing is really still done client-side in ever-clunkier
Javascript downloaded to a huge oversized resource-hog of a Web
browser every time you use it. Then all the software just to start
that browser mysteriously keeps getting bigger for no reason, so
you need a super fast drive and RAM to load it all fast enough. And
why not? After all, normal rich people that matter buy a new
everything every couple of years just for looks/fun anyway.
But I still think the complete and utter hypocrisy of advertising
"The Cloud", while forcing hardware upgrades on people through
increased minimum requirements, needs highlighting. I, for one,
refuse them both. Perhaps if that means the internet in general
refuses me eventually, that won't be such a bad thing. Clearly by
accepting such bullshit as this, internet users in general, ie.
people in general, are being outed as complete fools.
