This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is"
At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely.
It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.
* Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it.
I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when?
If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs.
For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it.
Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.
My grandma wouldn’t know what ‘burning’ a CD means, but she sure knows how to use Netflix.
It’s not defensive to explain the overwhelming reality of todays content landscape. I couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between a single 1tb drive and YouTube or Netflix, it’s clearly obvious.
There is nothing ridiculous about contracting companies to do work. We hire professionals to perform all sorts of tasks everyday and purchase products made by them. It’s not lazy to do so, it’s smart. Why do I have to explain the basics of how the world works?
For e.g. Do you grow your own food? Fruit and vegetables all that. It's easy right some soil and seeds with minor maintenance. You don't need professionals to do something so basic. Why cant everyone become an expert at growing their own food? Why do we need farmers, a massive global supply chain and mega stores to do something so simple? The idea that we have this global spanning network just to supply a tomato to someone is stupid and we screwed up?!
We don't have time to be experts at every facet of life, the world doesn't work like that. Believe it or not, managing big stashes of content isn't common knowledge or on everyones priority list.
But on the topic of services like Netflix and YouTube, they're used to manipulate peoples tastes these days, discoverability is broken deliberately to push priority content, and really their only advantage is discoverability, so they've got virtually nothing going for them besides network effects and entrenched market position.
Services can be nice, when they work for a user. The problem is these services are designed to disempower users. We could live in a world where all these services empower users and work perfectly, but we don't, because there's a conflict of interest.
Yes, I do grow my own food actually.
Needs to be very simple so my grandmother can build it, and cheap. No maintenance, set and forget. I assume there will be apps available for all her devices to quickly go through the process or will she need to create them? It needs to be easy to search for content and stream on any device at any time without fail.
She doesn’t care about ‘owning digital movies’ or the exaggerated threat of her accounts being closed. She's is much more likely to accidentally lose her own content managing it herself. She just wants to watch movies, how much will it cost to own all that content? Less the $10/month?
No professionals so let’s keep instructions basic and preferably just using a single blank drive with no content.
It must bother you that people don’t grow their own food? That they can’t manage their shit and need to buy it from a store?
You can BTW buy pre built devices where this is already done from owncloud I believe.
It doesn't bother me that people pay other people to do things, no need to be condescending about it. What bothers me is when people are funneled into paying for services that are more stressful to use than doing things themselves, and then making excuses for the state of affairs for whatever reason (either they're convinced by the marketing, or their salary depends on it all continuing this way).
People by and large use what they see in advertisements and justify the decision after the fact. What is preferred is not always what is superior.
Bandcamp is as easy to use as Spotify. Yet people don't use it as much. Why not? Marketing is why.
Mobile UX is full of deliberate friction points put in to support profitable business models at the expense of utility. The mobile experience is designed to funnel users towards making certain choices. This is beginning to happen in windows as well now. And people just go with it.
Is it condescending? Maybe. But if I was wrong you wouldn't have advertisements on TV, marketing people know what works and businesses aren't in the business of throwing money away for no return. People wouldn't bitch about Facebook and continue to use it, they'd go somewhere else.
As for your reference to ownCloud, there are no pre-builds for raspbian. You have to build the web stack on the pi. This is the most inconvenient option imaginable, but I guess it's the hypnotising marketing stopping Grandma from building a web service.
No, it doesn't. I literally just tested this. The article you linked to is wrong. (The site looks like a content farm, so this is hardly surprising.)
Signing out of an Apple ID will leave any subscription content downloaded from Apple Music present on the device, but unplayable. This is expected -- the user never purchased that music; they only had access to listen to it through their Apple Music subscription. Any other locally stored content belonging to the user remains playable, even if it was downloaded through Apple Music, and the subscription content will become playable if you log back in.
Let's say I have an MP3 file, and I added that to my Apple Music library on my desktop computer. Apple Music will make that file downloadable and playable on my phone, and that downloaded file isn't tied to the subscription in any way -- it's literally the same MP3 file that was uploaded. This functionality is an extension of an older feature which Apple called "iTunes Match".
On the other hand, if I download an arbitrary track from Apple Music which I didn't put there myself, that downloaded file will no longer be playable if I log out or cancel my subscription -- because those files don't belong to the user.
(I ask because I just happened to notice a $25 annual charge for that the other day... and I was like, oh yeah, I've been paying them all these years to host those 5 CDs I bought at live shows in the 1990s that aren't available on any streaming service...)
Update: Like every time this comes to mind, I almost just canceled it, but then I listened to "Track 03" by the band "djiin", purchased at Jasper O'Farrell's pub in Sebastopol, CA in 2002, and I just can't...
good to know, thanks
The long term trend is the exact opposite. People don't want to the manage hardware and all the issues of configuration, backups and troubleshooting faults that come with that, just to watch a movie. They want to palm off that responsibility to an external entity.
Eg, he doesn't have to make access to all his music so it is contingent on his one credential, which can be revoked at any time by Apple. He can keep local copies of what he has bought, despite the ecosystem tries to make that difficult. Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated.
https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-ap...