[Discuss] UbuntuOne alternatives

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-04-07 18:49-0700 Murray Strome wrote:

> On 14-04-07 04:47 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> On 2014-04-07 16:00-0700 Murray Strome wrote:
>> 
>>> At the last BB&C LINUX SIG meeting, Google Drive was suggested as a good 
>>> alternative to UbuntuOne. It has lots of storage, but is uploading to it 
>>> ever SLOW!
>> 
>> Why use any such cloud alternative when an external drive works so
>> much better (e.g., because of concerns over freedom, speed, and
>> privacy of the cloud) for the same purpose?
>> 
>> Alan

> I don't have access to the external drive when I am away from home and all my 
> computers at home are powered down!

There is no point turning off computers just for the day while you are
gone.  The power costs are something like $50 at most per year, and
that power also helps to keep your house heated so it isn't really
wasted in a cool year-round climate like ours.  And it is possible
it may be good for computer hardware to leave it on all the time
rather than flipping them on and off a lot.

But assuming you are referring to longer time scales, sure turn off
the home PC for a holiday, but then I view a holiday as a wonderful
time to be completely disconnected! The one counter-example that might
concern me with that option is storage for my holiday pictures.  But I
don't know how big that factor really is because I am not a
photographer.  Also, I don't know how difficult it is simply to take
along enough memory cards to hold a holiday's worth of images.

> Also, the external (Network Drive) is also pretty slow.

But a direct (non-network) esata drive is extremely fast!  And I also
think it is a very good way to simplify your life to limit yourself to
just one extremely good PC in the home office.  Others that need PC
access elsewhere in the house (or for simultaneous access with
different keyboards/monitors in the same office) should use thin
clients which means all storage of files is concentrated in the one PC
and those files then can be backed up with one esata hard drive
rather than fooling with a network drive.

One big issue with cloud computing for me is privacy.  It's obvious
that company's that store your data feel they have a right to sift
through it for anything they can find that might be commerically
valuable such as obtaining a personal profile on you so that you can
be effectively targeted by advertising. In fact, there was a
well-circulated quote from a google vice president several years ago
essentially saying that anybody that uses google services should not
expect privacy!

All the above is, of course, my opinion about certain simplifying
lifestyle choices that can be made with computer technology.  Of
course, others here will have different opinions, but those lifestyle
choices have worked well for me, and I assume they will also work well
for the rest of you here who like the KISS principle as much as I do.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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