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posted by CoolHand on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the your-face-is-cloudy dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Amazon Web Services' "Workspaces" desktop-as-a-service offering can now be paid for by the hour.

Workspaces are a cut of Windows Server 2008 with a Windows 7 skin and are consumed with a custom client application. Until today, the service was sold by the month for a fixed price that included storage.

That's now called the "Always On" mode. There's now also a new "AutoStop" mode in which desktops shut down after you disconnect for a certain amount of time. AWS promises that desktops will emerge from AutoStop in 90 seconds, complete with all data.

[...] The service still needs a device running Windows, Android, iOS, Amazon's own Fire or Chrome OS. There's still no Linux client, which seems an oversight as those considering Workspaces on a PC would surely like the chance to run them without having to worry about Windows licences. Nor is there a way to use Workspaces on a thin client or Raspberry Pi, arrangements that look like matches made in cloud desktop heaven.

But why grump about such things on the day that slightly slow and weird desktops became something that can be rented by the hour? Truly we live in an age of wonders .... ®


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  • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:16PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:16PM (#390583) Journal

    One possibility is bloggers.

    If anything, this is all a sign of the times. We invented telecommuting and hoped that we'd be able to do our traditional, productive jobs from home or a coffee shop. That didn't happen.

    Instead, automation and overseas labor are slowly eating the economy alive. People still need money to live and eat. So now we have a new class of freelancers who contribute nothing of value to the world and thrive on controversy, cat videos, one weird tricks, etc and, above all else, they get paid by the corporate panopticon.

    This must be what the death of a civilization looks like.

    Even if you're living off the street, we now have services (thinking of a different one than Amazon's here I'm not really at liberty to discuss in a critical light but occupies an almost symbiotic place to Amazon's service in the New Economy) popping up to get you a place to work during business hours. All you need to do is find a way to pull in more than 22¢ per hour.

    Civilization in decline rant follows.

    Wonder if we'll also start to see the rise of bath houses. I heard about a Japanese style bath house going up not far from here. Might pay it a visit. I'm thinking something more like the private shower rooms at a truck stop, though. Looks like prices [howmuchisit.org] aren't too different than I remember, but the majority of the showers I took were the $500 kind (fuel stop = free shower on your loyalty card for the most part) or else at the company's terminals. My rule was that I refused to shower somewhere it cost less than $6 (based on a very nasty place I paid $5 to shower at that gave me athlete's foot for a week). Would have to adjust that up probably to $7 or $8. (If nothing else has changed since then, I recommend Pilot, Flying “Hook,” and Love's. TA and Petro especially were hit or miss. I don't think Petro is in business any more.)

    This also has interesting implications since most government benefits require being out of work for years, and unemployment is what, not even half a year these days? Really, food stamps and medicaid are the only two it's possible to get once unemployment runs out (and only once it runs out since that counts against you as income).

    The lifestyle of the future. Spend a few years as a homeless blagger making barely enough to cover your Amazon Desktop you access with a $300 laptop while showering at the soon to be common American-style public showers using your food stamps and charity to avoid starvation. Everybody will look down on you, blame you personally for this situation while applying levels of cognitive dissonance that are only possible to achieve for Americans and North Koreans to miss the larger economic problem this represents. You'll be the scum of the earth but at least you won't be one of them begging on street corners.

    Then finally, after 4 or 5 or 6 years of waiting, you get your disability cash benefits with a half-bogus diagnosis and subsidized housing and you've got it made! You are now a full fledged member of the Welfare Aristocracy, too afraid to accept a productive job because the minute you do, *poof* there goes all your hard waited-for benefits!

    I see this from two perspectives, both as one of the last smug middle class Americans still deluded that I'm merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire (well not really) and knowing a few people who are unemployable and listening to what they have to say about our labyrinthine implementation of socialism here in the USA. Anyone who doesn't think the USA is a socialism is deluded. It's just a shit socialism full of bureaucratic waste and duplicated effort all to make sure those people don't get a free lunch on my dime.

    I really hope we can implement some kind of citizen's dividend or basic income before that becomes more common than it already is. A nation of bloggers and no industry, not too different from Palahniuk's refrigerator full of condiments and no food. How embarrassing.

    I mean, maybe somebody could be a self-sufficient cog in the panopticon. But do we really want that either?

  • (Score: 2) by naubol on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:19PM

    by naubol (1918) on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:19PM (#390639)

    Such keen insights, you should blog about it.