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Maximum survival time without Internet?
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You are taking yourself far too seriously.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday May 03 2024, @06:13AM (5 children)
"It depends."
Are we talking about maintaining my normal business and lifestyle, or how long I could go during an apocalypse?
Since I run a business, I'm always online or have my phone on, unless I'm sleeping. If I were retired, I'd probably go multiple weeks without it on occasion.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mhajicek on Friday May 03 2024, @06:56PM (1 child)
One thing just occurred to me. I'm running an older version of my CADCAM software, which still uses a hardware dongle for licensing. More recent versions of all brands of professional level CADCAM are either cloud based or software activated, afaik, requiring at least occasional Internet connection to continue functioning. So I would be able to continue running my shop during a prolonged internet outage, while many others would not.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2024, @01:43AM
I have my old Eagle 4 and 6, perpetual license, offline, for that reason. I stopped at WIN7, with the GRC patch that destroyed the upgrade backdoor (Never 10). I still leave it offline to the public net, although I still use it on my own intranet. I have several systems ( laptops, actually ) that are all cloned, so if one has an issue, I can clone the system back from a known good system. Clonezilla. DAZ 2.2.2, xp_activate32, because the OS activation servers have been offline for years, and I often swap parts around while troubleshooting aging hardware, which occasionally will deactivate my system. I have bent as far as I can to accommodate finicky terms. I consider the newer commercial stuff far too fragile to consider seriously for anything critical, however I will use the latest inexpensive throwaway Androids to communicate with businesses on the web.
It's a time-to-live thing for me. I will acquire and keep tools that are multigenerational, just as I still use tools I inherited. However most businesses are not designed to last more than a couple of years. They have to use cheap stuff that doesn't last to do unimportant things like communicating with customers. Some businesses already won't talk to my three year old browser on my phone. I won't even try talking to business with my Win95 k-meleon. The ONLY site that works with everything I have is SoylentNews.org!
However not all businessmen are so nearsighted...some even still run COBOL systems for the really important things like accounting and contract work. It's just the throwaway things like customers that have to put up with finicky business storefronts.
I still use the old html4 because it is much simpler, it's rendering instructions make bar chart presentation easy, and I can support form instructions, radio buttons, tick boxes, and download instruction that may take megabytes of support libraries to implement...I just use a few kilobytes of assembler or compiled C. I only implement what I need, as all I am doing is using a web browser as an HMI. So in case some rightsholder delicenses me, I can swap it out to something more fungible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday May 04 2024, @11:30AM
I was going to come here and say something similar.
I myself can go for a long time without internet access as everything I need for day to day activity is stored locally on my server and I don't use social media or "cloud" anything. Once the internet went down for a few hours and I did not even notice. I was only alerted after the issue was resolved when I got an e-mail from my ISP apologising for the days outage.
If however I need to function/interact with society, that is a different situation. Almost everything is done online now, from banking to dealing with the local authorities. Likewise my work does require internet access if I want to earn money to live.
I myself could cope without the internet just fine (but of course I prefer having it). Worst case scenario would be a return to the sneakernet days [wikipedia.org], just with much larger storage media.
However the modern world is built on the assumption of internet access. So losing internet access long term would bleed into the real-world and cause me problems (e.g. unable to earn money, pay bills/rent or deal with government).
I would say it would take about a month before problems occurred, basically until next rent/bills are due.
For other people (like some members of my family), their entire life is "in the cloud". They interact through social media, listen to music and watch stuff off youtube, all their pictures, documents are on Google, etc... Their devices are basically a thin client to the cloud where their life is.
If they lose internet they notice instantly, and if it doesn't come back within 15 mins or so they get visibly anxious, frustrated and irritable. I think most people are like that now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 04 2024, @02:08PM
Went on a 3 week vacation in the Caribbean in 2018, took lots of cell phone photos but basically had no connectivity the whole time. Didn't miss it.
No Internet during work time? Maybe 24 hours max before I have to explain to my manager or start driving in to the office. Haven't been in to the office for over a year now, probably less than 10 hours total in office since lockdown started in 2020.
I do occasional training of staff in India and China. That just doesn't happen at all without Internet.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday May 10 2024, @01:18AM
Same.
Personally, I have a digital books, video, music, and games library with multiple backups and modes of us that can support my off-work lifestyle very well indeed for a completely indefinite period of time. If the web were destroyed but I had power I'd be just fine... and as long as my car is running I can recharge all my devices that matter to me. I don't let streaming services own me (even though I'm subscribed to some).
(Aside... I also have a large enough physical library of books and games as well, including my professional reference library.)
In my working life... well.... my employer would be totally boned because we absolutely depend on the Internet for both data management and to allow those of us in the field to make updates in the field. Without that we would require at least a dozen more computers and probably at least a half dozen more employees to cover all the downtime traveling back to base would necessitate. Although we can sync and get a database update, do work in the field, then resync when convenient if we're beyond signal coverage. But that is measured in hours and a very few visits... maybe a day... before requiring sync-up. And sometimes critical situations demand that we be able to resync ASAP. Genuine downtime emergencies for us have to be measured in hours for us.
This sig for rent.