Not again... the state of the Internet in 2021

[TH2002]

Went to read an NWS article about the Tri-State Tornado today and saw this:


IS THIS NECESSARY? Why does every single website have to be bogged down by JavaScript and dependent on some stupid cloud services these days? Does NO ONE see the potential security issues with this? Not to mention the last time the NWS moved their data to new servers, many useful resources became unavailable.

First the Vintage Computer Forum, then the NWS radar site, and now this... Is TalkWeather going to be the next great website to be ruined in 2021?

 

[maroonedinhsv]

Wow, I never would have expected someone fascinated with tornadoes to be so anti-cloud!

 

[TH2002]

Wow, I never would have expected someone fascinated with tornadoes to be so anti-cloud!

Haha I get it

But let's look at it this way: Clouds are good in meteorology, and bad in computing.

 

[WesL]

We've lived in the cloud since the great hardware crash of some year I can't remember. I will say we haven't bit the bullet with going with serverless architecture, we still run and maintain virtualized hardware. Maybe they are doing the same and hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls of serverless in the cloud.

Wes

P.S. The way we run it is more expensive, especially during severe events when we deploy bigger servers. Thank you so much to everyone that has a "2021 Supporter" badge on their profile. Those sustaining members help us flex our services when we need it the most.

 

[TH2002]

We've lived in the cloud since the great hardware crash of some year I can't remember. I will say we haven't bit the bullet with going with serverless architecture, we still run and maintain virtualized hardware. Maybe they are doing the same and hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls of serverless in the cloud.

Wes

P.S. The way we run it is more expensive, especially during severe events when we deploy bigger servers. Thank you so much to everyone that has a "2021 Supporter" badge on their profile. Those sustaining members help us flex our services when we need it the most.

Using cloud services for some things is reasonable enough. Just having a website entirely dependent on cloud services is a massive security hole and extremely UNRELIABLE!

What I like so much about websites like TalkWeather is that they just WORK! Haven't tried this site specifically but sites like the old NWS Radar sites and VCFed were simple enough to work on my 90's laptops (Win95 and Kmeleon 1.5) but obviously not anymore. Hell they don't even work on my main (XP) desktop anymore! As far as I'm concerned a website not working with WinXP and Kmeleon 76 is unacceptable yet Google and other internet monopolies continue to insist on unnecessarily shoehorning other technologies like JavaScript into their websites.

A little JavaScript is okay (none preferred though) but when your website becomes nothing more then an unscrupulous pile of CPU intensive broken scripts, you know you have a problem.

I just really hope TalkWeather doesn't go down that route. Many thanks to you and the other mods for maintaining a functional website!