Lost In the Cloud 121
Colonel Korn writes "Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests in an Op-Ed piece that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy: '... many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple. If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents. We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.'"
Internet Hype Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, developers could still write code that runs on one computer and do whatever they feel like doing.
Somehow, I don't think that Facebook is going to be the technology that drives computing forard...
Re:Internet Hype Machine (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow, I don't think that Facebook is going to be the technology that drives computing forard...
Someone please tell that to the Facebook developers. That site moves slower than the clouds in the sky, giving a new meaning to cloud computing.
Remember Neuromancer? (Score:1)
That's the computing / data dystopia portrayed by Gibson...
So lets see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives -- tax breaks or liability relief -- that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents
That is in a word, stupid. The thing about online services is, there is little requirements to entry and they are easy to change from one service to another. Its trivial for me to switch from Facebook to any number of different social networks. Same with search engines, etc. All it takes is simply replacing the URL. Regulation will only stifle innovation.
Re:So lets see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its trivial for me to switch from Facebook to any number of different social networks.
Really? Is it trivial to transfer all your uploaded pictures/videos, friend list, and history to your new social network provider? Now is it trivial for you, as a tech enthusiast, or trivial for a normal facebook user? Or did you mean that it is trivial to log into some social networking site other than facebook? Unless your data can follow you, or you're willing to recreate/lose that data, you're locked in.
Services not always easy to switch away from. Switching search engines is one thing, changing your email provider is entirely another. Encouraging data portability and compatibility is not a bad thing, especially when the encouragement is relief for liability incurred by making that data portable.
Re:So lets see here... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it is that trivial.
Most have a search feature to find people by email/account/etc. Also if you have your albums hosted somewhere sites like picasa [google.com] can upload them directly to whatever [facebook.com]account [scrapur.com] you have.
Re:So lets see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uh?
Most of these addons take a total of 3 clicks, you pick your album, you press upload, and you pick the pictures for the online album for the site of your choice.
That's considered a mess/difficult?
I do get that not all users are the typical slashdot fare but I would hardly consider that in the realm of something to turn away most users.
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First you have to realize that you have a need, then you have to identify these services that will fill this need, then you need to figure out how to sign up for them, then you need to figure out how to use them and how to get them to work together....
Yes, that is more than enough to turn away most users on the internets.
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LMGTFY [lmgtfy.com]. Speaks for itself. When you don't have to be a genius and just do a google search to find the answer, it's not in the "difficult decisions" category.
Your whole thing there, doesn't involve physical effort or stress. Thus, it will not turn people on or off from any activity. It doesn't even have to do with people making the decision to do an activity, as above.
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Notice again that you've ignored the most important, and for most users most difficult, part. FINDING THESE SERVICES IN THE FIRST PLACE. Once you know about Picasa and you know it's even possible to connect it with Facebook, then search on Google is easy. But most people haven't heard of Picasa. And those that have, it wouldn't even occur to them that they could use it with Facebook.
You keep talking about how easy the technical part of the very last step is without realizing that most users aren't only stuc
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People with 1k friends on Facebook don't really have 1k friends. Anyhow, how hard is it to add a message to your Facebook profile / about box saying, "I've moved to $shiny_new_social_network, and you can also find me at my website foo.com"?
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The term "friend" is a misnomer here. It's a Facebook term, but obviously the budding musician with a thousand+ friends doesn't really have a thousand+ friends... he does however have a thousand+ fans or people interested in his music. That's the thing about social networks, many people use them for job networking, keeping a fan base informed, organizing political movements, or any number of other things that require you to:
a) Have a lot of friends, followers, or whatever the service's "link" technology i
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People with 1k friends on Facebook don't really have 1k friends. Anyhow, how hard is it to add a message to your Facebook profile / about box saying, "I've moved to $shiny_new_social_network, and you can also find me at my website foo.com"?
Pretty hard if facebook chose to censor it...
IMO application developers should demand that cloud providers standardize their APIs so that I can implement one storage API in my app and move freely between different storage providers (Just an example).
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IMO application developers should demand that cloud providers standardize their APIs so that I can implement one storage API in my app and move freely between different storage providers (Just an example).
You're not the first to think of that. [opensocial.org]
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I have actually watched people adding friends on facebook based on desirability... had nothing to do with actually knowing the people in question!
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Moving and putting a notice in my profile does NOT free me from Facebook. It's a freakin' social networking site. It doesn't work if everybody doesn't use it.
I have a Facebook account, despite the fact that I loathe everything about the site. Why? Because practically everybody I know uses it to plan events. If I moved, most of those people would just plain not invite me. First of all, they wouldn't look at my profile to see the notice. Secondly, they wouldn't find it worth their trouble. And they'd be ri
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Re:So lets see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that's misleading. In general, the switching costs for online services are relatively low, but a social networking site has higher switching costs than many due to the network effects (the more users on the site, the more useful/valuable the site is).
Of course, that switching cost isn't as high as the venture capitalists may believe, as we saw with Friendster, then MySpace - as soon as the "cool" factor disappears, migration can happen en masse. The key is that many individuals must essentially cooperate to move to another social networking site. Or some subset of "leaders" have to migrate, creating the sense that the new social networking site is the cool, "in" place to be now and the old site was yesterday's thing.
Now that people see their parents and even grandparents logging into Facebook, I wonder if it will eventually change the perception of Facebook and lead to its eventual replacement.
Also, people seem to be more likely to "add" than to switch outright, at least at first, and then simply abandon the old site when they perceive that their friends have abandoned it too.
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Social networks, rather less so. Shockingly, networks are subject to network effects. I can create a new account anywhere, anytime; but unless I can convince people to switch
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Social networks, rather less so. Shockingly, networks are subject to network effects. I can create a new account anywhere, anytime; but unless I can convince people to switch with me in decent numbers, I might as well not bother.
Yes, and thats one of the reasons why social networks have spread in popularity. However, Friendster was started in 2002, yet I don't know anyone who still goes on Friendster in the USA. Same with Myspace, Facebook has pretty much devoured all of Myspace's marketshare and most of those still on Myspace have a Facebook account.
Re:So lets see here... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not one of the "all regulation is bad" camp; bad regulation is bad and good regulation is good. But in this case I agree with you - regulation is only called for AFTER a problem arises, unless one has balls of crystal. I tend to agree that in this case, regulation would stifle innovation.
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1. Take everything from site A and create on site B
2. Remove everything from site A completely
To my knowledge, step 2 is impossible on most sites.
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repeat after me (Score:3, Insightful)
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the cloud is not taking over everything, not everyone is going to give up their computers for a network appliance that depends on the cloud to do anything and everything, the cloud will at best become useful for a few people but not everyone
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the cloud is not taking over everything, not everyone is going to give up their computers for a network appliance that depends on the cloud to do anything and everything, the cloud will at best become useful for a few people but not everyone
the cloud is not taking over everything, not everyone is going to give up their computers for a network appliance that depends on the cloud to do anything and everything, the cloud will at best become useful for a few people but not everyone
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They were right.
Re:repeat after me (Score:4, Interesting)
How were they right?
The book industry is still pretty big and it seems to be growing [liswire.com]. Electronic books are maybe 10% of sales last I read. The primary business of one of the internet's biggest retailers is paper books.
And I'm not sure what you mean by 'traditional media' but television and the rest of Hollywood continue to do well. Some things have changed, for sure, but most of the business is still in the hands of the people it was in before in internet.
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Whoosh? The sarcasm in the GP's post was obvious from a mile away.
It's actually kind of scary (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It's actually kind of scary (Score:4, Informative)
I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
You must be...actually, some of us have been protesting, but our voices keep getting drowned out by some people black turtlenecks and artsy looking glasses. I think they may be a cult.
Re:It's actually kind of scary (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be surprised; the reason you don't hear it is because that line of argument against Windows is silly and illogical.
The IBM-compatible PC is about as open as you get. If you don't want to use Windows, nothing is stopping you from writing your own OS (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, QNX, Mac OS X, etc.) It's not prohibitively expensive, requires no government sponsorship, and it's not even that difficult. All the documentation you'd ever need is free from Intel's web site, or you can order a hard copy from them.
What Microsoft does with Windows is largely irrelevant. It's annoying when you have to use it at work or school, but irrelevant to your freedom as a citizen and your freedom to do what you please with the hardware you bought.
Same thing with the iPhone. I can buy a different phone and write software for it to my heart's content. What Apple does with their hardware and phone is irrelevant because I'm not forced to pay for it.
Problems only start when organizations attempt to coerce me by force to pay for something that I otherwise wouldn't have. The whole MS DRM/Palladium debacle was a concern because it had the potential to close off an entire network funded by taxpayer dollars with the expectation that it would be an open system.
Apple and others can do whatever they want with the infrastructure they've paid for. It's only when they try to do something to the infrastructure I paid for that I have a problem.
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Whereas on the iPhone, it's illegal to develop even a browser and anything you develop will have a 30% Apple tax slapped on it and there's no alternate means of *widespread* distribution.
Really? It's illegal>/i> to develop a browser for the iPhone? Can you point me to the state or federal statute that criminalized creating an iPhone browser?
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"Really? It's illegal>/i> to develop a browser for the iPhone? Can you point me to the state or federal statute that criminalized creating an iPhone browser?"
Hmm. Is it illegal to break a signed contract?
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No.
Well... that was easy.
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*You're* "missing something crucial" in the GP's comment: it doesn't matter that Apple places so many rules and restrictions on those who want to play on the device and in the App Store. It doesn't matter because Apple can't force you to do any of this. You're free at any time to walk away and develop for a more open platform (like Windows Mobile, which is kind of hard to believe).
The iPhone is Apple's sandbox. They don't have to share it with us. They also tend to make decisions to protect us from ourselve
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Apple's take is nothing. If you think a 70% take for the creator is unfair, then you've never tried to sell anything on a scale greater than a flea market or garage sale. Apple is handling distribution, payment processing, some marketing, paying the bandwidth bill, all while making your app available to anyone with an iPhone. That's anything but unfair. If you think you can get a better overall package elsewhere, then you can always try the jailbreak market, but that, despite all the "freedom", hasn't exactly taken off. Why I would pay $5 for an app I could get for $1 (or less) in the App Store is a mystery. I'm sure that'll change as more commercial offerings for jailbroken phones appear, but right now it's not so hot.
Why not simply make it installable from a website(for eg. the developers) like, you know, the rest of the smartphones and computers and netbooks? That is the difference. There is no choice. If there is a choice and what you say about the App store being a great deal is true, developers will flock to Apple's offerings anyway. But looks like Apple just wants to take the 30% cut and be in control of the platform and is jumping through hoops and making developers jump through more just for the sake of it. The
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Why not simply make it installable from a website(for eg. the developers) like, you know, the rest of the smartphones and computers and netbooks? That is the difference. There is no choice. If there is a choice and what you say about the App store being a great deal is true, developers will flock to Apple's offerings anyway.
Why would you want to have to run your own website and manage all the bandwidth bills and marketing when you can pay a pittance for Apple to do all that for you? Secondly, developers are flocking to the app store en masse. The 50,000+ apps on the store aren't coming out of someone's rectum so they clearly most have some sort of developer following.
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Why not simply make it installable from a website(for eg. the developers) like, you know, the rest of the smartphones and computers and netbooks? That is the difference. There is no choice. If there is a choice and what you say about the App store being a great deal is true, developers will flock to Apple's offerings anyway.
Why would you want to have to run your own website and manage all the bandwidth bills and marketing when you can pay a pittance for Apple to do all that for you? Secondly, developers are flocking to the app store en masse. The 50,000+ apps on the store aren't coming out of someone's rectum so they clearly most have some sort of developer following.
I don't understand this reasoning at all. The developers can run their own website if they are so inclined or already have one. If not they use the App store to host. Forcing the developers to the App Store is one way to protect the 30% cut and prevent competition. How can you claim that the 50k+ applications show the strength of App store when there's no credible alternative at present? Cydia is not, because there are very few jailbroken iPhones.
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How can you claim that the 50k+ applications show the strength of App store when there's no credible alternative at present?
Yeah totally. Having 65,000+ apps written for your mobile platform (having just looked at some more recent numbers) and having had over 1.5 billion downloads from your store is clearly the sign of being an abject failure. Apple should just discontinue the whole iPhone line considering such abysmal numbers. If these numbers don't show any sort of strength of their store, please enlighten me to an app store for any other mobile platform that can boast such numbers. The Android Market has only about 3,000 a
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f any old person could come along and write another browser, you'd wind up with all sorts of problems (I develop iPhone apps for a living - there ARE reason
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Yep, like the thousands of incredible apps for the Blackberry. More like the thousand of disconnected, difficult to find, questionably marketed apps for Windows Mobile / Palm / Symbian / Nokia, etc.
Most of the apps in the App store are garbage. Some of them are pretty cool - I never once saw a protractor app for my Blackberry and I use that one on a daily basis. I never once even
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The reality is that Palm did the exact opposite of what apple has done, and the platform isn't a "mess". If you install a new browser and it doesn't work you uninstall i
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I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
I'm not. The iPhone was not designed for wizards. It was designed for muggles. The tech community gave up on the slathering flesh-beasts that beat upon the keyboards of the world long ago...
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It's called 'choice'. If someone wants the latest overpriced cool gadget, go buy an iPhone and get locked into the iTunes store and only what they will sell.
Or
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The one is that, for all our protests about principles, (most) people are strongly motivated by comfort and convenience. The USSR didn't fall because the gulags were full, it fell because the supermarkets were empty. Here at home, gas prices likely ranked above torture and surveillance when it came to deciding the last election. People cut Apple's cryptographically walled garden a lot of slack because, thus far, they've done a better job than t
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Argh . . . The USSR fell more because of divergent nationalist impulses than because it didn't provide enough consumer goods.
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As someone who was there at the time, I can confirm that USSR fell because of glasnost. Once people learned that so much that they were told about the rest of the world, and especially US, was deception, government lost ability to motivate the masses. As I understand, with Putin/Medvedyev since are coming back to good old days, patriotism and all.
Re:It's actually kind of scary (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. The people who say that it's Apple's property or that consoles are similarly locked down are missing the point. Consoles etc. were never projected to be a computing platform. We already have people hailing the iPhone as the mobile computing platform and the iTouch as Apple's version of the netbook. It is just Apple trying to get greedy by triple dipping into the jar by charging first for the phone, then taking a nice chunk of the users' monthly phone/data plan fee through AT&T, and then skimming 30% off the cost of a application in the App Store from the user/developer.
And applications cannot use 'undocumented APIs'(determined inconsistently by arbitrary lackeys), contain political undertones, or any hint of non PG 13 content or compete in anyway with Apple's builtin programs. http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2008/09/04/apple-rejecting-applications-based-on-limited-utility/ [macrumors.com] This would be okay if there was alternate means to get applications, but the only way to get widespread distribution is through the App Store. http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/21/122225 [slashdot.org] MS bundled a browser with it's OS, but Apple gets away with banning any browser from being developed at all, not allowing any VM(like Java) and gets a free pass because it's not a monopoly(yet)?
For example, there was a app for a countdown clock for second term of Bush in Nov 2008. When it was rejected, the author emailed Apple, and Jobs himself replied: http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/ [juggleware.com]
Mr. Jobs replied : Even though my personal political leanings are democratic, I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers. Whatâ(TM)s the point? Steve
So, before you develop the application, you might want to brush up on what Jobs MIGHT think about any political overtones in your application. There are no clear guidelines or rules. Some Apps are allowed, and other Apps with similar type of content or using similar development tools rejected.
There's another case of Apple rejecting an application for duplicate functionality and then filing a patent for a similar app. Details are here http://www.ikaraokeapp.com/node/18 [ikaraokeapp.com] and here http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/02/app-store-rejections-apple-rejects-ikaraoke-app-then-files-a-p/ [tuaw.com]
They say that when restrictions come, they come wrapped in a sweet looking package. That may well be the iPhone to condition people to the world of restrictive applications on machines billed as general computing devices.
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The iPhone is a neat doodad, and does some things I like, much like my Nintendo DS. I don't think of either as a general-purpose computer. Heck, together they're cheaper than the computers in my car, and I don't care all that much about doing my own programming there. Moreover, they're not entrenched monopolies, and there's not a whole lot of network effect for them (more for the DS). If I want to program on a version of MacOSX, I've got a low-end Mac on my desk, and I can program what I like for that.
Open source software != open source hardware (Score:2)
Now that you bring up the smart phone perspective, let me just say that's different than cloud services. The reason is that, comparing, say, a Facebook app with an iPhone app, while the environment is pretty fixed in both cases, in the latter case you have the additional element of needing to have hardware in the hands of the users.
The OpenMoko project is trying to address that, but its struggles show the great difference between open source software and ditto hardware. Software is just so much easier to mu
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What I find interesting is how many smart phone reviews dismiss the G1 (and Android) because there is only a single available phone from a single carrier providing service. But in the same breath hold the iPhone as a perfectly reasonable device. I like my G1 a lot, given I'd like a little slimmer device, but I happen to prefer the slide-out keypad to an on-screen keyboard(which android itself supports). I also like that rooting/jailbreaking is easy, with no efforts to stop it... although the only real re
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It's a successful platform. The barriers to entry are low. It pays the rent. Next question, please.
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iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
Maybe because a substantial group of us don't really give a flying fuck about the iPhone (ooohhh shiny). Steve jobs can keep his overpriced iCandy, I don't need it. That being said it is Steve's platform and like so much else from the Cult of Mac; Steve gets the final say and doesn't have to explain himself to anyone. If you don't like that then don't write software for the iPhone or at least don't complain when Steve bricks your jailbroken phone or breaks your hacked apps. If you want an open source softwa
Capitalism at its best (Score:4, Insightful)
Let em' stifle all they want. Somebody else will make another cloud that doesn't stifle...or just build their own platform.
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Requiring users to keep local copies of what they put in the cloud, so that they can switch to a another service later, is tantamount to telling them not to use "the cloud."
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It's not really that absurd. It sounds a lot like how the world was around the time I first got online. Back then, everyone had Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, or any other online services that were around. I don't remember there being any interoperability at the time, so in effect they said "Let them build their own free internet if they want to complete." That's exactly what they did, and now these companies are all either out of business or they have morphed into just another ISP.
True, the Internet was develop
Twitch! (Score:3, Interesting)
any software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
You're suggesting Facebook and Apple actually care about your privacy? Are you from the past?
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Government (Score:5, Funny)
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That meme is so played out. Let it rest, before any remaining scraps of truth it contains are leached out.
Re:Government (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, because anarchy has proven to work so terribly well already.
If doing something harmful is profitable, it will be done to the fullest possible extent without (and sometimes even) outright breaking the law. That includes trying to generate profit by making the market less free, hence monopolies and cartels. While it's fashionable in some circles to argue that the market is a panacea for all conceivable problems, that argument is so absurd on its face that it wouldn't be worth refuting if there weren't so many laissez-faire bobbleheads nodding gleefully every time some business model comes along touting anti-competitive practices dressed up as "innovation". Touting Facebook and iPhone apps as innovative -- seriously, Facebook apps? -- crosses the line from absurdity into actual comedy.
All regulation isn't bad. Remember that the next time you spout off some reactionary wisecrack and the regulations against assault and battery keep me from bashing you over the head with a sack full of iPhones.
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All regulation isn't bad.
I agree. Government should prevent force from being used, for example, to stop you from bashing me over the head with a sack full of iPhones.
However, nobody has a right to tell Apple that they have to open their platform to more apps. Regardless of whether or not that would produce innovation, your desires do not override others freedom. You don't get to tell people what to do just because you don't like how they operate. In an anarchy, might makes "right", but in a civilization, that should not be th
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That's a matter of perspective. You sacrificed a lot of your freedom of communication for companies that wanted to lock in their customers. Our government actually protected that freedom here.
As an another example, would you also like to give big companies rights to patent your human genes? For freedom of what? For the freedom you have to pay more money for drugs in the future? Or would you like that information to stay free and your government to back that up? Did you know you paid for most of that genome
Needless Concern (Score:3, Insightful)
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That just about sums it up (Score:2)
perfectly.
I agree with pretty well everything you said.
Remember how Microsoft setup 'Plays for Sure' and then when it failed, shut it down meaning that people who had bought stuff were no longer able to play it or made them incompatible with their new toy, the Zune.
Any Service that stores your data on their servers is open to misuse. They have something you want so what is to stop them from holding you to ransom and charging you an arm and a leg to get it back.
This is almost as good a business model as drug
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Everytime the wireless breaks, people will want a ground-based-app.
Cloud computing will have to come after routers that are more sophistocated.
Eg a router like dd-wrt [dd-wrt.com] where mere mortals don't instantly turn on WPA locks.
Lets have some factory open unrestricted bandwidth, or idle-open-bandwidth and help seed the cloud.
Add a speedlimit here, its a cloud.
http://www.wikispeedia.org/ [wikispeedia.org]
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See, the thing is, 'we' don't care if 'you' don't want to use the cloud. No matter how much you try to protect it, your privacy will be eroded for you.
I'm not on Facebook, and I wasn't on GMail for the longest time. But do you really think they don't have my data anyway, from all my friends who think differently ("if at all")?
Privacy is dead, killed by your friends who sold it for nothing to the big corporations. (Whoa, that sounded way more dramatic than I intended.) If you want privacy, you'll need person
Why would you buy into a walled gardin in a cloud? (Score:2)
First of all, clouds aren't a good foundation to build stone walls on (;-))
Secondly, and more seriously, a smart user will buy a service that gives them a virtual machine or a JVM to run an application on, and control the app and it's storage themselves.
At the expense of sounding grumpy, a lot of the cloud stuff reminds of software written for script kiddies
--dave
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Right, because all "smart" users have the capability to do that. This is mostly consumer stuff, large firms do exactly what you suggest. Most consumers simply don't have the ability to match what the enterprises are doing.
Just because this is within your area of expertise doesn't mean it is within everyone else's expertise
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I entirely agree: what's being offered seems aimed at the level of someone who isn't even a consumer, more of a learned-by-rote kind of user. That's survivable by consumers, although it may be frustrating.
That's less than useful to a company that wants to use the cloud for something profitable: they're limited to a very restricted set of things they can do. I've worked with one of the big packaged-services providers, and the service they offer limited, hard to adapt to your business and breaks in mysteri
Just another issue with this cloud thing (Score:2)
Amelia Earhart (Score:2)
You want to fly
Wait for radar
Or likely die
Burma Shave
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You want a new buzzword for the same thing? How about, stop using buzzwords entirely and call it by it's technical name? (hosted applications, etc.)
FYI (Score:3, Informative)
Or, if you don't like reading, you can watch his thoroughly engaging book talk here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/04/zittrain [harvard.edu]
Zittrain knows his stuff. He was friends with Postel. He's got an AI background from Yale in addition to his Harvard Law degree.
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>Zittrain knows his stuff. He was friends with Postel
Oh. Of course. He must be a very good computer scientist, then. :-)
Seriously though, is the term "the cloud" a substitute for "the Internet", now? Enough with this please.
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congrats (Score:1)
Just when I thought I'd heard the worst usages of 'cloud', someone upped the ante!
Now sites with a lot of users are considered the cloud? Is WoW the cloud? MySpace is "the" cloud?
Requiring applications meet certain criteria for your site is now somehow part of "the Oppressive cloud"?
Seriously, go die. Thx.
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But it is very sad though when the ante is upped not by another set of marketing people for commercial interests, but by a disinterested party who is
Lock down? (Score:1)
The year of the cloud (Score:2)
Are additional options bad? (Score:2)
One could argue that move from time-sharing systems to PCs stifled innovation by constraining developers to 64-640k of memory and single-threaded applications running one at a time. Yet, lots of progress in using computers was made this way. Now we see a resurgence of modern time-sharing systems. While their administrators may impose restrictions, they enable many new options at the same time. For example, hosted apps make it easier for individual users to adopt Linux, since they are no longer tied to Windo
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Deja vu..... You'll recall that the Web was gonna kill the desktop, and client/server, but look around. Sure you'll see a TREND toward more Web/cloud stuff, but the use cases for the old stuff don't go away. Everyone's a top-down, absolutist on these things. If you think bottoms-up, based on customer use cases, you'll have mainframes, terminals, PCs, and client/server -- for good or for bad -- around forever.
That and ego/politics; few Type A managers are gonna give their sensitive data over to someone th
The Cloud is cloudy. (Score:2)
No, I did not RTFA... but about Cloud Computing and all the conserns that come with it:
First, let's define the Cloud. If you have your backups "In the Cloud", my understanding is that you have your data hosted by somebody other than you. You reach them over the internet. You're using the internet to access the services. Because you're receiving this service from an outside network, you're getting it from the "Cloud".
Traditionally, you would be doing this yourself, within your own network. This is defiantly
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Of course, I very well might be wrong.
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Less important: It appears that Google Docs does support SSL. See the Following: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=100181 [google.com]
More important. If Google sold an appliance, much like the Google Search Appliance, that allowed you to run Google Docs from your own network... or anywhere on the internet, that's bringing the cloud to your business. I see things going that way.
Google already does something like this with Google gears, but I haven't tried it yet.
--Pathway