We’re becoming more and more passive consumers, not active and involved citizens!

Post-wikileaks the cloud needs a major rethink.

To transfer the books you read, your personal writings, accounts, contacts, message history, media you consume, etc in a space which can be closed down at a whim takes what little personal power we have left and hand it over to someone you’ve never met.

Consider that these objects were still physical and you decided to give them to a a major corporation, subject to possibly foreign government influence, to own and control when you can and cannot access them (as well as monitor the contents). People would call you insane.

Sure, you might argue, you aren’t Wikileaks. But the line’s only going to keep on moving. And what if one day you really don’t agree with the government?

I realize most people won’t take this into account, but it seems to me that they’ve made the plumbing overly complicated. For universal binaries, modify Android OS for netbook/tablet use (which they’re working on) and make a Dropbox-style service available for Google Netbook available.

What really does the iPad get me? It’s an upgraded e-reader that can surf the web and runs “apps”…

While I’m writing this on a 13″ notebook that’s fairly portable and has a keyboard, and runs proper apps.

And this whole idea of having a dumb device with remote cloud apps could have been done by Apple a long time ago. OS 8.6 allowed you to move applications just by taking the program directory with you. It wouldn’t have been hard to have a harddrive for local installs of programs and the OS. While all your programs and data could have been stored on a compact flash/sd card. Alas nothing like this was ever done, but it wouldn’t have been hard to do.

And while I going on here, I don’t like when people start waxing poetically about file management and how it is some evil that needs to managed by someone else. I never understood the idea of “metadata” and indexing my searching or having all your data piled into one directory. I might be a geek, but I know what data is on my pc, where things are, and what they are.

Perhaps would shouldn’t be making products more dumb, but the users more intelligent.

As for the whole “replacing Caps Lock with a search key” debate, I think it’s a good idea to replace caps lock, I’m just not 100% sure I want a search key in that spot. I can’t think of a better function for it, right now, though.

Roboton – at the worst case, I would like to have the possibility to set up mesh networks. That would be a last stand, but it’s worth preserving as an option. If there were serious censorship, meshes could start to make sense.

I wonder how encrypted P2P would figure in? Just finished Corey’s Little Brother and now am reading Greg Egan’s Zendegi, which both use plausible peer-to-peer communication to bypass said scrub points. As for crypto underpinnings, I recall some work from Chaum, Goldreich, Micali, Widgerson, and a few others – and that was from 10 years ago! Ancient stuff. All that is needed are private beacons of relatively prime numbers, which we already have, and a widely deployed protocol (SIPP perhaps?) to allow devices to talk to each other directly.

And, oh yeah, a will willing populace – a much harder problem.

“[Mac OS X] assumes the necessity of backwards compatibility with the Power PC architecture…”

Mac OS X is no longer backwards compatible with the PowerPC architecture. 10.6 won’t run on the PowerPC. There is support for apps compiled for the PowerPC architecture through Rosetta, but that’s an optional download, and not installed with the operating system — because that backwards compatibility is not assumed.

“…and local storage…”

Any modern Mac can netboot OS X. Local storage is not a requirement.

“…and compatibility with plugins…”

There’s no plugin architecture for Mac OS proper. There can be kernel extensions, control panels or applications, but plugins are for applications. That’s true of what the CR-48 is accessing as well — applications have plugins, too (cf WordPress).

“…and interaction with networks…”

The CR-48 needs to interact with networks in order to access the cloud. This isn’t just a prerequisite for Mac OS, it’s a prerequisite for any device that wishes to access the cloud.

“… and legacy third-party hardware.”

This is the one place where the Chrome OS actually represents something different. But not for long, as the Chrome OS builds in support for different devices released over time.

One upside to a dumb terminal would be longevity, it should be just as useful in 10-15 years, but I think that it would end up like most other computers and phones; useless or dead in 2-3 years.

That’s where I stopped reading…

Please do. While the specs are impressive, the in-field performance is still trying to catch up with Juniper/Netscreen, and doesn’t come quite to the specs you are quoting (plus, you’d need to ensure that all internet traffic was symmetric (good luck with that), and load-balance all of that traffic over your mega-arrays of firewalls.

And don’t tell anyone about the “Established” bit — that screws their numbers right up.

I wish he’d stay put in one place for longer though so I could actually follow him easier. Kotaku, BoingBoing, Wired… etc, etc.

There’s an option to show 100 e-mails at a time. Well, actually 100 “conversations”, so up to 10,000 e-mails at a time. There, I just saved you 20 minutes per day.

That said, the ultimate goal of these software as a service cloud computing platforms is to extract more money from you by forcing you to start paying a monthly fee to use your software. It also means an end to piracy which does cost the industry some money.

Now, a lot of businesses love software as a service because it means less IT, but plain old consumers? I don’t see it.

I understand the need for simplicity, but complexity in these supposed ‘legacy computers’ hasn’t stemmed from some arbitrary want for power, but actual need for wide-ranging functionality. They did not appear overnight, but have evolved over time.

These arguments about ‘simpler=better’ were pretentious when the ipad was announced, and they still are with the Chrome OS. Yes, I understand the need for simplicity, but you have to keep in mind that it is inversely proportional to functionality. Case in point; iphone multitasking update. Switching between apps was annoying and difficult before this update, which is resolved by adding functionality. But now it requires you to force kill background apps if you want to run that graphics-heavy game, or save battery life. The maintenance-free platform for ‘Regular People(TM)’ requires maintenance. That update also added Folders. File management. Its a little bit more complex now. And it will keep evolving into a more complex platform with more features.

Chrome OS is a noble idea. And the execution is sound, from what I have seen through Chromium OS beta. But I already see countless issues that will affect all users. The lack of even temporary local storage means that all webapps ‘installed’ must either be cross-compatible, a logistical impossibility, or having a permanent free cloud access for all users provided by Google themselves, which is more likely to happen, but which will more or less destroy the ‘freemium’ business model of cloud based apps.

I would also like to add another nod to APT on Ubuntu/Debian. Its the most magical thing I have ever seen, and I went to school for this crap.

I work directly with users, so am able to sit on the wall between both parties; and while one shouts “it’s underpowred”, the other shouts “but it works and is easy to use”; except they’re not shouting … and they can’t hear each other.

Luckily for us there are companies out there like Google and Apple that employ techs that understand users, and don’t spend all day scratching their own itch.

‘Features’ and ‘Hardware’ only matter to the point of functionality; in the real world no one cares if it has 3 extra tickboxes in the settings or .2mHz of power in the CPU, especially if it makes no difference to the usability of the product and the experience they have when using it.

The public responds to these devices because they promise simplicity. No local storage also means no file management. Applications managed by a server means no application management, no updates to hunt for, etc.

“But those aren’t exactly the most challenging tasks on Earth,” you might say. True- but that’s not the point. The real question is: “Why are we doing these tasks at all?”

There are cases where we have (and want) to. Full-fledged computing devices designed for maximum flexibility will always be with us. They’re just too damn useful. But limited devices that focus on delivering core use-cases with the minimum of fuss and maintenance are also useful.

I think many people expect this to be an either-or. These two differing models have to compete, because we view marketshare as a zero-sum game. If one company increases its marketshare, some other company loses it. If one product gains marketshare, it must be at the expense of some product.

What these limited devices have done, however, is increased the total size of the market. It’s not zero-sum.

With the state trying to censor the internet, and the hosting companies pulling the plug when Joe Lieberman says so, I think relying on the cloud is only going to less and less realistic.

On the other hand, for those people who *do* fit the criteria of not frequently taking the device out of their house, and spending most of their time on email and basic web browsing (and there are many in that category, like half of my relatives, even if none of them read Boing Boing), this device will do everything it needs to do and require absolutely no maintenance knowledge, which is a *big* deal. Things that most of this readership thinks are trivial, like installing updates and avoiding malware, are really hard for less technically-literate users, and a computer with *fewer* features can be *more* useful if, by virtue of its limited nature, it keeps its users from ever having to worry about or fix things.

It’s more correct to picture a world where every device is capable of any computational task, and has infinite storage — and, connected to the net (because of the nature of tcp/ip), is a peer with any other device on the net. Why think about and design for a dumb terminal world when every device has infinite storage and computational power? Now, if we could just solve the interface problem, that would be the thing.

- Computer hardware is cheap. If I’m going to pay a couple hundred bucks for a decent screen and crappy computing power and storage, I can get real computing power and storage for fifty or a hundred bucks more. The computer is now way more useful for only 33% more.

- Mobile devices which can’t work without an internet connection are moronic. End of story. The internet is not ubiquitous. The ability to share documents when the internet is around is nice. Being unable to access your documents without the internet is nightmarish. Is an offline cache so hard to implement?

- As a general rule, the internet will always have more latency than the local machine. This means that certain interfaces will alway suck more over the internet than on one’s machine. And web “applications” are not always superior to local applications. My office switched to gmail and it wastes at least twenty minutes of my day, every day (and I’ve had gmail for five years, so it’s not like I’m a noob). Can people not see that having to click a “next” button to access email 26 is moronic? There’s this great device called a scroll bar which allowed us to look through all of our email in seconds. The superior web applications can’t effectively use them. Try sorting. Click. Wait. Go. Everything you do in a web application is: Click. Wait. A web browser, despite what Google wants us to believe, is not a device which is universally good at everything, especially not Chrome. For godsakes – clicking the “back” button means reload the page you were just at. It’s absurd.

I swear, between this shitpile Android phone I’ve got, and hundreds of hours of wasted time in gmail over the last year, and that stupid-assed insta-search they’ve got going, I’m not feeling real impressed with the genius of Google lately.

Making Android actually work – there’s something I could get on board with. A decent version of Android would kick the crap out of ChromeOS on netbooks any day. It can always have a decent web browser if you want the “window on the world” experience.