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Pervasive Computing: Microsoft, MIT And The Future
illuin writes: "There's an interesting article over on BetaNews with a potential take on Microsoft's vision of the future internet, and internet based applications. Of course, it sounds quite a bit like Project Oxygen (press release,) currently being pursued by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science." The recent "dot-Net" announcement by Microsoft throws a new light on Oxygen, and on other distributed projects like Gnutella and Freenet. Project Oxygen and Microsoft may have radically different views on how all this diffuse computing ought to act and be organized (read "Who pays, how much, to whom?"), but the fact of widely disseminated files and an increase in ASP-style distribution seems inevitable.
I must say, good job. It's not often that we see Godwin's Law enter at the *beginning* of a thread.
VRML makes you a type of pirate too
My VRML software is being built on some Open Source components (zlib, libpng, and libjpeg), but notice that I drew a distinction between market pressures due to piracy and market pressures due to Free Software/Open Source. The latter are a legitimate, natural part of the development of things in a free market economy. If you lose to Open Source, you lose fair and square.
Nothing I've done is "warezed" and any use of Open Source in my work is legal and properly documented. I don't see how you can put me in the same category as some gangster from Hong Kong with a CD replicator.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So if all these wonderful services are brought to me by corporate providers and all my data is stored on corporate servers, what exactly do I own? And if I own nothing what kind of legal rights do I have should something happen to me or my data?
.NET to a room full of 'technology journalists' after several hours what hope do they have of convincing the general public?
Let's pretend that all my personal data is magically protected from 'hackers'. What's to stop the providers from using my information any way they want? This could be like many contests where the sponsor gets ownership of your creations as a condition of entry. Remember the flap when Geocities claimed to own or be able to use anything created on their site because you were using their services and resources? Will this be SOP in the ASP/.NET world?
What's to stop them from putting continual commercials in my applications that I use online? Like the recent Eudora release, applications could flash commercials or even track my movements as a condition to using the service. And if the service reaches critical mass where the penalities for non use are greater than acceptance (similar to using a word processor that cannot read/write the most recent Word format) what real alternatives do I have?
If the providers lose my information what legal recourse do I have? At least now I can back things up locally. If files are stored arbitraily on different servers can I still make my own back ups? I know I don't have much recourse in states that have passed UCITA, but who can I trust or blame should something go wrong?
And what benefit do I as a consumer actually get? Nothing really changes from my perspective. Am I forced to upgrade at the whim of my provider? Can I easily switch providers? Let's say I prefer an old copy of Freehand and don't want to upgrade to the latest version. Will I have a choice or will the upgrade be forced? Can I easily switch to Illustrator or am I stuck in a contractual obligation?
Let's not forget this won't happen for the next few years. I remember when push and interactive TV were going to be big. Unless consumers see some material benefit this thing will have a lot of hurdles to overcome. If the MS spinmeisters couldn't explain
That's a failure of the concept of a free and open Internet, dude. You can continue to blame Microsoft if you want to play chicken-little. Some of us won't buy your B.S. though.
It's the failure of the operating system giving every script root access while conected to a global network. Data has been moved around via for for decads before microsoft unleashed their VBS (virus building system) into the hands of clueless users.
Make no mistake, ms had every oportunity to make sure their operating system more secure but they failed to execute, opting instead to dump an unsecured OS and script interperater onto the net that caused billions in damages.
___
This is the future? Can't we have something else? What are the alternatives?
For a very good, poetic rant against this vision, I recommend Dan Simmon's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Highly recommended reading. If you haven't read it, be warned of spoilers.
In brief, Dan Simmons paints a world where computers control everything, and are truly ubiquitious. With help of their invention, Mankind colonizes the stars, using farcaster portals. But there is a price for this technology. Humankind becomes enslaved, dependent on ubiquitious compuetrs. So much so that they cannot fight an interstellar war. What does the novel offer as an alternative? Real starships. "Real" tech in the form of FTL ships and weapons.
Regardless of whether you agree or not, this is but one of the many threads in the Hyperion story. For those overtly enamored about ubiquitious computing, thinking it will liberate us, this novel is a very good antidote against that.
But like all Sci-Fi, things will never truly happen this way. The novel may be presenting a false dilemma. A good read and interesting viewpoint, nevertheless.
"We must limit cross-platform connectivity and interoperability even at the expense of uptime and security!"
;)
To become an engineer, you study the best way that it's been done before, and software engineering is no different. Since the best way it's been done before is UNIX, the ready availability of the blueprints for Linux makes it a natural choice for study. Mucking about with Linux is equivalent to moving I-beams around in the Twin Towers to see what happens -- except, naturally, quite a bit cheaper. The theory of software engineering -- computer science -- is more readily studied if the tools you use for the study are more readily available. The downtime associated with Windows means that it's not readily available...
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised?
If I wrote it with that in mind, of course I would. What kind of coward won't stand up and take responsibility for the quality of his own work?
A secure virtual machine for making arbitrary calculations can be very simple indeed; you only really need a few operations. It would be like signing a statement that you totaled a column of numbers correctly; you'd want to check it over until you're certain, and charge extra for the time and worry of that, but it's a simple enough task that you can eventually be certain that you're correct.
How do you think hardware designers ever get anything done? There's no magical difference that makes bug-free hardware possible and bug-free software impossible.
No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
I never said anything about that. I was very clearly responding to "I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users." and talking about protecting the machine from the tasks (and the tasks from each other). I'm not talking about communications security (which, of course, can never be perfect, for physical reasons; all theoretical communications security models rely on the absolute physical security of certain things, which is impossible in real life), I'm talking about the security of one machine and the processes that run on it.
BTW, what kind of idiot would let their car be controlled by a distant server over a network? Lines get cut, solar flares disrupt communications, networks go down.
I don't know why this got moded up. You never made any arguments, just asserted that I was wrong, and threw in a few non sequitors.
What the hell are you talking about? The email bugs are due to MSFT's faulty security model. Shit, I have friends at MSFT who have admitted that the Outlook team got chewed out for not implementing a sandbox model after the I LOVE YOU virus got out. The virus wouldn't have spread if the developers at MSFT had chosen security over perceived usability. .NET .
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by internet Security Model? Do you mean a restructuring of TCP/IP with security in mind or the use of routers to block certain packets (how this would have stopped I LOVE YOU is beyond me). Frankly both your posts seems like the ravings of a clueless non-techie who is pro-MSFT simply because he has bought the hype. Watch this... I LOVE YOU, Melissa and the others were emails sent by users carrying attachments... No Internet Securiy Model will suddenly be able to tell between programmatically sent email and user created email, unless of course you believe some central authority will be able to direct all the mailservers on the 'net to filter certain emails dynamically. Then what happens when some other 'net protocol becomes widely used for proliferating viruses, e.g. MSFT's
Finally about your little crack about Joel Klein and billions of dollars, what exactly is your point? MSFT got where it was by commiting crimes and breaking federal laws. The fact that it was making money for a few investors should not change the fact that they should be punished for their crimes. If you're trying to pin the fall of NASDAQ on MSFT...Get a clue. The fall of NASDAQ can be blamed on the fact that the Dot Comm Bubble Has Officially Burst, film at 11.
Of course I don't see them as being completely dry either. The Open Source movement is quite capable of salvaging the best ideas from what is out there and innovating from there. From Napster came Gnutella, which will have a very long life even if the RIAA brings Napster down.
.NET concept that make sense and are useful and leave out all the stuff that lets Microsoft remain in control and puts in all the stuff that gives the users control of their own systems.
The analogy I'm trying to make is that the idea of having resources accessible on the Net from wherever you want to be is something that will appeal to a lot of people. However the real solution is for people to configure their home servers that way. I'd love to be able to set up a desktop at home that I could take wherever I went. And not some big networked server I can't control, but my personal computer that I am in control of.
In the end, things like Office are too easily reengineered by the Open Source movement. The operating and basic application suites are too easily recoded by independent developers. Microsoft trying to clamp down on piracy and going to a subscription model for Windows and Office will end up driving people over to Linux and the software suits being developed for them, where there are no such costs.
In the end I see the Open Source movement taking on the ASP's by letting everyone become their own ASP. Everyone loads the applications onto their home servers that they like and then software is developed to let them run it from anywhere they like. And since this software is going to be Open Source, there are no monthly access fees like Microsoft plans to charge for their efforts.
So that is how Microsoft will be defeated, when the Open Source movement takes what ideas from the whole
Microsoft does not understand that the Net is too big for it to dominate and control the way it used to do with the personal computer industry. Or they haven't realized that they have an opponent that they can't simply beat in the end. The computer industry is growing sicker and sicker with Microsoft's control and everyone else is coming to the realization that while they can't control things themselves, with Open Source they can make sure no one controls them.
I don't think .NET will do very well - I think people would put up too much of a fight about paying a monthly fee for access to programs, especially with free alternitives availible.
.NET for each person - they just get a simple box that acts as a server for the house as well as the remote stuff, with perhaps a subscription to a backup provider if they care enough. You could buy more powerful home boxes if you wanted to do the remote voice stuff, and multiple boxes for redundancy.
.NET service.
Furthermore, they will be pretty stymied by a shortage of wireless bandwith and availiabilty (even if they get the connections up to 56k [which might be OK to send compressed voice over for control] you still even now have fairly terrible digital phone access across the US [though admittedly I've tried only Denver, New York, and San Diego])
And if that wasn't enough, you face a very ugly upcoming war of standards for these wireless devices with slow connections and small displays. I just got back from an XML conference where they also touched on WML and alternitives - what I got out of that was that WML is being pushed here and in Europe, though not in wide use yet (only one phone on the market has the most recent WML browser). In Asia, cHTML (compact HTML) endorsed by the W3C is already a standard - and in Japan they use iMode (a dervitive of cHTML) all over the place. Sure you can transcode to take away some of the differences, but there are enough mindset differences to make any content provider really want to support only one.
Anyway, that's my own personal off-topic rant about how I hope WML folds and cHTML is accepted. But my original point was meant to be this - that I think in the end the popular alternitive will be for people to buy software still, but basically have a home
And the point I was trying to make THERE is that I don't trust Microsoft to know where it makes "the most sense" for my computing to be performed - I might want quite a bit more local power if I go to remote areas often, and I don't want to be locked into one very hostile
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This article has caused me to browse around the MIT LCS pages a bit more, and I find it pretty depressing. Many pages are written like press releases, complete with quotations that make them look like journalism (the way press releases try to imitate journalistic style). Everything screamed "commercial relevance", "spinout", "efficiency", "scalability", "commerce", "break-through technology", and "invest now".
In part, that seems to reflect a genuine reorientation of research focus and motivation. In part, it also seems to reflect a misrepresentation of the reality of research: research is hard work, true breakthroughs are rare, and almost everything is built on other work, even at MIT.
I find these trends worrisome for the future of basic research. Where is basic research going to happen if even universities think about the commercial value of everything and graduate students are motivated by how they can sell the next billion dollar startup to VCs?
>In the past, computers were expensive.
Well, now that computers are "inexpensive", why do we want to move away from personal computers back to terminals? (sure, fancy ones, but terminals nevetheless.)
Even assuming we had an infinite bandwidth, who does really benefit from that ASP model?
The users? most users use their computer at work or at home and that's about it. I doubt people need to write letters in the bus or in their car (and personally I would rather that drivers focus on driving rather than some other tasks.) And some plain enjoy not having a computer handy.
It seems the ASP model is more some Big Brother wet dream... they charge you per use, plus they store all you information, can it get any better than that?
I think a few years ago, when Bill Gates started his MSN he said he wanted to make a few cents on every computer/network transactions... The ASP model seems to fit that vision perfectly.
Also given the state of reliability of softwares offered by Microsoft, AOL, and other software giants, I would be more than reluctant to have to rely on their ASP service to get any work done, even if I trusted them with the integrity and privacy of my data (which I don't.)
Janus
I don't put much faith in this guy's prognostications; if he was a real usability guru he would have set up his DNS so that useit.com => www.useit.com. Saving me typing == usability in my book.
As for ASP, once consumers and businesses get bitten by someone else holding their data and apps hostage (or even just due to a network outage), they'll be moving over to free, unencumbered, and open systems like never before.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Amen! Here are a couple of interesting scenarios for you. A couple of weeks ago Inacom declared bankruptcy and closed their doors, completely shutting down an outsourced help desk operation for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan. Imagine your ASP failing to achieve critical mass, filing for bankruptcy, and leaving you without access to your applications, databases, etc. Your corporate masters will only want ASP's with deep pockets...like MS, AOL, or Oracle.
A more ominous scenario is the effect of a shift from the machine to the network to Open Source software. The Open Source movement is focused on replicating the functionality of OS and applications built for the desktop or server market. If you want to use an automotive analogy you could say that they build vehicles of various types and let you use them for nothing. What happens when the functionality is no longer in the cars but in the network of roadways? Where do the resources come from to maintain a parallel network of value-added roadways that can be used for nothing?
Of course, the .NET, AOL, and Oracle folks have to actually get some value added to the roadways first...
My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
Actually, Jini has an amazing number of licensees. It's a fundamental shift in infrastructure that is taking a while to take place, but that's to be expected.
.NET is pretty vague and targeting two years from now. But in principle I support the idea of pay for use as an option for users, as long as the service provider's behavior is legally constrained to be reasonable. For example, it's not acceptable that your office software get cut off at the whim of the service provider any more than your phone service or power.
.NET, that would be great.
It's hard to compare the two, since Jini is thoroughly documented and implemented, while MS'
The other thing that would need to be in such as system is a means of locating competing implementations of desired functions. For example, in Jini I can ask the world what's available near me that can print a document, and then I can choose which one I want to use based on the printer's capabilities, physical location, etc. By extension, I should be able to locate available spelling checking services, and pick the one I used based on specific vocabulary, pricing, etc. Fundamentally Jini is completely distributed; there is no "root" -- everything is locally coordinated, so that it can scale to support billions of devices on a global scale. This means that while Sun (somewhat) controls the protocol, it cannot control the services provided via Jini, which means that the open marketplace rules.
If those same attributes are true of MS'
I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Not every security protocol is vulnerable, just those ones where the expense of perfect security wasn't justified by necessity (for example, when you want to sell a "secure" system, but you can hire marketers to hype it as secure more cheaply and effectively than you can hire programmers to make it secure).
I raised this issue at Andrew Layman's talk on .NET at XML DevCon 2000 in New York last week.
;-)
Microsoft gave this lovely humorous video presentation of a "Jetsons"-like world where all this chap had to do to get medical service was connect to his insurance company and approve their access to his medical records, and then approve access to the doctor for the same. All done using XML of course
Sadly the privacy implications of this are incredibly far reaching, and being almost totally avoided in favour of rapidly building this ubiquitous system. My suggestion to Andrew Layman was to go out and read Simson Garfinkel's book "Death of Privacy...". I sincerely hope he does, and many other people do, because otherwise we're going to end up in this situation of people getting bogus records or transferring records to people hacking into the network (you approved the record to be transfered to who you thought was your insurance company, but it was in fact joe bloe hacker). And we'll get my Grandma approving her own labotomy because she didn't know which button to press. Lets all celebrate this joyous new technology!
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
ASP model is all about piracy prevention. You can't pirate a service as easily as you can pirate a product. Will it benefit the consumer? Of course not. Thank the pirates. Welcome to the future, where you will here people saying "I can't use my word processor, the network is down".
You might want to thank the Free Software movement too. You can't really sell free software. You can sell a service. Software vendors pressured by falling values for software sold in the traditional manner will do what they can to follow the ASP model.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I can't believe no one has mentioned the privacy implications of this. 1) you an encode as much as you want during transmission, but there is currently no way to work on the data without decoding first. The main CPU (and the 'rented' progfgram) sees all your personal data, and it's not under your control 2) If you trust all commercial CPU cycle providers (I don't), what about cracked/compromised systems? But more importantly, what evidence do we have that commercial enterprises can be trusted in this fashion? Even EU privacy laws hace limited utility against a US server. 3) Consider this as well... if your apps are following you around, running on whatever machines are nearby, and those machines are programmed to configure themselves to your custom settings, then trojan/virus/macro checking becomes tougher. Each machine can only (at best) detect the known public viruses. Meanwhile that custom reporting macro your employer put in a 'petty cash' template, follows you from bar to bar, to the house of your college friend (who has had more social diseases than Don Juan's taste-tester; and eighteen misc. misdemeanor arrests for DUI, drug possession, disorderly conduct, and trolling /.) Etc. Etc. You can *know* the proper configuration on your home/office machine. An anonymous machine can't recognize what 'belongs' -- And (you heard it here first) what about a macro that is set *not* to load from the server to your home/work machine? One that effectively lives outside your door and follows you only when you're out? Sorry, I'll stick with my private hardware, running my privately owned copy of software -- and the PDA with electrical tape over the IR port
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Seriously, though, I can't imagine ever saying "are emm dash are eff asterisk" to make room, or "cursor right, cursor right, select, cut, damn it, undo, copy, cursor down . . ."
Thats because you're trying to marry standard text & keyboard interfaces to a completly diferent input system. It won't work, just as trying to use a mouse to type won't work; it wasn't designed to do it.
Interfaces provide a layer between the input devices and the computer, therefore the interace is designed for the input devices available. If you have voice recognition, you'll have a diferent interface.
For example, instead of "arr emm dash arr eff star" you could use more natural language, such as "delete all files in the temp directory", or "Open the abiword file that contains my current cv".
All of this is very obvious, but it seems a lot of people will have to be dragged away kicking and screaming from their text consoles.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Speaking of ASPs and the future of computing: what happened to Broadway? Broadway was XConsortium's X11R6.4 server and was intended to "web-enable" (cool buzzword) X11. It did so by including a new X protocol (LBX) with lower bandwidth requirements and adding features neccessary to run applications from untrusted sources on your X server. I think this sounds like a great and relativly simple way to provide applications over the net. The last thing I heard was that XFree 4.0 should be based on X11R6.4, but the release notes dont mention any of the broadway features, nor could I find any application for this. Info, anyone?
This is the kind of situation that authentication is supposed to avoid.
Sorry, I am too lazy to actually code html, so check out http://www.useit.com .
.Net as the dawn of a new era. It scares me that with so little information, and Microsoft's current track record that we all complain about, Nielen offers very strong support for this. As some have said, this can be a good idea, but at this point I don't trust MS to pull it off well. (I don't hate all of MS either, just the management. A lot of excellent programers and designers go to MS because that is where the money and security is.)
Jakob Nielsen heralds
More on topic, pay to play IMHO sucks. I personally prefer the system as it is now, pay once, play close to forever. Of course, this option won't go away, but it will cost a bloody fortune. OTOH, the idea that paying for what you use has been a dream of mine. To pull off these two ideas so that the consumer wins means one thing...pay once for only what you need and have the option to buy components later. Sounds a bit like the auto industry. And yet, the auto industry is setup to screw the consumer. So will the IT, IS, etc industry pull it off in a better fashion? Or are they slavering at the profits automakers are able to pull off?
Sig-"Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Jelaluddin Rumi
The late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC wrote an article for Scientific America in 1991 that defined much of the ground work for things like Project Oxygen. Give it a read, it changed my career.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
But I disagree with your assessment of the security situation. First, ASPs can work just fine without mobile code or agents or whatever. Consider your example of a speech-recognition ASP: It will already have the code installed on it, so there's no need for it to run untrusted code.
But does it have every single module it needs? For example, let's consider an ASP providing voicerec in Darkest Africa. Now let's say Bubba comes sauntering along through the jungle and sees a brightly colored snake. He asks his palmtop "Is that thang friendly?" The palmtop contacts the nearest ASP via wireless, indicating that it needs recognition for English, and would like dialect-specific services for Alabama. Most likely, this server does not have English(Alabama,USA), or if it does, it does not have the latest version. Therefore, it will query the local network. Let's say that Billy-Sue, angry at Bubba for not getting her new hubcaps, has compromised a node on the local network such that it appears to have the necessary software. However, her software is specifically instructed to reverse the sense of any safety-related query. Thus, when the palmtop sends the image of the snake for image-recognition, it ends up asking "Is animal (deadly redneck-eating snake) dangerous?", which returns true. Bubba therefore hears his palmtop say "Yes, it is." Thinking that the snake is friendly, he is promptly devoured.
The whole principle of ASPs, IMHO, is getting the latest code to the user just in time. If somebody compromises the delivery chain, malicious code can be inserted. (I can't wait to see the sorts of things a hacked Office.net could deliver. All you'd have to do is muck with the target's DNS resolution and point them to a malicious site. (Yes, the code might need a signature, but many users won't bother to read the resulting dialog box, will click on 'trust code', and get screwed.)
As an example of this, I just used last nights build of Mozilla and attempted to load this page (http://www.microsoft.com/net/). I got the message " The connection was refused when connecting to www.microsoft.com." They can't even get a server side referer script right, how can any right minded IT professional not look at their vision as just more useless PR.
On the issue of microsoft going forward with this horific idea, the unresolved DOJ case has their hands tied. Yes, they are in a strong position to exert their will onto the market, but they are not as strong as they would be if this case was resolved.
We all know what happened when ms took an operating system with a terible security model and unleashed it in the hands of clueless users . . it resulted in Billions and Billions in lost revenue and time when the ILUVYOU VB Script rippled around the world.
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The article opens by saying: I don[]t have any inside track with Microsoft. Heck, our company doesn[]t even have a Microsoft developer or marketing rep!
The first thing that caught my eye was the blocks that appeared where apostropies should have gone. The page, (produced by Adobe GoLive) suffers from that same glitch that Frontpage-created pages do, which stems from assuming you are reading it with de-facto browsers.
When an article discussing a microsoft-dependant market contains html errors that punish me for using Opera and not Internet Explorer, is that irony or hippocracy?
I'm personally not convinced that voice-rec is the way to go for mobile computing. If I'm on the bus or anywhere else where someone can hear me, I don't want them to know what I'm saying to my computer. OTOH, if you're actually the one driving the car, it does make sense.
More importantly, though, is this vision that most mobile machines will stream all their data to nearby big iron which will crunch the numbers and stream back finished product. Let's pretend for a bit that the bandwidth issues can be worked out. Who's going to actually be running the machines that provide all these spare cycles? Are we going to have companies which simply maintain large computers for performing standard tasks like voice recognition and Web searching on behalf of mobile users? I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
I did mobile-code research for a few years, and the resource question was always coming up. There were some papers written by a grad student with a background in economics, and some modeling was done, but it was never quite proven that this could work. (One can't really model all the various kinds of automated maliciousness that could occur.)
Finally, I'll add the standard gripe that I think ASPs are a step in the wrong direction. I don't want to be continually dependent on a manufacturer for access to an application. Let someone arbitrarily deny me word-processing services because they don't like what I write? Be forced to use a new version of software which adds features I hate and removes the ones I love? No thank you. If I want to take my laptop to Mars and do my word-processing there, I want to do so without interplanetary network lag.
Of course, if played right, this could be a big win for Linux and other free-software projects. I believe that once users get bitten by the ASP model, they will want to get away from it. Obviously, the big companies won't let them. If, however, they can just switch to a purely-local free-software office suite, we might see a large jump in the use of free systems.
The network is not the computer, the computer is not the network, and as far as this user is concerned, there are times when I'd like the network to fuck off and leave me alone with a completely functional machine.
Yeah.. we don't have to look at it.
I expected more from MIT, but things seem to have gone downhill since my undergrad days there.
Well, what would you expect? They're all fucking around with their Linux kernel when they should be learning something new, somthing that isn't a remake of Unix-1989.
To become an engineer you don't just muck around on the beach with a sand pail and shovel. To become a computer scientist you don't just muck around in one particular re-implementation of Unix.