Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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'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.