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The World Wide Computer, Monopolies and Control
Ian Lamont writes "Nick Carr has generated a lot of discussion following his recent comments about the IT department fading away, but there are several other points he is trying to make about the rise of utility computing. He believes that the Web has evolved into a massive, programmable computer (the "World Wide Computer") that essentially lets any person or organization customize it to meet their needs. This relates to another trend he sees — a shift toward centralization. Carr draws interesting parallels to the rise of electricity suppliers during the Industrial Revolution. He says in a book excerpt printed on his blog that while decentralized technologies — the PC, Internet, etc. — can empower individuals, institutions have proven to be quite skilled at reestablishing control. 'Even though the Internet still has no center, technically speaking, control can now be wielded, through software code, from anywhere. What's different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.'"
I'm fearing for the days when all you have at home is a thin client to some virtual machine inside some big server farm. You buy CPU time, like in the old mainframe times, get billed by cycle.
No need for anti piracy features, you don't get to see the executables or source anyways, all tucked away from your prying eyes.
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Or from nowhere. The risk of a bad guy taking over is serious, but the risk that no one is at the helm is much more likely to lead us to death by Global Warming, for example.
You have to look no further than the US Congress to see a worked example. If you idealize every single member of Congress as intelligent, and I think a similar analogy can be made for people on the net or for companies on the net (where you still have to question intelligence sometimes, but let's not and say we did), it's pretty clear that the problem isn't just the sinister taking hold of someone with total power. It's also that it's easy to cause behavior that no one can take responsibility for, and that isn't in the best interest of individuals. The Internet is no different, but not because we didn't have examples of this before. Just because we didn't heed them.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
This guy obviously has no sense of history....real or fictional.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Isn't this just the IT cycle, everything gets centralized, short term costs are saved. 10 years later decentralized, and long term costs are saved Vs short term.
I highly doubt that Windows will ever be remote boot only. In the US, there are still many many places where dial-up is the only form of Internet, needless to say, these people generally spend very little time online (unless they want to download something then they are on for a very long time) and wouldn't buy an OS that was totally online. Actually, most Linux/BSD distros are more or less internet dependent compared to Windows. In FreeBSD I can install almost the entire system via FTP and in Linux most applications come from a centralized repository, while most Windows applications that are proprietary and cost money usually come on CDs, DVDs or if they are really old, floppies. While BSD/Linux will still support hard drives, more effort is being made to store data over P2P networks such as BitTorrent (I forget the name, but some photo-backup software operates via Torrents to store pictures after they have been encrypted) then Windows. Windows and the computer "industry" have always made money on hardware primarily. Software is nearly pure profit but can easily be downloaded for free over P2P networks, CDs can be copied and it is easy to clone in open-source form most software. The personal hard drive will be diminished slowly but I don't think that it will be for a total lack of freedom as long as Google is allied on the standards following, mostly-open-source side, as Google will be one of the first to have "virtual hard drives" on the web. I doubt that any of this will happen in the next 5-10 years and even later than that so I doubt that Windows will still be dominant or even around then, and that leaves Google as the next "evil empire" and with their slogan as "don't be evil" I don't think that they will turn evil anytime soon.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Oddly enough that currently defines the difference between the professional level operating systems (some of which are free) and a hobby system that was pushed into the workplace (which you have to pay for). The wide range of malware is currently a single platform problem and is almost all the fault of poor design of two applications - Internet Explorer and Outlook.
Both Nick Carr and Alexander Galloway seem to be missing something..
perhaps it's that they assume the user and authority groups are mutually exclusive.. or perhaps it's the 'programming as control' inference that collapses the argument.. i'm not sure, but i really don't see this outcome occurring.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There's some technologies that everyone wants, and there's a solution that'll fit 90% of the populace.
Examples would be hosted email, contact management, and calendaring. A central provider can just simply do a better job at providing all these things that an IT department does, and the requirements are all extremely generic. Users seem to want infinite amounts of email storage, and the ability to find an email at a moments notice. That's difficult to manage unless you want to dedicate someone to JUST knowing the email systems.
The thing I disagree with is that the IT department is going away. Simply not true. The difference with other utilities is that the IT department doesn't provide a single, simple resource like electricity. IT provides automation and tools that increase productivity, many of which are going to be way to specialized to centralize.
IT departments may evolve, like they've been evolving for the last 50 years. I've heard many years ago (before my time at least) there were people dedicated just to swap tapes around. We don't have that anymore of course.
AccountKiller
As cool as Google Apps may be, you're essentially trusting your data integrity and security to an outside company.
Just to drive home your point further what can be even more important is that, as trustworthy as Google may be, they are subject to US law. This is a huge problem in places like Canada which have privacy laws since using, for example, GMail means that your organization can end up breaking Canadian law because the US government has free access to any data in your email which you may be legally responsible for protecting.
Kinda. Sorta. Not yet, but soon.
For businesses, especially small ones, utility computing makes a lot of sense. I work for a 70-person company, and six of our employees (including me) are dedicated to the IT function. We could probably reduce that number in half and still get more revenue-generating projects tackled if we were able to outsource things like backup and recovery, user account maintenance (why isn't this an HR function has always befuddled me - they control the hire/fire function, but don't determine system access at most companies, including mine), software rollouts, machine cloning, etc. I've been evaluating Google apps, and I tell you, it's almost to the point where I can see myself making the business case to deploy it company wide. I close my eyes, imagine a world where i never have to think about email servers and spam blocking again, and I cry a little. Saving my company $150K+/year in the process is just a bonus.
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That was true in the past, but nowadays malware is mostly spread by the good old "User wants free porn" method.
A.k.a social engineering.
I don't remember encountering any malware since at least before 2000 that could spread itself without relying on the user to infect their own machine. I've had several pieces of malware try to email or even msn file transfer themself to me from an infected pc though.