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Wozniak Predicts Horrible Problems With the Cloud
Hugh Pickens writes "'I think it's going to be horrendous,' said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak when asked about the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into the cloud. The comment came in a post-performance dialogue with audience members after a performance in Washington of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China. 'I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.' The engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today's personal computer, the Apple II, expanded on what really worried him about the cloud. 'With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to. I want to feel that I own things,' Wozniak said. 'A lot of people feel, "Oh, everything is really on my computer," but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'"
....but, sadly, doesn't.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Woz is a creator. So was Jobs. But they both needed Consumers - Jobs was more aware of that than Woz obviously.
Woz wants to build something, own it, and carry it around in his pocket. Most modern IT stuff is designed to give you a means to consume content.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
you *should* be concerned. It started with hotmail when they disabled the ability to download email to your home computer, and its only going to get worse. I literally cannot archive my email to an offline store and it is, in effect, owned by Microsoft. They can do with it as they wish, and I can't stop them.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Only people who are really in favor of the cloud are in management.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
MegaUpload
My Cloud recipe for success: encrypt all data you upload and use local apps to open/consume/create it all. Don't forget to use your own meatspace backup system of choice from time to time. All the taste none of the fat.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
We've already seen what can happen when a cloud service goes down. Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have both went down recently, causing havoc for many businesses. When Megaupload went down, it caused a huge loss for many legitimate customers as well. If your Steam account gets suspended, or you disagree with the new TOS - you're shit out of luck, all that you "own" is gone for good and you can't do shit about it. Dropbox lost a shitload of emails due to a security breach, Sony lost the details for 70million+ customers for a similar reason. Every single example of a cloud operation that I can think of, be it a service or a product, has had issues and it's not going to change.
The cloud is a wonderful idea in principal, but we need a completely different outlook on it. And possibly a hell of a lot of new laws governing ownership of the content.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48530369/ns/technology_and_science-security/
Why would Woz legitimize the work of that liar?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
When millions of people all of a sudden can't access their data due to some technical fault, you're going to have a bad day.
If there really is going to be a massive problem with the cloud, it will be solved before it affects too many people. It can't be any other way. Whenever a majority of people suffer more than they are willing to accept, the mistakes are corrected in their favor. That's why credit card fraud isn't the terrible problem that it should be given the massive security flaws. That's why daily life goes on despite the biggest financial crisis still in effect. The cloud will hurt some people badly, but the odds of that being you are miniscule.
Everyone runs a cloud storage service (CSS) on their own computer(s). This service functions as a repository of all things yours, but has peer functionality, so my laptops can replicate what is on my SAN. So the same laptop does not always need to be on. Services (applications) can be assigned read/write permissions.
Every cloud application provider (facebook etc) functions as a proxy. I tell the CSS to peer to facebook, and they use a mechanism similar to DHCP to negotiate the current location of the CSS. Facebook stores nothing. If I close the app account (facebook account) I can revoke all the access for the application. I still have all my data.
Since the CSS is just an application using standard interfaces, there's no reason why I can't partner with google to provide the storage service if I do not want to maintain my own. But this is my choice, and I always have my data.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So basically he is saying that a method of technology is flawed because his (and other people) buying behaviours are not compatible with it...
http://www.quasarcr.com/
An expose would reveal, well, reality.
Mike Daisey was found to have fabricated all of the issues he raises against Apple.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a no-brainer. Because they offer you pre-built solutions, for a monthly recurring fee that's cheaper than what you would have to pay (amortized over 5 years) to go it alone, they get to dictate the terms of the contract. They also get to fail and provide no "real" restitution for their failure. Your Virtualized Data Center is gone because we had a power outage in Bangladesh. Oh, you didn't buy the "Value Add Package", that means we don't have to provide any discounts or recompense for lost business or data. If you'd paid extra to have the data hosted locally, that would have been different.
Bull...
Of course, your pointy haired boss will insist on "cloud", you'll get right on it to keep your job. "Cloud" will fail, boss blames you, you lose job anyway.
If ya wanna save on infrastructure, why not have any applicable workforce telecommute, that'll save millions just on heat and electricity.
Blah...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
for years car dealers pushed monthly payments to clueless buyers to scam them into higher prices. same with the cloud.
dropbox, only $100 a year
cloud storage of music? $25 a year via itunes or amazon
remote backup? $50 a year
virtual server? $xxxx a month. oh you don't like the service, OK just buy your own for $15000 plus hosting
dollar here and dollar there and soon its real money
when you think about it a machine at your location is a consumer class CPU/hard drive. cloud provider will have multiple machines with enterprise class CPU's, overpriced enterprise hard drives, precious metal support contracts, etc. I bet the hardware vendors love it and are pushing the cloud hype through the tech media
Moving to the cloud, whether Apple or Microsoft or any of the other players, has two main purposes:
- Guarantee ongoing profits through subscriptions and micro-payments to the providers for storage, use of cloud-based applications, or viewing or listening to cloud-based media.
- Control of digital media, making DRM easy to enforce since your audio and video files will all be on their servers to be scanned, audited, and confiscated.
Even with the fluctuating prices for hard drives the cost to store media locally is lower than ever, and there are plenty of options for sharing your media over the web yourself due to the low cost of high speed Internet access.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Future generations will not even know about the need for control. All their data will be in Google's servers. In future, all personal computing devices will be hobbled anyway.
The cloud is not really a shift away from hard disks and CPUs, these must still store the data and supply the computing power.. but they won't be yours anymore.
Instead the cloud is a shift away from ownership, privacy and ultimate control over.your computing .. even to the point of managing how much CPU and disk you are entitled to.
That'ss really behind this scheme. Harddisks and CPU wilays cost money and you will be paying for them .. only you won't own them, renter. You will be a tenant.
that without something else that allows everyone to easily store, sync and backup their data "owning" your data is a mostly meaningless feature.
What we need is some kind of peer-to-peer cloud and syncing *protocol*, with distributed storage. Back in the good old days email and Usenet offered something like that.
But just requiring people to run their own servers will never work. Because 99% of people just lack the knowledge, motivation and time to implement and use anything like that. Not seeing this problem is idiotic.
How long before some court declares your data is in the public domain once it has left hardware that you own?? Then it will be datamined to death by advertisers, spammers, government agencies..... If you use cloud services even today, make sure you encrypt your own data and keep the keys, certificates, passphrases, or whatever you use to yourself. While I don't have anything to hide, I still don't want anyone digging through my stuff. Especially nameless, faceless ones at a remote location.
You can sync your hotmail account with Outlook. For really important emails, I print to PDF and store with Subversion. I use my GMail account through Outlook as well. It's much easier to work with.
Work Safe Porn
He's not at Apple and has not been for a long while.
Wrong. He may not work there daily, but he is still listed as an employee of Apple
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Employment_with_Apple
Hotmail provides pop3 access so you can certainly download your mail.
Even if you choose to use the dynamic server provisioning facilities that define cloud computing, nothing stops you from buying your own servers and running your own software (free software, even!) for those services. (That's what "private cloud" systems are.)
Or even doing a "hybrid cloud" system where your main system is a private cloud system and you use a public cloud system to provide extra capacity to deal with processing spikes.
The cloud doesn't make you stop owning things. It adds more options, one of which is the option to run your own cloud. You have the option of remote hosting dependent on someone else, but you had that option before cloud computing, too.
"monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China."
Oh, my. Where to even start? First, where's the controversy? Who is against Apple's labor conditions in China? Nobody. Popular wisdom has workers jumping to their deaths in order to escape Apple's tyranny. Where is the opposition that this brave monologist is so bravely and controversially standing against?
Second, Apple doesn't even employ the workers in China. Foxconn does. If you think you can dictate terms to your Chinese contractor regarding worker conditions, you are dead wrong, mister. You can write a contract, you can inspect the factory, you can do anything you like. At the end of the day, it's the Chinese factory's decision regarding how they will conduct their own business. Foreigners dictating terms to Chinese which the Chinese will obey without exception...what's that called again? Oh, right...imperialism.
Thirdly, Foxconn's workers are well-paid and well-treated, by Chinese standards. Remember, China is a socialist state, and workers are represented by officially approved unions. The All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is a government-run organization that has been implementing aggressive unionization tactics aimed at foreign companies in China since the middle of 2006. Just think of how the US government intervened to keep the GM unions afloat and you'll get the right idea of how things work in China. The Labor Law of 2008 requires that any employee who completes a 1-year contract, upon renewal of that contract, be employed for life. How is Apple supposed to improve on lifetime employment, exactly? I'm not an Apple fanboi, I hate them as much as anyone who loves innovation and despises walled gardens, but jeez. How, exactly, should Apple dictate terms to Foxconn without recalling the bad old days of unequal treaties and foreign enclaves?
Fourthly, what does monologist Mike Daisey think should be done? Pay Chinese workers Western wages? This would invalidate the entire idea of moving production to China. It would render millions of Chinese people unemployable - in favor of Western people. What's that called again? Oh, right: jingoism. Or protectionism, take your pick. Either word is repugnant.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
With local storage, you are only subject to failures in your immediate control (to a degree, hardware failures are not necessarily your fault, but can be mitigated in the event of one with proper planning). With cloud storage, you're no longer in control of your data. You have effectively handed complete control of your data to a third party and are pretty much at their mercy. Cloud provider has an outage? You're screwed until they're up and running again. Cloud provider decided to up their rates? They can pretty much hold your data hostage until you pay. Cloud provider wants to make extra money? For a price, they can/will/have allow(ed) governments to peruse your data for signs you may be a terrorist or have terrorist ties... At least this will be the justification the alphabet suits will give (i.e. FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)
Buy a NAS, keep your data at home.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
This story has buried the lead. All anyone's going to talk about is Woz this and Cloud that, when the real news should be that somehow people are continuing to pay money to go see Mike Daisey put on his one-man show that, despite coming across as if he's telling a true story about what he did, has in fact been proven to be largely false. It became quite the embarrassment for the radio show This American Life when they aired portions of it as being true after he lied to them about specifics of the story.
Schnapple
Any thinking person is wrestling with this issue right now. Cloud computing is potentially a LOT more dangerous than it is beneficial. There's a ton of money being spent by the major players (Facebook, Google, Amazon AWS) and for at least one of these (Facebook) the path to profitability is not clear (and I recognize that they are making money today, but the ad revenue that they're pulling down may be related to hype in the advertiser's sector, not actual effectiveness. Advertisers may not like Facebook in a year). There was this kind of thought process, for example, on Facebook's part that all they needed was an enormous audience (check) and that somehow they'd be able to profit with their personal information for advertising. Now it's starting to come out in the press that Facebook's ads may not be effective and that there may be bots being used to increase click-through stats. So, if any of what the press is reporting on is true or if their profitability changes overnight, what are Facebook's options with their enormous collection of user data? All "ecosystem" vendors are in this situation in some form or other. What does Google have to gain with Gmail, Google Drive, and G+? All of your stuff is sitting on their servers - an infrustructure that ain't cheap. At least Amazon Web Services has kind of found a way to make an infrustructure worth paying for and kind of have an economic interest in protecting properly. When my free-usage year wraps up on AWS next year I will be happy to continue on with a paid subscription (about 15 dollars a month for a micro-instance). But there's always this hanging doubt that things can be going on that the user is not aware of, even in the best case scenario. Always assume that someone is looking at your information and keep your data on offline storage. Always.
http://xkcd.com/908/
I think Steve has been asleep for the past decade or so, here a few services that we spend 99% of our time on and don't own: Ebay Paypal Webmail Webdisk / Webstorage Photobucket et al YouTube Facebook, myspace et al Netflix We don't own squat...
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
A new CEO brought in to do the Bain thing to our company (outsource, lay everyone off, show temp false profit, sell company, reap commission) decided to start by moving all our custom built stuff based on FOSS to The Cloud. Our operating costs were impossible to beat, but it didn't matter to the guy. His response to concerns was "I'm sure google's servers are more secure and reliable than we could ever make ours." Two weeks later the news broke about the Chinese hackers getting into google. After losing a million bucks due a wide variety of inefficiencies and lost customers and assorted hassles, we wound up pulling all our stuff back off The Cloud. We don't see FailCEO around the office much anymore.
I have to wonder how much interest in The Cloud is being driven by the corporate scam thing that seems to be all the rage lately among executives (outsourcing, showing temporary false profits, selling, walking away from a flaming wreck after having personally enriched onself.)
First, where's the controversy?
How about the fact that it was discovered that Mike Daisey made up pretty much everything in his 'two-hour expose' from whole cloth. None of his 'revelations' were true, and he didn't even meet the people he claimed to have interviewed, much less talk to them.
Oh, and the Foxconn workers who threatened to jump to their deaths as part of labor negotiatons? They worked on the X-Box lines.
Second...
True, except that Apple, unlike *most* major electronics 'manufacturers' *does* pressure Foxconn (and their other subcontractors) to improve conditions. This has included pay raises, as well as reduced hours (which many workers proceeded to complain about) when it was discovered that the factory was breaking regulations. (Regulations, I might add, which are *more* worker friendly than what we have here in the US! Seriously, ask someone sometime, about the legal limit for hours worked in a week in the US. I'll give you a hint. There is none for most occupations.)
Third...
Completely true.
Fourthly...
He doesn't think *anything* should be done. Or at least he certainly doesn't think anyone should fact check his claims.
The cloud is useful. The cloud is not the problem. Other people controlling and possibly owning your data is the problem.
I have a VPS for ~$15/mo. I use that to run webDAV and other 'cloud' services. Lots of applications support this, I can encrypt whatever I want (and no one else holds the keys), it functions as immediate backups (i.e. my stuff is offsite before regular backups run), and I can automate all kinds of stuff.
Wow. It's "jingoism" to suggest Chinese workers deserve the same consideration, protection, and compensation as westerners? Just, wow...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
So long as it's trivial to sync to your own privately held computer infrastructure.
For storage, I love the concept of a provider keeping bits (that I have pre-gpged) for my reference. The problem is the trend seems to be more and more limited and convoluted storage capability in favor of more exploitive pricing and schemes (e.g. Amazon changing from a modest capacity to a pathetic song count on their cloud).
For compute, so long as you own the DNS name and all the data needed to reconstruct your presence elsewhere, it gives smaller businesses a chance to have a presence without a lot of up-frot cost. Too bad the trend is overwhelmingly fewer and fewer businesses making this benefit moot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China."
Oh, my. Where to even start? First, where's the controversy?
The controversial part is not the content. The controversial part is that much of it is fantasy or second hand reports that he has repackaged into a first person journalistic narrative that he claims is a piece of theatre when questioned about the reported "facts".
When did this become a new argument against the cloud. People have been talking about this for a while now. Its like someone mentioning that an internal combustion engine should work in 1915. Hey, I'm a famous person so the minute I say something its real. Come on people...
Pay Chinese workers Western wages? This would invalidate the entire idea of moving production to China. It would render millions of Chinese people unemployable - in favor of Western people. What's that called again?
A manufacturing boom in the United States with the attendant reduction in unemployment?
Also, jingoism and protectionism are significantly different concepts.
I am officially gone from
Expand your brain. It's what education is supposed to do, eh?
Paying Chinese workers Western wages would result in rampant inflation in China, as well as the closure of thousands of factories and the onshoring of those jobs back to America. "America for Americans" is a KKK slogan. "American products produced by American citizens for American people" is a Tea Party slogan. Are you really on their side? What's your problem with sharing the wealth with the less fortunate?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Thus depriving Chinese workers of jobs. Preferring your own nationality to foreigners is called...what exactly? Purely because you're part of that nationality? Go ahead and put whatever label you like on it. It's still bullshit. Why should Chinese suffer while Americans prosper?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"Remember, China is a socialist state, and workers are represented by officially approved unions.
Incorrect.
China is not a socialist state. I suspect that your ranting about unions has more to say about your opinions than anything else.
Over 50% of the economy is directly owned by the State. The State owning the means of production is called...what?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The issues one will see with the cloud are the very same, if not worse, as those experienced with main-frames. What got people off main-frames was the low cost of mini and micro computers and the fact that organizations need control over mission-critical equipment and processes. Those who operated main-frames had become uncontrollable entities unto themselves. They had no accountability for corporate success but had every control over the means of success. That situation had to end and the new, smaller, and cheaper computers made that possible. Recently, I read an article about a large company that had spun off its cloud services component because the company found that its potential corporate and government customers were already getting off the cloud for the very same reasons cited in the first paragraph above.
Predictions come before the event in question. At this point, Woz is just stating a fact.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So the interwebs disrupts "ownership society". Boohoo. Get off my...er..the lawn.
Still the issues of access. Ask WikiLeaks about that. All the encryption in the world doesn't matter if you can't access your files. And, if your files are backed up locally, aren't you just mirroring on a remote server?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The Problems are already there, why does he need to predict anything?
Correction: CATS are no longer consumers of content, they are creators. People just operate the cameras and upload the CATS' content to YouTube and ICanHazCheezburger, for human consumption!
Over 50% of the economy is directly owned by the State. The State owning the means of production is called...what?
Communism.
However, the parent to your post was specifically pointing out that China is not a socialist state.
You're both technically correct; the best kind of correct.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Ah yes, a manufacturing boom in the US, where all these manufacturing jobs will be paid western wages, resulting in price increases (product must cost more to account for increased labor costs) and lower sales of the manufactured product (product costs more, therefore fewer people can afford it, or feel it's worth the cost.)
Clearly you grasp the economics of the situation - temporary manufacturing booms followed by rampant layoffs, unemployment, and price inflation - that's the stuff of economic recovery!
...of formalizing the shifting of blame in the one area they've been unable to in the past; IT. They tried contractors...that didn't work. They'd outsource...everything would go to hell so they'd in-house again. In-house would dork it up. Out source. They primarily view cloud the same as a hardware vendor. Go with a reputable enough vendor and you're relatively safe even if they dork it up. Like the old adage says, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. If you move your stuff to, say, Google's cloud and it blows up....you're safe. No one will fault you because, well, if Google fell victim to something, no one could have foreseen such a calamity. Anyway, cloud makes no damn sense in terms of security, integrity, availability, cost or performance. It only serves to keep someone's ass out of hot water. Blame game.
Still the issues of access. Ask WikiLeaks about that. All the encryption in the world doesn't matter if you can't access your files. And, if your files are backed up locally, aren't you just mirroring on a remote server?
All true. I've never uploaded a file anywhere that I didn't have a local backup of (in the context of this conversation). I use dropbox as a convenient way to share files between my devices and with the occasional other person. Naturally, all of the files reside both on dropbox and on each of my computers. I don't really know what to say about the people that got caught up in the Megaupload shakedown. I would never have put anything up there in the first place that I couldn't also access elsewhere. I guess that's just me though. The only thing I would use MU for in the first place might be to distribute Android ROMs or maybe custom Linux distros. Files that are completely legal to share but are big enough that I'd rather not use my own bandwidth every time somebody wants to download one. Of course if I was somebody like wiki-leaks, I'd be hosting an .onion site that would be much harder to bring down. But that's really a special case and I'm sure the best in the world are giving them advice which probably means they won't be going away anytime soon.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Thus depriving Chinese workers of jobs. Preferring your own nationality to foreigners is called...what exactly? Purely because you're part of that nationality? Go ahead and put whatever label you like on it. It's still bullshit.
Not sure I parse your argument here... you're saying that it's wrong for American companies to pull their manufacturing back from China to America (where, consequently, the vast majority of said American companies customers reside)... because why? Nationalism bad? Like I said, not sure I follow your point here...
Why should Chinese suffer while Americans prosper?
They don't now?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Really?
The People's Republic of China... ... governed by the Communist Party of China... ... where ~40% of the GDP is still generated by state-owned enterprises... ... doesn't meet any definition of a socialist state?
Would you allow your children to work in this factory for Apple? I'm guessing the answer is "no", but you think it's a-ok for second class Chinese citizens to do so, because "hey, it's better than starving to death in a ditch, right?" It's easier to just dehumanize them and go on living a lavish lifestyle. That way it won't bother your conscience.
That is what will happen.
Do you keep your money in a bank, or do you feel safer with cash (or gold nuggets) under your bed? People happily transfer their life's work into the cloud every day when they deposit their paychecks. There is trust, both in the banks and the government defining and enforcing rules. As people increasingly rely on other clouds, there will eventually be lawsuits to settle these disputes and new regulations to protect consumers/users.
Hasn't RMS already warned us all about this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
"the shift away from hard disks towards other people's hard drives"
Fixed.
I hate the term "the cloud". It's fucking remote servers is all. I can just see some guy with 20 years experience managing network server applies for a job and HR screens him because he doesn't have "Cloud" in his resume. It's a stupid marketing term that people are taking for a technology.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There is nothing wrong with using the cloud as long as you don't care about privacy and have everything on the cloud backed up where you can easily retrieve it if the cloud blows away.
for gaming ( server authentication, always on connections, etc ) why the hell would anyone think that storing your own personal files and data online be a good thing ?
Are you insane ?
As far as I'm concerned they can keep their cloud connected BS. Especially in the days of bandwidth caps, and security lapses every other day. It's one thing when the heathens get your login / password info from some obscure server. It's something else when they have direct access to your " Cloud " data.
Oh hell no.
What's not been mentioned but now should be evident is that we, especially the US citizens, due to the US government opening up a new cyberwar with Iran are legitimate targets for terrorist organization cyberwarfare. If you've got valuable info on a cloud server, it would be a prime target.
Gotcha. I see the difference now. It's wrong to run WWII-style slave labor camps yourself, but it's fine to hire other people to run them for you. I'm glad you cleared that up for me.
So, I just get done reading this, and come across this story on Gizmodo about a successful social engineering attack on Apple Tech Support that killed things he had in the cloud, in less than 5 minutes for journalist Mat Honan.
Didn't RTFA, but I did read the summary, and it's a bit ironic. The reason I bought my first computer (an Apple ][+ system) was because I wanted everything on a computer that I controlled. And I still wonder if using a cloud-based email service (gmail) is a smart thing to do.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
... unless you explicitly DELETE your local copies, trusting to a single copy in the cloud.
and this is what a great number of "average" people will do.
"I don't have to keep my music on my laptop anymore, I can just stream it from 'da cloud' on my iPhone/Android phone AND my laptop!!!"
There's people out there right now that do just this. Entire photo collections on FB or photobucket/fotki/flikr, music collections in the cloud, documents on Google Docs, nothing local on their desktops or laptops.
But you're only focused on docs, data implies much more than just that. Corporate application servers "in the cloud" are also subject to the same issues and it's been well reported on. You still don't have total control over your own data.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Hold it, hold it. Why build? You're better off leasing at a buck and a quarter, a buck and a half a square foot. Take your down payment and put it into CDs or something else you can roll over every couple of months.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
After the media issues following the NPR broadcast, he modified his monologue to remove the problematic content and discuss his original mistake.
Interesting, I had not heard that... still it does not change the nature of the show, since he didn't find any problems there himself what he is doing is not an expose.
That's the part most people missed when this originally became an issue...this is a theatrical performance, not a documentary.
But originally he was doing his best to present it as a documentary. This American Life certainly felt misled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope. Fabricated his first-person accounts.
Take for example the workers with deformities from working with some chemical.
That didn't happen at ANY Apple factory, just at some other totally unrelated Chinese factory.
It's like claiming you saw a Jupiter lander. Yes there was a lander on Mars - but never on Jupiter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's simple:
The cloud is for off-site backup of already-encrypted data.
Period.
Need to work some Dr. Bronner quotes in there somehow...
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
He owned the building complex, and you are only required to have a legally mandated number of handicapped spots. Steve insured that there were more than the legally mandated number of spots available so that he was never in technical violation of the rules.
Here's the ADA requirements for parking spaces:
http://www.ada.gov/adata1.htm [ada.gov]
Here's a more accessible interpretation, with a table indicating the number of spots required per number of total parking spaces:
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Disability-Law-917/Handicapped-Parking.htm [allexperts.com]
He was perfectly within his rights, so long as there was not a sufficient number of other people gaming the system at the same time. I suggest you avoid trying to do the same thing, unless you are the property owner and the single largest tax payer in a given municipality, however.
You'll likely eventually win, unless you are a total dick, but the lawyer costs will exceed just paying the fine, since it isn't a moving violation and therefore will only cost you the fine.
Really?
The People's Republic of China... ... governed by the Communist Party of China... ... where ~40% of the GDP is still generated by state-owned enterprises... ... doesn't meet any definition of a socialist state?
Names, names. Ever heard of their neighbor, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea?
Over 50% of the economy is directly owned by the State. The State owning the means of production is called...what?
Communism.
However, the parent to your post was specifically pointing out that China is not a socialist state.
You're both technically correct; the best kind of correct.
You're all three dead wrong.
Since the State--not the workers--controls the means of production in China, I call it state capitalism, and you should, too.
At the very least, please don't bandy words like "socialism" and "communism" about if you don't know what they mean.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Today's word: The cloud.
Explanation: Someone else's computer.
No body believe the grid will fail, not fail such a long time. No body will! You ask people about that now, just before you tell them the truth.
/golfclap
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Thus depriving Chinese workers of jobs. Preferring your own nationality to foreigners is called...what exactly?
Common sense?
Typical human behaviour?
An important evolutionary adaptation?
This Mike Daisey is a proven liar, it beats me what Steve Wozniak is doing sharing the same stage with him. Doesn't he realise that Daisy is happy to make money out of trashing Apple and the memory of the other Steve. Daisey has never apologized or retracted the lies. Come on Wozniak, just because you're a straight-talking dude don't mean the rest are.
AccountKiller
The State owning the means of production is called...what?
Obama's Vision, otherwise known as hope and change.
Got Code?
Just upload the important stuff as a truecrypt hard drive image and you're done. They can snoop around as much as they want for all you care.
Um, all you need to do to get your email from one email system to another is forward your messages as attachments form one to the other.
In fact, the defunct ZOË email archive server uses this technique to import email... of course, it automatically files all of the attachments as separate emails, so it makes it easy. Other clients may require more work.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
For a few years now I've been telling people "letting other people store your data for you means you don't control your data any more". I'm willing to use "the cloud" for some things, but any data I really care about is stored on hard drives and/or optical media that I own.
You would think the loss of legitimate users' files in the Megaupload takedown, and the near-weekly reports of user databases of various online services getting broken into would drive this point home, but most people still seem to be blissfully ignorant of the issues.
However it's done so badly it's dangerous. While spideroak and dozens of others add the value dropbox has a very long list of spectacular failures that show it was never tested properly before release.
for gaming ( server authentication, always on connections, etc ) why the hell would anyone think that storing your own personal files and data online be a good thing ?
Because we aren't all complete noobz like yourself. My backups are in the cloud and 100% secure from security breaches at the cloud provider. I could explain how, but I'm sure it would only confuse you.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
There's not going to be any problem with the cloud because anyone with so much as a single functioning brain cell is not going to use a cloud service to store their personal data. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.
You would quite literally have to be brain dead to trust your personal information to a third party where it can be arbitarily searched, indexed, copied etc. by anyone connected with either the cloud service provider or any random government agency. Oooh look, all the data from "cloud provider X" has been leaked onto the intarwebs. Quelle suprise !
My personal data (bank details, nude snaps of lady friends etc ;) is on an doubly encrypted truecrypt partition on a smart card which I only ever access using a Linux live CD. It will be this way until the day I die. There is nothing on this, or any other Earth, that would make me trust a cloud service for anything other than my crappy pictures of my cat. Even then I wouldn't put any really good ones up there in case they were nicked..
Cloud. Pah. What a load of rubbish.
The cloud is a tool. Same as a hammer or indeed a hard drive. Hammers if used wrong can cause serious injury (why didn't they warn me it was not a sex toy and if you wanted to use it as a sex toy, you should only use the bottom?) HD's can die and the cloud can fail.
If you want your data to be available outside the home, you can buy storage to take with you. There are wifi/3G routers with internal storage if internal storage is not enough and other solutions. But carrying everything with you, is cumbersome and you could loose it all very easily by just forgetting it.
You can do without, it is a viable solution, for the ludite.
Or you can host it from your home, if your home connection is fast enough on the upload, most aren't no matter what your ISP promises.
Or you put it on someone elses computer. For some reason, people think a shared or dedicated server is more reliable and safe then a cloud server. Poppy cock to that. ISP's go bust, datacenters burn down or are raided by cops controlled by corrupt officials elected by stupid voters.
Data. ANY data, whether it is a photograph, a CD or a bit in the cloud, can get lost, stolen or confiscated. That is why smart people use backups and the rest of us just ignore the potential for disaster and hope to get lucky and buy lottery tickets.
REALLY smart people also consider which data they want to get what exposure. DO NOT USE YOUR WORK ACCOUNT TO VISIT PORN SITES. Simple really but if you leave your phone on your desk, don't set the background to you raping your kid. Simple really.
People worry about uploading their ripped music to the cloud and then having it found out by the copyright industry. Gosh, you upload your non-payed for content to the services of a content seller and think that might cause a conflict? How unexpected, why not steal a car from a garage then bring it in for a service? (And people have really been caught with this).
I use Amazon AWS for some websites, it is very cheap (free) but I do not use it for all. For that matter, I won't even tell on a semi-anonymous account like this, all the websites I own or have worked or even visit. No reason to broadcast everything to the world.
Use the cloud as a tool but use it wisely. I am baffled by pedo's caught at airports with tons of illegal material. I mean, what are they thinking? You know you are going to be searched and you take stuff that absolutely nobody who anybody cares about has trouble killing you for, past guards who LOVE to make a real case against a real criminal? What would you rather do? Lecture someone on water bottles or send a child rapist to jail?
Don't upload things to the net you can't afford to loose control over and keep backups of things you can't afford to loose. Simple really.
Oh and Wozniak, if the PC had followed the direction of Apple, they would have been un-affordable. Apple neither invented the computer or popularized it, it just made a nice case for it. It would be like saying Daimler or Peugot is responsible for your car. (One of the first true car companies and the oldest company that makes cars) and ignoring Ford because all they did was take the car to the masses.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've listened to Woz speak. It's pretty clear to me that he is a bright man who did something brilliant at the exact right time. The timing wasn't his fault, but he's been rewarded for it with both money and adulation, and kind of like a Hollywood star he assumes that his success means he is somehow qualified to speak on other areas of life. Woz didn't have much to do with the development of much anything since the Apple II to my knowledge. Lucky for himt he had lots of Apple stock to cash in on no matter what he contributed.
I'll probably get modded as flame for this. Sigh. I actually don't have anything against Steve W., and think he's made a great contribution to the universe. I guess I simply believe that while Steve Wozniak blazed the trail, Steve Jobs paved the road.
Here's an offbeat question...
How do you prove a civilization that had everything 'in the cloud' existed 1,000 years after a solar flare wiped it out?
A rehashed, centralized 1989 data center computing model - a.k.a. 'the cloud' - makes us far more vulnerable technologically. I know, I know the pendulum swings back every 20 years or so but, IMHO, the 'cloud' is a colossal strategic mistake.
It doesn't matter what he thinks, does it? Cloud will come - this thread will be easily searchable from it, and accessible at any time.
Who cares.
You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to...
Exactly. You don't anything especially the right to continue using the service should that service provider unilaterally decide you're violated their TOS, TOS which , btw, don't include anything like a satisfactory or effective right of redress or review of their unilateral adjudication of what they thought they smelled in your panties.
It only takes one incident for the AVERAGE customer to defect from all such services forever. The only thing keeping these services going is that 1) new people are always coming online and 2) it's actually hard to offend that many people that quickly .
So Facebook and G+ which only permits real names (lest you violate their TOS) et al survive by appealing to people who are either constitutionally unstrategic in their thinking or who are posting throw-away comments of no real value. No one of any competence is going to work hard on anything so much as an opinion which ceases to be theirs or even entered into the Creative Commons, the second it's submitted but instead becomes the sole private property of Google MS or whoever else who can do what they want with it.
No one is with an ounce of business acumen and ability to strategize or flesh out the consequences of hypothetical events, that is, anyone who can run a business to begin with, is going to trust their business email or contacts to Gmail, their calendar to whatever is any cloud-based provider has set up for them, or their documents to Google / MS docs et. al.
There's a huge element of hubris on the part of providers in all this. There's a sense that it goes beyond what Eric Schmidt ex-CEO Google asserted which was to paraphrase him- "all your privacy and anonymity is *poof!* and belong to us...." and is now heading into- "your life, thoughts and work have no value and belong to us !."
Not to be too dramatic , but that kind of thinking is the stuff rebellions are made of .
I used to spend a lot, way too much of my leisure time authoring *very* highly rated highly replied-to, comments in a 2nd tier online magazine's comment section which was VERY lively indeed and the known habitue of most of their paying customers. I had built up a lot of good content that I like to self -plaguarize because it very often represented that perfect moment when topic and brain and passion come together to create something really well said and penetrating.
Then *one day* they decided that you could not be anonymous any longer and locked everyone out of their identities and accumulated posts until their readership had proven their real identity to the site admin's satisfaction.
So I don't do that anymore. I don't contribute the same level of speech and thought online I used to. I don't put *that* much effort into forums because one day it can all be taken away.
It's becoming a bottom feeder world in the online forums, where there are positive disincentives to meaningful contributions and the fantasy that you're actually contributing to society by being a clear and nuanced voice instead of a bomb thrower or drive-by artist is being ripped away. Really, I used to look at the number of people who read my posts and take it very seriously, doing research, crunching numbers accumulating links and laboring over my words and phrasing because I was convinced that the online forum had revived the concept of the public street corner, the town hall, the marketplace of ideas.
Then one day I just stopped cold because I saw everything disappear on someone else's whim .
Blogs are not online forums where large numbers of people go at it in public for the edification of the onlookers. They're pompous monologues authored very often by ego maniacs who at best answer each other's criticisms across great distances, omitting inconvenient facts and contradictions and avoiding their opponent's best points without suffering reputational conseq
Paying Chinese workers Western wages would result in rampant inflation in China, as well as the closure of thousands of factories and the onshoring of those jobs back to America. "America for Americans" is a KKK slogan. "American products produced by American citizens for American people" is a Tea Party slogan
Really, so we're just supposed to spend all of our money to raise another country's standard of living until we go broke and everyone here is unemployed? And that's jingoism? KKK slogans? Hey, all these nations -compete- with each other. We all compete for resources, we all compete for our dollars. If I choose to purchase an American product over a Chinese product, I'm more likely to be helping the guy down the street and I'm far more willing to help someone local than someone across the globe. Focusing on your community first -- this is the first time I've heard someone actually trying to frame that as a negative. It's usually one of the few things that people on the left and people on the right can agree on.
I'm a little sickened that refusing to exploit poor working conditions in other countries is considered jingoistic. The things we take for granted, like OSHA, disability from workplace accidents, a living wage, those were put into place in the US because we came to consider those things basic human rights. Now, of course, there are people in other countries who don't have human rights, and that sure is convenient for the businessman who finds things like a living wage, sick leave, and safe working conditions quaint and a drain on corporate profits.
The term itself ("the cloud") is so retarded that it can't be anything else than a good way of getting more money from the masses.
Basically you will pay to give away your privacy and ultimately, your freedom. It's a dictator's wildest dream coming true. Incidentally, a society model where you give up ownership of your data sounds like communism to me. Or maybe even worse than communism. I don't buy the "but people never backup their own data anyway, so the cloud is good for them." point. In fact, I don't want to live in a society where people can't even take care of their own data. Idiocracy?
Any US manufacturing boom isn't going to significantly affect unemployment numbers, although a few humans will surely get new jobs maintaining the robots. Even as our industrial output increases, the future of living-wage blue collar US manufacturing jobs is pretty bleak.
- T