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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?"
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!
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
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
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.
http://xkcd.com/908/
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.
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
How about Tahoe-LAFS?
By the way, it has a too hard name -- every now and then I want to mention it but keep forgetting what Totse-TANSTAAFL was it again!
Fine. What about the billions and billions of people who would know a NAS if it came up and them? You know, like the rest of the world.
Expand your horizons! Many business and social opportunities exist out there.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Eh. Maybe. Thing is, he does have a point. If it is on their server, it's not yours anymore, it is theirs. They provide a method for you to obtain a copy any time you like, assuming the TOS doesn't add terms where they can ban you from it. Once it is on their machine, it is theirs to do with as they like, with only the need to keep your good-will as a user, and possibly some hard to enforce privacy laws written by legislators who can barely figure out how to check their email, to stop them.
If they can start reading your files and using that data to start providing targeted information to you, or to use you as a data point for something else, there may well be some "unforeseen consequences" to you.
That said, as long as you aren't backing up something private, storing data on the network is a decent backup strategy. You just need to remain aware of any way which that data might come back to bite you. You should never, ever, rely on network apps or storage in their current form to be your primary store for your files. The "Cloud" is a cheap way to keep redundant copies of your data, and it can also help keep your data available to you when you are mobile. In that way it is very useful, but considering it to be the same as a hard drive that you own will leave your data at their mercy.
Explain.
I use Dropbox frequently. It keeps files in sync and accessible between my laptop, desktop, and phone. If Dropbox disappears literally 1 second from now - what data have I lost? What outage have I suffered? Where's the damage? How can they hold my data hostage, exactly?
The WORST that would happen is I'd have two separately-modified versions of the same file on 2 separate computers to reconcile when/if the service came back online.
I use iTunes Match. If that service goes away literally 1 second from now - what data have I lost? What outage have I suffered? Where's the damage? In fact, I saved a lot of time updating old 128kbps MP3s that I ripped from CD years ago to the higher-quality 256kbps Matched versions - so even if the service disappears in an instant, I've still benefitted.
Your ranting sounds like somebody who is entirely unaware of the operation of these cloud services you're criticizing. Your local filestores are completely unaffected by the "cloud" outage, unless you explicitly DELETE your local copies, trusting to a single copy in the cloud. If they jack up prices, disappear, etc., you cancel your account and revert back to the local storage copies that are ALREADY and HAVE ALWAYS BEEN on your local storage.
In other words, they AUGMENT, not REPLACE, the capability of your local storage.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.