Though this is different from the OP's areas of excitement, I'd suggest taking a look at the architecture of the web, and Roy Fielding's (quite readable, IMO) thesis on the development of that architecture while he was working on HTTP 1.1. A major factor behind why the Web has become successful is that it focuses on the data, not the roles of the participants. Similarly, this is why systems like UNIX pipes are so useful -- a uniform interface provides for many benefits (at the cost of some tradeoffs, such as latency). Unfortunately the mainstream seems to have missed this, though times are 'a changin'
However, this comes down to who do you give credit to the success of Magic; the person who designed it, or one of the people who were responsible for giving it to the public. Ahem.
While I have heard of a number of problems with the initial Leopard release (particularly with Adobe products), I do know a large number of people, myself included, found the release to be fantastic and largely bug-free.
My only problem was with Keychains; they renamed the default keychain to "login" and created a new one since my old one was named after my user account. That took around 5 minutes to fix (just rename my old one to "login").
I do agree the industry should strive for better, but I think you're overstating the relative number of problems with Leopard compared to other major operating system releases.
And I want to be able to rent an apartment without signing a 1 year lease in my area, but find it pretty rare. Same thing. There are plenty of legal, economic, and practical reasons why the two are entirely different. All that needs to be done for cell-phone providers is to update one record in the customer database, and to create/mail new SIM-cards for new customers. Housing is a bit more complicated and takes more time and money. Also, it is typically possible to negotiate your contract when renting an apartment. Ok, I think there's agreement here that from a consumer's perspective, cell phones shouldn't be locked. But I think we may still have a misunderstanding -- even if they mail you a new SIM card for your own phone, you *still* need to sign a contract for your service if you want discounted rates. Usually it's 1 year when you have your own phone, but it varies on the price plan you pick.
I compared this to apartment rentals because both are examples of acquiring a "service", wherein the owner can provide to you access to their service under whatever terms are permitted by law.
There are also plenty of complications in the telecommunications industry (I used to work in it, so I retain some mild empathy, but only mild). The costs to "acquire" a new customer for a telecom is quite a lot of money (between fixed costs for the billions$$ in radio towers , fraud, marketing, sales, call centre, billing systems that never work, etc.), so they try to recoup that by encouraging a contract, so they get a minimum amount of that back.
Secondly, the traditional reason for a locked phone was so they could sell it to you for $99 or free. That means the phone is subsidized, and they're amortizing the cost of the phone over the length of your contract. Now, the iPhone isn't subsidized, so we are in different territory, but I can understand the reason: Apple needed to give AT&T a big bone to chew on to take the risk. This *was* a big risk from AT&T's (admittedly silly) perspective -- no North American carrier has *ever* let a third party company dictate the phone features and capabilities to the level Apple has been allowed with the iPhone. (This is why you don't see a lot of the cooler European or Japanese phones here)
Thirdly, any contract you sign usually can be broken with a penalty fee. In Canada the fee is reasonable (I think it's capped at $100 or something), but in the U.S. it gets pretty high (AT&T is like $175 if I recall).
Anyway, my points are that - Yes, it would be nice to see greater competition in North America on price plans, but the capital required to cover the *size* of the USA and Canada relative to Europe means there won't be much competition, short of a blanket WiFi / Skype network. - No, the carrier's aren't really stopping a market if they offer you discounts based on a contract -- it is their network & service, after all. - Yes, cell phone locks are stupid, annoying, but North American carriers are uniformly stupid , and this goes way beyond the iPhone traditionally. In any case, usually you can work around them through a hack for a minimal annoyance.
Is it illegal for americans to import their own unlocked cellphone from abroad? That's certainly what I would do.
Sure you can, it's legal. But you still have to sign a contract if you want a calling plan with "good rates". Same in Canada (where I reside). The "pay as you go" rates are very high if you're a frequent user, especially for data.
People seem to be confused about this whole "no one in Europe has contracts" thing. *Everywhere* contracts are supported -- it's how you get a cheaper rate! What's questionable is whether your phone should be locked to a carrier during that period.
You can't be serious. Two years is longer than the projected lifespan of the phone, even if you treat it nicely.
That's absurd. I've kept most phones a minimum of 2 years (almost every model of BlackBerry, a RAZR, and an old Nokia). Some like my old Blackberry 7780 are going on 4+ years.
Also, I'm not interested in whether AT&T is going to raise the rates. The rates they already have are already astronomical!
Compared to who? $20 for unlimited data is astronomical? If you say "Europe", I say "move there".
In Canada, I pay $65/month for 1 GB of mobile data. Why? I have no choice in the matter if I want an international (GSM/GPRS/EDGE) phone, there's only one carrier that supports that standard. And that's *way* better than the prices were 6 months ago.
What I want is a free market, and that means that I'm not locked to two year contracts, and can change provider any time I feel like it. A cell-phone carrier is not something that should need your first-born son just to be able to sell you their service.
And I want to be able to rent an apartment without signing a 1 year lease in my area, but find it pretty rare. Same thing.
Most carriers do provide month-to-month plans, by the way. AT&T also offers a pay-as-you-go plan for the iPhone (not advertised much, but it is there) if you want the freedom. BUT -- it's pricier if you're a heavy user.
Finally, I see no reason why an over-hyped but somewhat fashionable touch-screen phone should need to play a different ball-game than all the other phones on the market.
But there is little difference between the iPhone and other phones in North America. Most others don't approve an unlock until after the contract is expired or you pay your penalty fee. Most others require a hack if you want to work around this.
The iPhone is a bit more restrictive here so far in that there are no policies in place for AT&T to give away an unlock code, though one could predict that by June 2009 may happen, as the first contracts expire.
But without workipping them how can you justify being locked into AT&T for two years while literally _the rest of the entire world_ does nothing of the sort?
North America is not the rest of the world. I could go through the inconvenience of buying a European phone unlocked and then getting a Pay-as-You-Go plan here, but it's annoying firstly, and secondly, it's very expensive compared to a monthly plan if you use a lot of minutes or a lot of data. It's that way with *ANY* kind of smart phone.
And paying $600 off the bat for mediocre hardware that's so locked down you can't even change the battery, or install programs not paying a billon dollars to Apple for signing, without feeling like a criminal from all the DMCA filth spewed by Apple?
I paid $400. The hardware is not mediocre, it's the most solid feeling and quality phone I've owned (and I've owned many). I don't give a shit about the removeable battery. If it dies, I swap it in for a new one and get a loaner immediately. No major hassle. And I do install programs on it if I want to. I don't feel like a criminal doing it either.
As for "DMCA filth", what in fuck are you talking about. You're as bad as a fanboy, just reversed.
This is an interesting point. The Church views forgiveness as a spiritual action, and indeed, an action of the Holy Spirit. If you deny the Holy Spirit, you're denying the means by which you are forgiven, and hence, can't be forgiven.;-)
See this section of the Catechism, particularly verse 1864. "...There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.137 Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss."
I wouldn't call that lock in. I would call that prioritizing features. Most users would not have the skills to export/reimport data between two different programs.
It's not like this is new, either. There's a cottage industry of email import/export programs due to Outlook, Eudora, etc.
Given the demographic changes, where the majority of the western world will be old folks, we can only expect more old people in positions of power.
Does that mean the decisions will get more conservative? Hard to say. I'm not sure I buy into an ageist argument. It's not like they're going to suddenly lose what they've learned over the past 20 years, assuming they had tech exposure.
If anything, it's tamer than it was in 1998-1999. These days you can actually find comments that defend Microsoft, back then you'd get spam-flooded with flames. Slashdot has evolved into a very messy cross-section of skewed opinions.
The only difference is the last thing you mentioned, private ownership of capital.
Therein is the secret sauce. Private ownership allows re-allocation of capital into new areas. This is Entrepreneurship. It leads to the destruction of old organizations eventually, so it tends not to supported by bureaucracies seeking to retain power.
Having said this, "late capitalism" sews the seeds of its own destruction as it becomes more and more accustomed to preserving the status quo. The western world doesn't live in a purely capitalist society for good reason, as society adapts slower to change than the market does. Thus there are plenty of collectivist elements at play in the government that place limits on the ability to "creatively destroy" the old -- subsidies, bailouts, regulations, etc. These aren't necessarily always bad things, but can be taken too far.
Why is it, then, that most data centres charge something like a $10,000 server tax whenever you install a new server?
The reason you don't keep data local is - energy costs - labour - knowledge of how to run the hardware & databases - risk that shit will blow up on your watch - risk that someone will break in on your watch - capital costs to keep upgrading your hardware
Paying a usage fee simplifies a lot of this shit. Sure, it doesn't _eliminate_ the risks, it just _shares_ the risk with another party. I seriously doubt any regular IT department will have better HA, capacity planning, or security procedures than a specialist that offers risk sharing penalties in its contract! After all, it's their bread & butter, in corporate IT, downtime & break-ins are just another shell in the political game.
Right, because it happens to Google *way* more than your own servers, with their bulletproof procedures, obfuscated passwords (and change policy), and well-managed backups.
In fact, Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) is a new layer on the enterprise software stack. For those of you coming from the SOA space, BPMS is the choreography layer.
BPMS are *not* choreography engines, in the sense that Fingar was referring to. He likes to claim that this stuff is all based on sound theory (pi Calculus), but in reality, it's not, just the modeling langauage is. It's unlikely choreography will really take off for a long time, frankly, because it's a bit too beyond where people's heads are at today.
Carr's current article's argument that IT functions should be taken over by functional units only perpetuates the silo thinking of most organizations. Budgeting IT resources on a departmental basis perpetuates islands of automation, redundant/conflicting rules, ridiculous internal interfaces., etc.
Conflict, islands, and redundancy are side effects from an even more primal principle of business organization: decentralization! The tension between it and centralization is eternal, and is essential to almost any directed human organization. Which one wins does not matter, as they both have problems. The balance of power is what matters.
My point is that the only way that "giving the business control" is insane is if you believe that IT is some kind of savior, a voice of rationality in a sea of despair, that is keeping the business from harming itself. In a way, I agree -- the skills of systems design and information management are rare but essential. However, it's not insane to want to distribute those skills around the organization. I've seen functional units with more IT savvy than the IT department!
It's a bit much to call him a nutter when most of what he's pointing to are trends in the consumer space that potentially may be disruptive (in the Clayton Christiansen vein). Disruptive innovations rarely look adequate for the broader market, but they have a way of taking over....
As for "off site centralization", perhaps I'm a bit of a weirdo: I don't store my money in a sock under my bed, I use an off-site centralization service called a "bank". I also don't cut my own hair, I get a salon to do that. When I get my oil changed, I get my car over to the off site centralized service station....
Back to IT, the point is that we have been artificially been forcing a "cobbler's" mentality on IT for way too long, and his kids have no shoes. Outsourcing is currently dysfunctional, it's just hiring another cobbler to ease your burden. The better model is to standardize & commoditize layers of responsibility and pay for it based on usage.
Web 2.0, if it meaningfully exists at all, is built on some rather horrible hacks that break down the server-client wall, and for certain kinds of limited applications that's fine, but building substantial applications, like accounting and financial software, in AJAX would be an unbelievably difficult job, and a rather hard one to justify.
AJAX is getting pretty damn easy (have you looked at Prototype? Dojo?) But AJAX is just one very small part of this..
Today, if I'm a company, and want to build a multi-terabyte data warehouse, I need to invest, at minimum, $1+ million in hardware & software costs alone, and usually much more in support & maintenance.
But, If I were to run a parallel database on Amazon's EC2 it would cost me peanuts (a few hundred dollars a month for storage; a few thousand annually for CPU).
Eventually, all the arguments can't hide the sheer economics of using cloud computing.
Other examples:
When you want to load test applications, where do you get the hardware? What happens to it afterwards? How about disaster recovery? How quickly can you install a new server to meet capacity? Does your capacity planning predict it well enough?
All of this stuff is made much, much quicker & simpler with on-demand capacity. I've worked in IT trying to build it into existing data centres, and it is bloody hard to get the bureaucracy to move beyond the 1:1:1 app:database:server mentality. So this change will come from businesses wondering why they're paying $10,000 server tax when they could go to a utility for $0.50 an hour.
Yes, security is a concern, but, using Amazon as an example again, they have some very stringent physical security for their EC2 and S3 servers (I've heard their CTO claim you would need a small army to break-in). Beyond this, good transport security and authorization, and you're as secure as any VPN (which big companies are using all the time now!)
With any disruptive innovation, it doesn't always make sense for the entire market at first.... but it eventually creeps up on you.
that capitalism would not survive, because society can't handle the pace of change. A corporatist / socialist approach would be more likely. Note this wasn't advocacy (he was a champion of the "entrepreneur"), rather it was a projection of the trend he saw.
Given corporate welfare (car makers, airlines, etc.), lack of anti-trust enforcement, etc. there certainly is an element of this "statism" in the U.S., so you are correct about things being "slowed down" by certain societal & government forces.
Having said this, there often are good reasons to slow things down: it is arguable that "free markets" are not a natural condition for all aspects of economic life, and society "reacts" to to this by slowing the market down (see Polanyi's classic for more on this one). Society won't let capitalism completely trample its traditions & comforts, and that includes the existing corporate power structure and technologies
Of course, slowing technological & economic change down costs money. Eventually too much money. Look at farm subsidies. Or import tariffs. etc.
Advertising doesn't really enter into it. Usually corporate accounting policy of how various elements of a product are priced (which are called "Vendor Specific Objective Evidence" or VSOE) will dictate this sort of thing long in advance.
Here is an article about the complexities of this, if you're interested...
I recall reading that Chris Date has indicated that RDF can be used as a foundation for relational theory (it's in "sixth normal form").... the major difference is that most RDF processors make an open-world assumption vs. most databases assuming a "closed world".
Slashdot Mirror
Though this is different from the OP's areas of excitement, I'd suggest taking a look at the architecture of the web, and Roy Fielding's (quite readable, IMO) thesis on the development of that architecture while he was working on HTTP 1.1. A major factor behind why the Web has become successful is that it focuses on the data, not the roles of the participants. Similarly, this is why systems like UNIX pipes are so useful -- a uniform interface provides for many benefits (at the cost of some tradeoffs, such as latency). Unfortunately the mainstream seems to have missed this, though times are 'a changin'
While I have heard of a number of problems with the initial Leopard release (particularly with Adobe products), I do know a large number of people, myself included, found the release to be fantastic and largely bug-free.
My only problem was with Keychains; they renamed the default keychain to "login" and created a new one since my old one was named after my user account. That took around 5 minutes to fix (just rename my old one to "login").
I do agree the industry should strive for better, but I think you're overstating the relative number of problems with Leopard compared to other major operating system releases.
If Google would just buy Bluetail already, things would start changing for the better, fast.
...
I had thought Bluetail was bought many years ago and absorbed into Nortel
I was an Oracle DBA in the past.
Oracle Dimensions are a logical overlay, they have no impact on how the data is physically organized in segments.
Neither does Oracle RAC -- it uses the same underlying storage format as regular Oracle.
You *could* do column-orientation in Oracle with a data cartridge, but that would likely be third party.
I could see Oracle offering this natively in a future release, maybe 11g r2...
Because there is no such thing as a "superior" format. They all have their quirks. Engineering is about tradeoffs, not about religious contests...
There are plenty of legal, economic, and practical reasons why the two are entirely different. All that needs to be done for cell-phone providers is to update one record in the customer database, and to create/mail new SIM-cards for new customers. Housing is a bit more complicated and takes more time and money. Also, it is typically possible to negotiate your contract when renting an apartment. Ok, I think there's agreement here that from a consumer's perspective, cell phones shouldn't be locked. But I think we may still have a misunderstanding -- even if they mail you a new SIM card for your own phone, you *still* need to sign a contract for your service if you want discounted rates. Usually it's 1 year when you have your own phone, but it varies on the price plan you pick.
I compared this to apartment rentals because both are examples of acquiring a "service", wherein the owner can provide to you access to their service under whatever terms are permitted by law.
There are also plenty of complications in the telecommunications industry (I used to work in it, so I retain some mild empathy, but only mild). The costs to "acquire" a new customer for a telecom is quite a lot of money (between fixed costs for the billions$$ in radio towers , fraud, marketing, sales, call centre, billing systems that never work, etc.), so they try to recoup that by encouraging a contract, so they get a minimum amount of that back.
Secondly, the traditional reason for a locked phone was so they could sell it to you for $99 or free. That means the phone is subsidized, and they're amortizing the cost of the phone over the length of your contract. Now, the iPhone isn't subsidized, so we are in different territory, but I can understand the reason: Apple needed to give AT&T a big bone to chew on to take the risk. This *was* a big risk from AT&T's (admittedly silly) perspective -- no North American carrier has *ever* let a third party company dictate the phone features and capabilities to the level Apple has been allowed with the iPhone. (This is why you don't see a lot of the cooler European or Japanese phones here)
Thirdly, any contract you sign usually can be broken with a penalty fee. In Canada the fee is reasonable (I think it's capped at $100 or something), but in the U.S. it gets pretty high (AT&T is like $175 if I recall).
Anyway, my points are that
- Yes, it would be nice to see greater competition in North America on price plans, but the capital required to cover the *size* of the USA and Canada relative to Europe means there won't be much competition, short of a blanket WiFi / Skype network.
- No, the carrier's aren't really stopping a market if they offer you discounts based on a contract -- it is their network & service, after all.
- Yes, cell phone locks are stupid, annoying, but North American carriers are uniformly stupid , and this goes way beyond the iPhone traditionally. In any case, usually you can work around them through a hack for a minimal annoyance.
Is it illegal for americans to import their own unlocked cellphone from abroad? That's certainly what I would do.
Sure you can, it's legal. But you still have to sign a contract if you want a calling plan with "good rates". Same in Canada (where I reside). The "pay as you go" rates are very high if you're a frequent user, especially for data.
People seem to be confused about this whole "no one in Europe has contracts" thing. *Everywhere* contracts are supported -- it's how you get a cheaper rate! What's questionable is whether your phone should be locked to a carrier during that period.
You can't be serious. Two years is longer than the projected lifespan of the phone, even if you treat it nicely.
That's absurd. I've kept most phones a minimum of 2 years (almost every model of BlackBerry, a RAZR, and an old Nokia). Some like my old Blackberry 7780 are going on 4+ years.
Also, I'm not interested in whether AT&T is going to raise the rates. The rates they already have are already astronomical!
Compared to who? $20 for unlimited data is astronomical? If you say "Europe", I say "move there".
In Canada, I pay $65/month for 1 GB of mobile data. Why? I have no choice in the matter if I want an international (GSM/GPRS/EDGE) phone, there's only one carrier that supports that standard. And that's *way* better than the prices were 6 months ago.
What I want is a free market, and that means that I'm not locked to two year contracts, and can change provider any time I feel like it. A cell-phone carrier is not something that should need your first-born son just to be able to sell you their service.
And I want to be able to rent an apartment without signing a 1 year lease in my area, but find it pretty rare. Same thing.
Most carriers do provide month-to-month plans, by the way. AT&T also offers a pay-as-you-go plan for the iPhone (not advertised much, but it is there) if you want the freedom. BUT -- it's pricier if you're a heavy user.
Finally, I see no reason why an over-hyped but somewhat fashionable touch-screen phone should need to play a different ball-game than all the other phones on the market.
But there is little difference between the iPhone and other phones in North America. Most others don't approve an unlock until after the contract is expired or you pay your penalty fee. Most others require a hack if you want to work around this.
The iPhone is a bit more restrictive here so far in that there are no policies in place for AT&T to give away an unlock code, though one could predict that by June 2009 may happen, as the first contracts expire.
But without workipping them how can you justify being locked into AT&T for two years while literally _the rest of the entire world_ does nothing of the sort?
North America is not the rest of the world. I could go through the inconvenience of buying a European phone unlocked and then getting a Pay-as-You-Go plan here, but it's annoying firstly, and secondly, it's very expensive compared to a monthly plan if you use a lot of minutes or a lot of data. It's that way with *ANY* kind of smart phone.
And paying $600 off the bat for mediocre hardware that's so locked down you can't even change the battery, or install programs not paying a billon dollars to Apple for signing, without feeling like a criminal from all the DMCA filth spewed by Apple?
I paid $400.
The hardware is not mediocre, it's the most solid feeling and quality phone I've owned (and I've owned many).
I don't give a shit about the removeable battery. If it dies, I swap it in for a new one and get a loaner immediately. No major hassle.
And I do install programs on it if I want to. I don't feel like a criminal doing it either.
As for "DMCA filth", what in fuck are you talking about. You're as bad as a fanboy, just reversed.
This is an interesting point. The Church views forgiveness as a spiritual action, and indeed, an action of the Holy Spirit. If you deny the Holy Spirit, you're denying the means by which you are forgiven, and hence, can't be forgiven. ;-)
See this section of the Catechism, particularly verse 1864. "...There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.137 Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss."
Indeed, to deny the existence of the Abrahamic god is an unforgivable sin.
That's not accurate, in Catholicism at least. All sins are forgivable, up until the time of death.
I wouldn't call that lock in. I would call that prioritizing features. Most users would not have the skills to export/reimport data between two different programs.
It's not like this is new, either. There's a cottage industry of email import/export programs due to Outlook, Eudora, etc.
Stop the presses, so this huge iPhone hacker / app development community that's emerged is made of.... yuppies?
I mean , I know Cocoa is easy to program, but not THAT easy...
that it was leaked. It could also be a flawed crypto implementation.
Given the demographic changes, where the majority of the western world will be old folks, we can only expect more old people in positions of power.
Does that mean the decisions will get more conservative? Hard to say. I'm not sure I buy into an ageist argument. It's not like they're going to suddenly lose what they've learned over the past 20 years, assuming they had tech exposure.
If anything, it's tamer than it was in 1998-1999. These days you can actually find comments that defend Microsoft, back then you'd get spam-flooded with flames. Slashdot has evolved into a very messy cross-section of skewed opinions.
The only difference is the last thing you mentioned, private ownership of capital.
Therein is the secret sauce. Private ownership allows re-allocation of capital into new areas. This is Entrepreneurship. It leads to the destruction of old organizations eventually, so it tends not to supported by bureaucracies seeking to retain power.
Having said this, "late capitalism" sews the seeds of its own destruction as it becomes more and more accustomed to preserving the status quo. The western world doesn't live in a purely capitalist society for good reason, as society adapts slower to change than the market does. Thus there are plenty of collectivist elements at play in the government that place limits on the ability to "creatively destroy" the old -- subsidies, bailouts, regulations, etc. These aren't necessarily always bad things, but can be taken too far.
Why is it, then, that most data centres charge something like a $10,000 server tax whenever you install a new server?
The reason you don't keep data local is
- energy costs
- labour
- knowledge of how to run the hardware & databases
- risk that shit will blow up on your watch
- risk that someone will break in on your watch
- capital costs to keep upgrading your hardware
Paying a usage fee simplifies a lot of this shit. Sure, it doesn't _eliminate_ the risks, it just _shares_ the risk with another party. I seriously doubt any regular IT department will have better HA, capacity planning, or security procedures than a specialist that offers risk sharing penalties in its contract! After all, it's their bread & butter, in corporate IT, downtime & break-ins are just another shell in the political game.
Right, because it happens to Google *way* more than your own servers, with their bulletproof procedures, obfuscated passwords (and change policy), and well-managed backups.
ROFL
In fact, Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) is a new layer on the enterprise software stack. For those of you coming from the SOA space, BPMS is the choreography layer.
BPMS are *not* choreography engines, in the sense that Fingar was referring to. He likes to claim that this stuff is all based on sound theory (pi Calculus), but in reality, it's not, just the modeling langauage is. It's unlikely choreography will really take off for a long time, frankly, because it's a bit too beyond where people's heads are at today.
Carr's current article's argument that IT functions should be taken over by functional units only perpetuates the silo thinking of most organizations. Budgeting IT resources on a departmental basis perpetuates islands of automation, redundant/conflicting rules, ridiculous internal interfaces., etc.
Conflict, islands, and redundancy are side effects from an even more primal principle of business organization: decentralization! The tension between it and centralization is eternal, and is essential to almost any directed human organization. Which one wins does not matter, as they both have problems. The balance of power is what matters.
My point is that the only way that "giving the business control" is insane is if you believe that IT is some kind of savior, a voice of rationality in a sea of despair, that is keeping the business from harming itself. In a way, I agree -- the skills of systems design and information management are rare but essential. However, it's not insane to want to distribute those skills around the organization. I've seen functional units with more IT savvy than the IT department!
It's a bit much to call him a nutter when most of what he's pointing to are trends in the consumer space that potentially may be disruptive (in the Clayton Christiansen vein). Disruptive innovations rarely look adequate for the broader market, but they have a way of taking over....
As for "off site centralization", perhaps I'm a bit of a weirdo: I don't store my money in a sock under my bed, I use an off-site centralization service called a "bank". I also don't cut my own hair, I get a salon to do that. When I get my oil changed, I get my car over to the off site centralized service station....
Back to IT, the point is that we have been artificially been forcing a "cobbler's" mentality on IT for way too long, and his kids have no shoes. Outsourcing is currently dysfunctional, it's just hiring another cobbler to ease your burden. The better model is to standardize & commoditize layers of responsibility and pay for it based on usage.
Web 2.0, if it meaningfully exists at all, is built on some rather horrible hacks that break down the server-client wall, and for certain kinds of limited applications that's fine, but building substantial applications, like accounting and financial software, in AJAX would be an unbelievably difficult job, and a rather hard one to justify.
AJAX is getting pretty damn easy (have you looked at Prototype? Dojo?) But AJAX is just one very small part of this..
Today, if I'm a company, and want to build a multi-terabyte data warehouse, I need to invest, at minimum, $1+ million in hardware & software costs alone, and usually much more in support & maintenance.
But, If I were to run a parallel database on Amazon's EC2 it would cost me peanuts (a few hundred dollars a month for storage; a few thousand annually for CPU).
Eventually, all the arguments can't hide the sheer economics of using cloud computing.
Other examples:
When you want to load test applications, where do you get the hardware? What happens to it afterwards?
How about disaster recovery?
How quickly can you install a new server to meet capacity? Does your capacity planning predict it well enough?
All of this stuff is made much, much quicker & simpler with on-demand capacity. I've worked in IT trying to build it into existing data centres, and it is bloody hard to get the bureaucracy to move beyond the 1:1:1 app:database:server mentality. So this change will come from businesses wondering why they're paying $10,000 server tax when they could go to a utility for $0.50 an hour.
Yes, security is a concern, but, using Amazon as an example again, they have some very stringent physical security for their EC2 and S3 servers (I've heard their CTO claim you would need a small army to break-in). Beyond this, good transport security and authorization, and you're as secure as any VPN (which big companies are using all the time now!)
With any disruptive innovation, it doesn't always make sense for the entire market at first.... but it eventually creeps up on you.
that capitalism would not survive, because society can't handle the pace of change. A corporatist / socialist approach would be more likely. Note this wasn't advocacy (he was a champion of the "entrepreneur"), rather it was a projection of the trend he saw.
Given corporate welfare (car makers, airlines, etc.), lack of anti-trust enforcement, etc. there certainly is an element of this "statism" in the U.S., so you are correct about things being "slowed down" by certain societal & government forces.
Having said this, there often are good reasons to slow things down: it is arguable that "free markets" are not a natural condition for all aspects of economic life, and society "reacts" to to this by slowing the market down (see Polanyi's classic for more on this one). Society won't let capitalism completely trample its traditions & comforts, and that includes the existing corporate power structure and technologies
Of course, slowing technological & economic change down costs money. Eventually too much money. Look at farm subsidies. Or import tariffs. etc.
Advertising doesn't really enter into it. Usually corporate accounting policy of how various elements of a product are priced (which are called "Vendor Specific Objective Evidence" or VSOE) will dictate this sort of thing long in advance.
Here is an article about the complexities of this, if you're interested...
I recall reading that Chris Date has indicated that RDF can be used as a foundation for relational theory (it's in "sixth normal form").... the major difference is that most RDF processors make an open-world assumption vs. most databases assuming a "closed world".