"Surely that would have been an Imsai peripheral voice synthesizer, did they plug it in to the WOPR and run a great long cable to the war room? "
Heh, that always annoyed me when I first saw WarGames myself.
I think the answer is, yes, NORAD was so cheap they bought an Imsai voice synthesiser to plug into their billion dollar mainframe. Because every mainframe needs a spooky voice.
"but there's nothing fundamentally different between cloud computing and IBM's vision of computing in the 1960s."
Yeah, there is.
The Cloud(tm) is now built by the lowest bidder instead of a single big company known for its boring reliability. You still can't see inside, you still can't get your data out, and it's still expensive, but now we've done away with all that needless safety and redundancy.
"many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed."
This is something which subtly nags at me.
We have this assumption in Western technological society that ultimately, we can break stuff down into linear-composable processes: things like milestones. We tick one box (acquire a piece of technology, install a system, research a subject, , that's done, we go on to tick another, and we just tacitly assume that ticking box 2 does not untick box 1. Our row of boxes grows in a straight line. Simple and manageable. That's what Management Science is founded on.
However, more and more, the realisation is growing on me that Life Does Not Work Like That At All, and that Reality(tm) has signed no contract which requires it to be linear. And in fact it's never been like that except in some very extreme special cases - which we've unfortunately seized on, because they're so nice to think about, as being The Way Things Are.
What actually happens, I suspect, is that each piece of technology we acquire, each piece of knowledge, doesn't simply ADD to the rest but at the very least MULTIPLIES - possibly even worse. So as we keep adding entities to our organisations or programs or social lives, we get an exponential explosion of potential interactions. And each of these interactions is a process which can potentially feed back into every other one. It's all a big messy chaotic graph which only (deceptively) LOOKS linear in places. And then suddenly, wham, an earthquake or a data loss event reminds us that actually, what we thought was a solved problem was in fact just a temporary straight line in a very kinky process. And we don't ultimately understand the systems we're creating - let alone the systems we didn't create, like the biosphere and our bodies and minds, which we inhabit and depend on for life.
I don't think this realisation has yet sunk in, even now. I don't know what will happen to our psyche when it does. Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance points to the 'explosion of hypotheses' problem in science, where Popper falsifiability doesn't guarantee convergence towards 'truth' or that scientific revolutions will always be about smaller or smaller disagreements, but that we might get a divergent cascade of increasingly contradictory and not-yet-falsified ideas. This might be arguable, but I think we're now seeing a similar problem in systems administration. The Internet is increasing mutual connectivity between otherwise partitioned social and computational systems; we fundamentally do not know and can't predict how these systems will fail.
We can't even be sure that currently shipping software is free from major security holes; in fact, about all we can predict is that all our software doe have deeply dangerous flaws. Not just small, linear, flaws. Big nonlinear ones which can hit us like a data crash, or a financial crash, or getting pwned by a botnet, on a global scale. And yet we use it, because it's there. We think we can trust our systems because other people are. But that's not true at all.
A big rethink for management techniques is ahead of us.
I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac I've information Pokemon and Haruhi and Brainiac I've twitters blogospherical and edits Wikipediac From Amazon to Zotero plus wiring maps of ENIAC.
I'm very well acquainted, too, with web-semantic hyperlinks I understand equations (all the property of Wolfram, Inc) With cameras on satellites I'm teeming with a lot of news With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
I'm very good at Javascript and PHP and CLI I know by heart the J2EE web remoting API In short, I am a technocratic, caffeine-fueled insomniac: I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac
I've always thought the logical solution to space energy needs would be:
1. Built cluster of giant solar-powered accelerators in close solar orbit, say around Mercury 2. Automatically refine positrons and antiprotons into cryogenic antihydrogen 3. Figure out some way of diamagnetic containment using a really strong magnetic field. 4. Ship tanks of the devil's brew to the outer system 5. Mix antihydrogen and real hydrogen to make a crude but energetic brute-force rocket. Maybe 1 part anti-H2 to 1000 H2 or something, so you get enough reaction mass. Otherwise it'll all be just gamma rays. That's just a small matter of engineering, anyway.
6. Explore strange new worlds! Profit from new lifeforms! And if your power supply ever glitches: kablooey! Not much use for lifeboats.
Look it would make space travel EXCITING and that's the important bit, right?
"this is arguably why the patent system was created: it's very important research, even basic research that could never be fully financed by patent royalties."
This sentence no sense make. The patent system was created to finance research which patents could never fully finance?
""The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind using exclusively Nobel patented premium explosive products such as Dynamite(tm), Gelignite(tm), or a Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft cannon."
Freedom will be restored when the sludge grinder at Processing Plant B is welded, and not before. Now quit yappin' or we'll all be up to our armpits in raw freedom feedstock, and I'm sure nobody wants that.
"Yeah, that whole ultimate-arbiter-of-morality-with-respect-to-software thing is perhaps slightly patronizing."
Only if you believe that morality is literally relative to the beholder.
If you believe that 'morality' is just another name for 'objective correctness with respect to how the universe actually works in the long term', then RMS isn't being 'patronizing' in the least, any more than a physicist or computer scientist is who analyses a situation and says 'here's what I think is really going on'. He's simply describing reality as he sees it, and you're free to agree or disagree with his ideas, but whether or not you agree, the universe will do its thing regardless and will ultimately impose IT'S morality on you via the effect of your moral choices. If RMS is right about how the universe works, it's worth your while to listen to him.
RMS believes that GNU/Freedom(tm) is a vitally important democratic civil right, in the same sense as FDR's Four Freedoms. You're welcome to disagree, but preaching morality is not about personal power. It's about basic philosophy and social science. Actions have consequences; so do ideas, if practiced. Those who understand this have the duty to try to point out the consequences to others.
Critique and analyse, but don't name-call. It doesn't add to the discussion.
"Isn't that true, though? I always thought Linus came down heavily on the side of open source as an engineering philosophy and against the ideological side of software freedom? I'd have expected Linus to agree with the sentiment RMS is expressing, to be honest, as I believe it matches his real world stance."
From what I've noticed over the last twelve years or so, yes. Remember the BitKeeper fiasco? git seems to be doing well, so Linus does eventually do the 'right' thing in terms of GNU/Freedom(tm) and makes some kick-ass software as a result... but his primary motivation is always just pragmatism. Do what works best, easiest, cheapest, now, without regard to whether it's philosophically sustainable in the long term or not.
He's as consistent on the Linus/WhateverWorks(tm) line as RMS is on GNU/Freedom(tm). It's just a happy accident that GPL happened to Work(tm) for him.
"It is beyond unfortunate that the Foundation adopted the name from the hosting site. The logic apparently was "It is already a known brand"."
Odd. Didn't it cross anyone's mind at the Foundation that there's such a thing as *negative* brand equity? What kind of organisation would even think in terms of 'branding' without considering the target demographic?
They can't actually ruin your life. They really can't FORCE you to do anything."
Why not? Computers run our life now. That's what Free Software is all about: looking to the future, seeing the pervasiveness of computing, and realising that user control of the information architecture is a necessity for democratic citizen control of our own lives. That's what this argument has ALWAYS been about.
Participation in the computing grid is NOT optional on a world scale. It's mandatory. We accept that. The only question now is who gets to control it. We want it to be everyone, not a minority, so our machines can't be turned against us and used as a tool of enslavement. That's already happening now as a form of 'soft' slavery via copyright - yes, it's somewhat 'opt-out' still but it's increasingly getting less so. So we have to struggle to keep our freedoms.
"You can end MS "tyranny" very easy. Stop using their products. Period. Really, thats it. You don't actually have to have them to survive."
Yes! Thank you! That's exactly what RMS and everyone else are saying. Don't use Mono, because it's a stealth Microsoft product. We don't need it, so we won't use it. Just give us the right to stay separate.
It's the people like Miguel who are trying to make Mono part of the mandatory fabric of Linux which are forcing the issue. Keep potentially IP encumbered stuff out of the Free Software kernel and we'll all be able to coexist nicely.
"If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness"
See, in our line of work, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Law, software, and philosophy have zero tolerance for errors too. RMS is just being very carefully *correct*. If you take that as a personal attack and think sloppy work is something to be tolerated - why are you even working in a technological industry? Shouldn't you be doing literary studies or some other field where there's no 'right' answer?
Law is code, and it needs to be correct, or it doesn't work. RMS also takes the approach that there are things underneath law - ethics and philosophy - which are also not a matter of opinion but can be objectively right or wrong. If he thinks your ethics are wrong, he'll tell you exactly what wrong result he thinks that will get you.
It's an approach which might not make him many friends, but so what? If he's right, disliking him personally won't make his position wrong. If he's wrong, then by all means, point out where you think he's wrong. If he's a hypocrite, point out where his speech and actions contradict. If he's a bad salesman for his ideas, okay, say how these ideas can be communicated better without compromising their integrity.
Just don't call him - or anyone - a 'hardliner' as if that means something awful. It doesn't. It simply means he actually believes what he claims to believe. Is that so strange and scary? Consistency and absolute truth is very much a *good* thing, to be encouraged in all civic life, and it makes me very much afraid for the future of our society and species that the majority seem to think that having strong principles and standing by them makes one some kind of dangerous nutcase.
"Since people are quite adamant about adding each other as 'friends' on social networking sites like Facebook etc., why can't something like the Web-of-Trust be riding along somehow?"
That's pretty much the entire concept behind the Cory Doctorow book "Little Brother". The Xnet is a secure free Facebook. It did require physical key-signing parties, and he pointed out how the whole network could still be rooted by infiltrators, but that's the idea.
"I am not interested in saving 10MB per app because of DLL sharing when I have 8GB in a system for less than $200."
You might. I only have a gig in mine.
Not all of your userbase wants to upgrade their hardware every year.
Re:I'm reminded, surreally of Space: 1999
on
Stargate Universe
·
· Score: 1
"When the moon went through an interesting neighbourhood they'd sometimes hop off and take a look around, then they'd jump back on again before it left."
Man, the delta-v would be a pain.
"Hi guys, we're just passing through this solar system at 0.998 C. Whee, colours! Okay, we've got about a millisecond to explore so don't say we never get shore leave. Also, if you so much as touch a paint fleck it'll hit you with the force of a small nuclear explosion. What, back already? Well, it's a week till we get to the next star, so back to playing Hearts."
"Socialism helps with the means... but not the will. "
Er? Doesn't Linux prove that it actually works the other way around?
It seems that wherever humans exist, they just sort of naturally have the will to do things. The personal financial profit incentive doesn't actually create this at all - in fact, some studies show that external incentives actually slow down people's natural problem-solving creativity.
"The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?"
Yes.
I mean, if we want a sane future Net, then yes.
Money doesn't enter into it - it's a basic business-ethics question of 'do you want to treat your free customers like crap now and pen them up in a box, or treat them well and give them freedom and hope they find value in your future for-pay services?'
You might not remember this far back, but before the Web - before SMTP email left ARPANET - there was this thing called 'online services'. Big American for-pay walled gardens like Compuserve, GEnie, BIX, The Well, America Online. You logged in, you had mail, forums, news, chat... in fact you pretty much had exactly what you get in Facebook. A full online social hub, but you couldn't link outside that community to a rival service.
They did not like it when Internet email and Web came along. No sir they did not. What is this weird hippie free love thing where anyone can send email to anyone else's server? That's downright unAmerican that is! It'll never take off!
Eventually, through some miracle (which I've never understood), sanity and openness prevailed... to a point... and SMTP mail became a standard. (Sanity did not prevail long enough for SMTP to address its serious security problems, which is why we now drown in spam. There was a very very short window of accidental sanity in the early 90s.)
And the online services gave in and supported it. But it was a huge fight, and they were slow to adopt it, because they could see their captive user base falling through their fingers like sand.
And they made the same noises you're making now about how it was THEIR service and the users were free to use it or not. But that wasn't the point. The walls were making the closed networks less effective.
Facebook and Myspace and the rest of the 'social cloud' services are in EXACTLY the same position that the Online Services were in the late 80s-early 90s. Kings of the hill, for now, because of a lack of interoperability.
Keeping people locked in is a business model, yes. And yes, you can manually repost your data, multiple times, on every service you want to connect to, just as you could log into multiple BBS systems in the 80s. But that's not a sensible way to run a society or a Net.
One would think we might learn. But the commercial incentives never have really been in favour of freedom, just of efficient profit extraction. It's really quite a fluke when every now and then a company accidentally does the right thing. Sometimes they pay dearly for it. Sometimes they make out like burglars. Either way, the user doesn't always get what they want or what they need or what would make for a well-educated, healthy society, but what a technological system driven by inscrutable self-serving ends decides to provide.
It's a miracle that the Net works as well as it does, really.
Slashdot Mirror
"Surely that would have been an Imsai peripheral voice synthesizer, did they plug it in to the WOPR and run a great long cable to the war room? "
Heh, that always annoyed me when I first saw WarGames myself.
I think the answer is, yes, NORAD was so cheap they bought an Imsai voice synthesiser to plug into their billion dollar mainframe. Because every mainframe needs a spooky voice.
""if it loses your data - it's not a cloud"."
Which is quite a good way of putting it. We could say much the same about markets.
"If it loses your money - it's not a financial market." :)
"but there's nothing fundamentally different between cloud computing and IBM's vision of computing in the 1960s."
Yeah, there is.
The Cloud(tm) is now built by the lowest bidder instead of a single big company known for its boring reliability. You still can't see inside, you still can't get your data out, and it's still expensive, but now we've done away with all that needless safety and redundancy.
That's progress!
"many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed."
This is something which subtly nags at me.
We have this assumption in Western technological society that ultimately, we can break stuff down into linear-composable processes: things like milestones. We tick one box (acquire a piece of technology, install a system, research a subject, , that's done, we go on to tick another, and we just tacitly assume that ticking box 2 does not untick box 1. Our row of boxes grows in a straight line. Simple and manageable. That's what Management Science is founded on.
However, more and more, the realisation is growing on me that Life Does Not Work Like That At All, and that Reality(tm) has signed no contract which requires it to be linear. And in fact it's never been like that except in some very extreme special cases - which we've unfortunately seized on, because they're so nice to think about, as being The Way Things Are.
What actually happens, I suspect, is that each piece of technology we acquire, each piece of knowledge, doesn't simply ADD to the rest but at the very least MULTIPLIES - possibly even worse. So as we keep adding entities to our organisations or programs or social lives, we get an exponential explosion of potential interactions. And each of these interactions is a process which can potentially feed back into every other one. It's all a big messy chaotic graph which only (deceptively) LOOKS linear in places. And then suddenly, wham, an earthquake or a data loss event reminds us that actually, what we thought was a solved problem was in fact just a temporary straight line in a very kinky process. And we don't ultimately understand the systems we're creating - let alone the systems we didn't create, like the biosphere and our bodies and minds, which we inhabit and depend on for life.
I don't think this realisation has yet sunk in, even now. I don't know what will happen to our psyche when it does. Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance points to the 'explosion of hypotheses' problem in science, where Popper falsifiability doesn't guarantee convergence towards 'truth' or that scientific revolutions will always be about smaller or smaller disagreements, but that we might get a divergent cascade of increasingly contradictory and not-yet-falsified ideas. This might be arguable, but I think we're now seeing a similar problem in systems administration. The Internet is increasing mutual connectivity between otherwise partitioned social and computational systems; we fundamentally do not know and can't predict how these systems will fail.
We can't even be sure that currently shipping software is free from major security holes; in fact, about all we can predict is that all our software doe have deeply dangerous flaws. Not just small, linear, flaws. Big nonlinear ones which can hit us like a data crash, or a financial crash, or getting pwned by a botnet, on a global scale. And yet we use it, because it's there. We think we can trust our systems because other people are. But that's not true at all.
A big rethink for management techniques is ahead of us.
I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac
I've information Pokemon and Haruhi and Brainiac
I've twitters blogospherical and edits Wikipediac
From Amazon to Zotero plus wiring maps of ENIAC.
I'm very well acquainted, too, with web-semantic hyperlinks
I understand equations (all the property of Wolfram, Inc)
With cameras on satellites I'm teeming with a lot of news
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
I'm very good at Javascript and PHP and CLI
I know by heart the J2EE web remoting API
In short, I am a technocratic, caffeine-fueled insomniac:
I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac
"It's a sad day when you can no longer post ASCII art onto a forum. Have we come so far that we've forgotten where we come from?"
No, some of us still haven't forgotten, despite years of hard drinking and therapy.
Brrrrr.
I've always thought the logical solution to space energy needs would be:
1. Built cluster of giant solar-powered accelerators in close solar orbit, say around Mercury
2. Automatically refine positrons and antiprotons into cryogenic antihydrogen
3. Figure out some way of diamagnetic containment using a really strong magnetic field.
4. Ship tanks of the devil's brew to the outer system
5. Mix antihydrogen and real hydrogen to make a crude but energetic brute-force rocket. Maybe 1 part anti-H2 to 1000 H2 or something, so you get enough reaction mass. Otherwise it'll all be just gamma rays. That's just a small matter of engineering, anyway.
6. Explore strange new worlds! Profit from new lifeforms! And if your power supply ever glitches: kablooey! Not much use for lifeboats.
Look it would make space travel EXCITING and that's the important bit, right?
"whilst I agree its a beautiful wood, its also somewhat dodgy to come by. "
Excellent. It will go nicely with the baby-whale-oil lamps, the blood diamond/ruby laser, and the miniature death camps for the Persian cat's mice.
One must keep up appearances.
Now, before we get to business, some chocolate?
"this is arguably why the patent system was created: it's very important research, even basic research that could never be fully financed by patent royalties."
This sentence no sense make. The patent system was created to finance research which patents could never fully finance?
"Insert tired old joke about Nobel/Noble."
This one?
""The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind using exclusively Nobel patented premium explosive products such as Dynamite(tm), Gelignite(tm), or a Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft cannon."
Now that would be a fun Prize.
Freedom will be restored when the sludge grinder at Processing Plant B is welded, and not before. Now quit yappin' or we'll all be up to our armpits in raw freedom feedstock, and I'm sure nobody wants that.
"Yeah, that whole ultimate-arbiter-of-morality-with-respect-to-software thing is perhaps slightly patronizing."
Only if you believe that morality is literally relative to the beholder.
If you believe that 'morality' is just another name for 'objective correctness with respect to how the universe actually works in the long term', then RMS isn't being 'patronizing' in the least, any more than a physicist or computer scientist is who analyses a situation and says 'here's what I think is really going on'. He's simply describing reality as he sees it, and you're free to agree or disagree with his ideas, but whether or not you agree, the universe will do its thing regardless and will ultimately impose IT'S morality on you via the effect of your moral choices. If RMS is right about how the universe works, it's worth your while to listen to him.
RMS believes that GNU/Freedom(tm) is a vitally important democratic civil right, in the same sense as FDR's Four Freedoms. You're welcome to disagree, but preaching morality is not about personal power. It's about basic philosophy and social science. Actions have consequences; so do ideas, if practiced. Those who understand this have the duty to try to point out the consequences to others.
Critique and analyse, but don't name-call. It doesn't add to the discussion.
"Isn't that true, though? I always thought Linus came down heavily on the side of open source as an engineering philosophy and against the ideological side of software freedom? I'd have expected Linus to agree with the sentiment RMS is expressing, to be honest, as I believe it matches his real world stance."
From what I've noticed over the last twelve years or so, yes. Remember the BitKeeper fiasco? git seems to be doing well, so Linus does eventually do the 'right' thing in terms of GNU/Freedom(tm) and makes some kick-ass software as a result... but his primary motivation is always just pragmatism. Do what works best, easiest, cheapest, now, without regard to whether it's philosophically sustainable in the long term or not.
He's as consistent on the Linus/WhateverWorks(tm) line as RMS is on GNU/Freedom(tm). It's just a happy accident that GPL happened to Work(tm) for him.
"It is beyond unfortunate that the Foundation adopted the name from the hosting site. The logic apparently was "It is already a known brand"."
Odd. Didn't it cross anyone's mind at the Foundation that there's such a thing as *negative* brand equity? What kind of organisation would even think in terms of 'branding' without considering the target demographic?
BTW:
"You can, in fact, never use a computer and still survive and function."
Not always, not guaranteed. Ever hear of e-government? What happens when tax returns *must* be filed electronically? In, say, a Microsoft format?
"They ARE JUST A SOFTWARE COMPANY!
They can't actually ruin your life. They really can't FORCE you to do anything."
Why not? Computers run our life now. That's what Free Software is all about: looking to the future, seeing the pervasiveness of computing, and realising that user control of the information architecture is a necessity for democratic citizen control of our own lives. That's what this argument has ALWAYS been about.
Participation in the computing grid is NOT optional on a world scale. It's mandatory. We accept that. The only question now is who gets to control it. We want it to be everyone, not a minority, so our machines can't be turned against us and used as a tool of enslavement. That's already happening now as a form of 'soft' slavery via copyright - yes, it's somewhat 'opt-out' still but it's increasingly getting less so. So we have to struggle to keep our freedoms.
"You can end MS "tyranny" very easy. Stop using their products. Period. Really, thats it. You don't actually have to have them to survive."
Yes! Thank you! That's exactly what RMS and everyone else are saying. Don't use Mono, because it's a stealth Microsoft product. We don't need it, so we won't use it. Just give us the right to stay separate.
It's the people like Miguel who are trying to make Mono part of the mandatory fabric of Linux which are forcing the issue. Keep potentially IP encumbered stuff out of the Free Software kernel and we'll all be able to coexist nicely.
"If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness"
See, in our line of work, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Law, software, and philosophy have zero tolerance for errors too. RMS is just being very carefully *correct*. If you take that as a personal attack and think sloppy work is something to be tolerated - why are you even working in a technological industry? Shouldn't you be doing literary studies or some other field where there's no 'right' answer?
Law is code, and it needs to be correct, or it doesn't work. RMS also takes the approach that there are things underneath law - ethics and philosophy - which are also not a matter of opinion but can be objectively right or wrong. If he thinks your ethics are wrong, he'll tell you exactly what wrong result he thinks that will get you.
It's an approach which might not make him many friends, but so what? If he's right, disliking him personally won't make his position wrong. If he's wrong, then by all means, point out where you think he's wrong. If he's a hypocrite, point out where his speech and actions contradict. If he's a bad salesman for his ideas, okay, say how these ideas can be communicated better without compromising their integrity.
Just don't call him - or anyone - a 'hardliner' as if that means something awful. It doesn't. It simply means he actually believes what he claims to believe. Is that so strange and scary? Consistency and absolute truth is very much a *good* thing, to be encouraged in all civic life, and it makes me very much afraid for the future of our society and species that the majority seem to think that having strong principles and standing by them makes one some kind of dangerous nutcase.
"Since people are quite adamant about adding each other as 'friends' on social networking sites like Facebook etc., why can't something like the Web-of-Trust be riding along somehow?"
That's pretty much the entire concept behind the Cory Doctorow book "Little Brother". The Xnet is a secure free Facebook. It did require physical key-signing parties, and he pointed out how the whole network could still be rooted by infiltrators, but that's the idea.
"the male fear of falling into a hole - especially a hole with teeth. "
Huh. And all this time I thought a sandworm was an obvious phallic symbol.
So does that mean in Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett actually got the girl?
"Near Future/Speculative Fiction (Rainbows End, Little Brother, etc)"
Nitpick, but in the 1980s, that's just what the genre now fossilised as 'Cyberpunk' was.
"I am not interested in saving 10MB per app because of DLL sharing when I have 8GB in a system for less than $200."
You might. I only have a gig in mine.
Not all of your userbase wants to upgrade their hardware every year.
"When the moon went through an interesting neighbourhood they'd sometimes hop off and take a look around, then they'd jump back on again before it left."
Man, the delta-v would be a pain.
"Hi guys, we're just passing through this solar system at 0.998 C. Whee, colours! Okay, we've got about a millisecond to explore so don't say we never get shore leave. Also, if you so much as touch a paint fleck it'll hit you with the force of a small nuclear explosion. What, back already? Well, it's a week till we get to the next star, so back to playing Hearts."
"Socialism helps with the means... but not the will. "
Er? Doesn't Linux prove that it actually works the other way around?
It seems that wherever humans exist, they just sort of naturally have the will to do things. The personal financial profit incentive doesn't actually create this at all - in fact, some studies show that external incentives actually slow down people's natural problem-solving creativity.
"Yeah, but the rubber band makers, book binders and air freshener peddlers have a harder time accomplishing vendor lock-in."
Ahem.
Tell that to John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison.
"The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?"
Yes.
I mean, if we want a sane future Net, then yes.
Money doesn't enter into it - it's a basic business-ethics question of 'do you want to treat your free customers like crap now and pen them up in a box, or treat them well and give them freedom and hope they find value in your future for-pay services?'
You might not remember this far back, but before the Web - before SMTP email left ARPANET - there was this thing called 'online services'. Big American for-pay walled gardens like Compuserve, GEnie, BIX, The Well, America Online. You logged in, you had mail, forums, news, chat... in fact you pretty much had exactly what you get in Facebook. A full online social hub, but you couldn't link outside that community to a rival service.
They did not like it when Internet email and Web came along. No sir they did not. What is this weird hippie free love thing where anyone can send email to anyone else's server? That's downright unAmerican that is! It'll never take off!
Eventually, through some miracle (which I've never understood), sanity and openness prevailed... to a point... and SMTP mail became a standard. (Sanity did not prevail long enough for SMTP to address its serious security problems, which is why we now drown in spam. There was a very very short window of accidental sanity in the early 90s.)
And the online services gave in and supported it. But it was a huge fight, and they were slow to adopt it, because they could see their captive user base falling through their fingers like sand.
And they made the same noises you're making now about how it was THEIR service and the users were free to use it or not. But that wasn't the point. The walls were making the closed networks less effective.
Facebook and Myspace and the rest of the 'social cloud' services are in EXACTLY the same position that the Online Services were in the late 80s-early 90s. Kings of the hill, for now, because of a lack of interoperability.
Keeping people locked in is a business model, yes. And yes, you can manually repost your data, multiple times, on every service you want to connect to, just as you could log into multiple BBS systems in the 80s. But that's not a sensible way to run a society or a Net.
One would think we might learn. But the commercial incentives never have really been in favour of freedom, just of efficient profit extraction. It's really quite a fluke when every now and then a company accidentally does the right thing. Sometimes they pay dearly for it. Sometimes they make out like burglars. Either way, the user doesn't always get what they want or what they need or what would make for a well-educated, healthy society, but what a technological system driven by inscrutable self-serving ends decides to provide.
It's a miracle that the Net works as well as it does, really.