To do some things that are trivial in a desktop app requires a lot of convoluted steps (callbacks, etc).
Don't tell me you've never used callbacks in a desktop app?
And even things that would be done the same way still requires a network round trip to get information that desktop apps don't suffer (simple tasks like dynamic drop-down or list population).
Except usually the point of doing this in a web app, as opposed to a desktop app, is that the data is stored somewhere else. If a desktop app would be doing the same thing -- making a SQL call to a database, or accessing a shared file on a network store -- then you lose nothing by doing this with the web app.
Unless you aren't smart enough to cache the results in the web app, the way you would for a desktop app... And even then, I suspect that the browser should be able to cache many XHR calls, if they're designed to be cacheable.
Mostly because no one's really gotten it right yet.
That, and we still don't have any set of frameworks which have built up enough to be difficult to replace. Nothing close to, say, GTK+, Qt, WinForms, Cocoa, etc.
However, saying "What. The. Fuck." without giving a single reason why the article warrants that is really a waste of a comment. May as well just tag it wtf and be done with it.
Have you experimented at all with round-robin DNS records pointing to two different elastic IPs in different availability zones?
Nope.
Of course, the long-term plan is to have at least one on hot standby (or acting in another capacity) in a third zone -- the elastic IPs are not bound to availability zones, so however much this degrades performance, that'll only last 15 minutes.
If one availability zone goes tits-up, does round-robin yield acceptable performance, routing clients to the good zone?
I guess that really depends on the client properly detecting that one of the servers is dead, and that it should use the next one.
Keep in mind, that's not the only way to do it -- dynamic DNS is still feasible, so that's another way to narrow the window during which clients have to figure the situation out themselves. And given that we're mostly an AJAX widget, we can always do our own manual client-side load balancing, if we have to.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. I think this is another case of Amazon deliberately exposing the ephemeral nature of hardware, so that we are forced to engineer around it. I've never seen an instance crash, so our ephemeral store is probably as solid as many other providers, but we backup to S3 anyway.
Because I need to format it. Trivial example: I want to print huge letters, one per page, so I can make a big sign to put in the window, for a one-night-only event (prank, actually).
Or because I'm writing up a resume. Like it or not, plain text looks unprofessional next to a proper resume, with contact info right-justified at the top, proper (graphically) bullet-pointed lists, and maybe even a photo.
So "faster" is a non-issue -- I can make a text file faster, and I do that for things like READMEs in software, but it won't do what I want for a resume, a big party sign, a "Lost dog -- Reward" sign, or any of the many other uses for desktop publishing.
And because even if I did this every day for the rest of my life, it would still use an insignificant amount of disk space -- even if I stored the XML unzipped, in a folder (which some apps can do).
Because I don't know LaTeX, and don't have time to learn, especially for a one-off project. But even my grandmother knows Word. (Not making that up -- she also uses email, albeit very slowly.)
And because I can't recall ever needing the advanced features of LaTeX. I don't even use all of a WYSIWYG word processor's features -- when I use a word processor.
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days
Unless it's Excel -- which was the case last time I looked at the federal budget, if I recall.
why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
PDF != Acrobat.
PDF actually is an open standard, and is well supported by several open readers. While there are many Adobe-specific quirks, and Acrobat is arguably the worst PDF reader out there (heh, I just typoed it "Acrobad"), PDF is still very useful in a lot of contexts.
There are two problems with this: First, PDF is read-only (not everything should be).
Second, your mother doesn't know how to save as PDF. She'll still send you whatever the default format for her office suite is. It would really help if that default format was something we all know how to read -- that's the point of having a standard, so we don't have to think about this anymore.
So, you see, you actually should care about this debate -- precisely because if we win, no one will have to think about it anymore.
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software?
Both of these already exist.
let's just cook up a new extension for text files
And that about shows your complete lack of understanding.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
And it's not just word processing. It's presentations, spreadsheets, pretty much all office formats. But sure, let's pick the least useful of these for our most common example...
Everyone else has already pointed out my personal favorites -- Shoes, TryRuby, Squeak, Alice, and so on -- so I'm going to give you a piece of general advice:
He needs his own computer. Maybe more than one, but at least one, entirely to himself. And you don't get root on it unless he needs help.
He needs the freedom to be able to make his own mistakes, without it affecting anyone else.
I would even go one step further -- set up some virtual machines. Yes, he still needs to own the real hardware -- if nothing else, there's a psychological component. But virtual machines means he can deliberately sabotage a system without consequences -- what impact does "sudo rm -rf/" really have on a running environment? Let's find out!
Oh, and be prepared for him to make entirely different choices than you. Hopefully, he'll at least go beyond C -- point is, you'll know you've done your job when he disagrees with you on something -- and he's right.
#1... one key feature of the dedicated model for web applications is a stable, static IP address.
No it isn't. The key feature is a stable, reliable way to connect to your apps, wherever they are -- when I type example.com, I should be routed to the right place.
This means a built-in hardware load balancer, dynamic DNS, or anything in between.
Amazon's Elastic IP, for example, can take 15 minutes to switch between instances -- something like 10-12 minutes during which requests are sent to the old instance, then 2-3 minutes during which all traffic is dropped on the floor and no instance is reachable, and then, finally, traffic is routed properly to the new instance.
The only advantage is that if you don't have to do this often, you aren't paying for a hit to your DNS servers every few minutes, just in case.
#2... The API needs to be publicly available to everyone. Provide a credit card (that works and is yours) and you should get compute, storage, and RAM on-demand.
This is important -- not only are we moving beyond "submitting a ticket", but it has to be programmatic, not just point-and-click from a web interface.
For example, one could auto-scale on demand -- kill a few instances for the night, as no one's up at 3 AM, then bring them back up when you get traffic. Or bring up an extra few dozen to gracefully handle a Slashdotting.
But there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Autoscaling is nice, but consider that we might know exactly when we need power, and when we don't. We might deliberately spawn a ton of instances to handle a large batch encoding (like YouTube should have, when switching to high-def h.264), or deliberately turn off an instance when we don't need it (only really need a staging server and SVN/Trac during the day).
#3... I propose that cloud computers should support PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and the most common frameworks, libraries, gems/plugins, and application/web servers for each of these languages.
Absolutely not. That is the wrong way to go about this.
Specifically: What happens when I want to deploy an Erlang app, which uses a Smalltalk VM for a database, and forks off ffmpeg commands to do encoding? What if I like Ruby just fine, but I want to deploy, say, Sinatra + Sequel + sqlite?
I really like what Google has done with Python. All the low-level details are handled for you -- just throw a Python app up on App Engines and you're good to go. Probably not even OS-level virtualization -- could even be a language-level jail.
Which is all really great -- if you're running Python. And it's completely useless if you're not.
Compare this to Amazon -- they'll run just about anything that will work on x86/x86_64 Linux. It's up to the individual languages/frameworks to target Amazon.
So, to answer:
Essentially, a developer should be able to move between Joyent, the Amazon Web Services, Google, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, etc. by simply pointing the "deploy gun" at the cloud (having used the API mentioned above to spin up instances) and go.
This would be better accomplished by extending an existing tool like Rubber to support multiple clouds than to demand that every cloud hook into every possible framework.
After all, once we know enough about the requirements of the cloud model to actually draw up a list like this, and start working on standards, it shouldn't be too difficult to create a standard which allows Rubber (and friends, like PoolParty, Scalr, etc) to be portable without having to rewrite themselves for each cloud.
#4... Amazon is innovating with SimpleDB, Google has BigTable as solutions for the problem, but developers can't leave either cloud because neither SimpleDB nor BigTable are available anywhere else.
When a concept is so new that people can't even define it, now is not the time to be trying to develop an "open standard". Now is the time to be rapidly prototyping different ideas.
When we have several, stable clouds, then it might be time to talk about interoperability, or at least a compatibility layer.
I don't see any easy way to use EC2 with some third party solution for storage.
It's really no "harder", technologically, than using EC2 with S3. It's just that S3 is probably cheaper, especially when bandwidth between the two is free.
More specifically: An EC2 instance is just a Xen virtual machine. Amazon places no restrictions on what you run inside -- and as far as I know, they haven't even released their own S3 bindings, in any language. It's up to you to connect to S3, and it's exactly the same process, whether you're connecting from EC2 or not.
it would be lame if I had to go via internet for every request that should ideally be local.
That's exactly what EC2+S3 is. It's faster, certainly, if you're in Amazon's datacenter, but people can (and do) use S3 without EC2. Keep in mind that if either speed or reliability of the connection between the two is a concern, then you've chosen poorly for either hosting or storage.
But if you were expecting to, say, mount S3 as a local disk, you'll be disappointed. People have done so, but with deep black magic write-caching tricks that would probably work over a WAN as well.
that will only work for as long as some people think its wrong to pirate games.
Or as long as it's easier to legitimately buy a game than it is to pirate one.
I make a decent living. I have more money than time to throw at this problem. If the legitimate version was easier, sure, I'll buy it -- supports development and I get a better deal. But if I have to go to a crack/torrent site to fix my game, fuck 'em.
When all countries are like China in regard to copyright?
What China has that we don't is the infrastructure to support that piracy. You can literally walk up to a street vendor and buy a burned CD.
We don't have that -- most people here still think that the way to buy software is to walk into Best Buy and ask for help.
I think that reducing/removing DRM won't make people any more likely to attempt piracy -- I think it would make them less likely to do so -- and we already know it doesn't have any effect on how likely they are to succeed.
If copyright laws change, and if companies come out saying piracy is OK, that would change things -- but that's orthogonal to DRM.
Killing third party developer tools hurt Windows developers.
Only those working on third-party developer tools. Ordinary developers would now have a choice between free developer tools and paid (but presumably better) ones. There might also be an increase in FOSS tools, or in cheaper/free(beer) tools.
A wider ecosystem is a healthier one.
If Microsoft really believed that, I'd have Visual Studio Linux by now. No, keep it just narrow enough to make them money...
I've seen just as many asswipes in other games as in WoW. While many of them leave for WoW eventually, most don't -- some even bring back bad habits from WoW.
I think the other poster is right -- it's got nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with the scale.
The more straight forward solution is to hire some rackspace and host your own solution.
Which might be very bad (server in a closet behind the women's bathroom -- it actually has happened). Or it might be very good. If you get good enough at running a datacenter, you might start renting out your spare capacity -- thus, Cloud Computing.
Unless you were talking about renting some rackspace in a datacenter owned and managed by someone else. In which case, what's your point? The only difference here is the pricing model -- you'll be paying for all that rackspace 24/7, even if you only use it for five hours a day. A properly scalable cloud architecture will cost you close to nothing at 3 AM on a Friday when no one's on your site, but will be able to handle the Slashdot effect if you have to.
'Cloud Computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software.
Actually, it's not about renting software, it's about renting hardware.
True, you could use all that hardware to build something like Google Docs, which is essentially renting software -- although "renting" is a strange word, considering it's free (ad-supported). Or you could use it to run something entirely different.
I think that's where the confusion is. This article is about 'cloud computing' as in Amazon EC2. You're thinking more of apps in the 'cloud' (as the newest buzzword for web apps just like any other), which is an entirely different discussion.
Steve Jobs isn't going to bust down your door, seize your mice, or nail an iPhone over your trackpads.
Not because he doesn't want to, though...
Parallel ports, PS/2 ports, and floppy disks were all declared "dead" a long time ago, but their corpses aren't being buried too quickly.
I will admit that parallel and PS/2 probably exist on my motherboard, but it's certainly not a consideration when I buy one, and I can't remember the last time I used one.
I have a floppy drive in a box somewhere, in case I ever need it. Haven't touched it in at least a year.
your consciousness is tainted with superstition. Even if you feel compelled to make a joke about it, you're still brining attention to and perpetuating the superstition.
And what is wrong with that?
Take George Hrab's "Religious Moron of the Week" -- is that equally stupid for "perpetuating superstition"?
By carrying on the discussion, you've drawn even more attention to this "superstition" -- and the fact that it is a superstition -- than existed before. Good job! You're not only a hypocrite, you're (by your own definition) an "incredibly stupid" hypocrite!
But if they don't charge for VS, then all of the third party tools will die out
I somehow doubt that. Look at Apple -- Xcode is free, but people still pay for third-party tools. They just have to be a lot better than Xcode at something.
But what is that saving them from, really? How would killing third-party developer tools hurt MS?
For example MS, note that it was only with XP that they even tried to introduce some anti-piracy, and it is decidedly half-assed and low priority.
I don't know about 3.1, but 98 at least did include anti-piracy. It was called a Product Key.
In fact, the new anti-piracy features in XP caused a bit of a shitstorm (read: storm in a teacup), wherein many people refused to upgrade. Things like having to call Microsoft just because you bought a new hard drive -- that's ludicrous, when you really think about it. It's just that copy protection has gotten so bad that we accept these things as a matter of course, now.
Slashdot Mirror
To do some things that are trivial in a desktop app requires a lot of convoluted steps (callbacks, etc).
Don't tell me you've never used callbacks in a desktop app?
And even things that would be done the same way still requires a network round trip to get information that desktop apps don't suffer (simple tasks like dynamic drop-down or list population).
Except usually the point of doing this in a web app, as opposed to a desktop app, is that the data is stored somewhere else. If a desktop app would be doing the same thing -- making a SQL call to a database, or accessing a shared file on a network store -- then you lose nothing by doing this with the web app.
Unless you aren't smart enough to cache the results in the web app, the way you would for a desktop app... And even then, I suspect that the browser should be able to cache many XHR calls, if they're designed to be cacheable.
Really? I know Gmail does -- does GWT actually not do this, or are you making an uninformed statement about AJAX in general?
Mostly because no one's really gotten it right yet.
That, and we still don't have any set of frameworks which have built up enough to be difficult to replace. Nothing close to, say, GTK+, Qt, WinForms, Cocoa, etc.
the vast majority of posts here contribute nothing of particular value and or say nothing at all.
Most at least try to pad it with more than three words.
However, saying "What. The. Fuck." without giving a single reason why the article warrants that is really a waste of a comment. May as well just tag it wtf and be done with it.
Have you experimented at all with round-robin DNS records pointing to two different elastic IPs in different availability zones?
Nope.
Of course, the long-term plan is to have at least one on hot standby (or acting in another capacity) in a third zone -- the elastic IPs are not bound to availability zones, so however much this degrades performance, that'll only last 15 minutes.
If one availability zone goes tits-up, does round-robin yield acceptable performance, routing clients to the good zone?
I guess that really depends on the client properly detecting that one of the servers is dead, and that it should use the next one.
Keep in mind, that's not the only way to do it -- dynamic DNS is still feasible, so that's another way to narrow the window during which clients have to figure the situation out themselves. And given that we're mostly an AJAX widget, we can always do our own manual client-side load balancing, if we have to.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. I think this is another case of Amazon deliberately exposing the ephemeral nature of hardware, so that we are forced to engineer around it. I've never seen an instance crash, so our ephemeral store is probably as solid as many other providers, but we backup to S3 anyway.
Because I need to format it. Trivial example: I want to print huge letters, one per page, so I can make a big sign to put in the window, for a one-night-only event (prank, actually).
Or because I'm writing up a resume. Like it or not, plain text looks unprofessional next to a proper resume, with contact info right-justified at the top, proper (graphically) bullet-pointed lists, and maybe even a photo.
So "faster" is a non-issue -- I can make a text file faster, and I do that for things like READMEs in software, but it won't do what I want for a resume, a big party sign, a "Lost dog -- Reward" sign, or any of the many other uses for desktop publishing.
And because even if I did this every day for the rest of my life, it would still use an insignificant amount of disk space -- even if I stored the XML unzipped, in a folder (which some apps can do).
Because I don't know LaTeX, and don't have time to learn, especially for a one-off project. But even my grandmother knows Word. (Not making that up -- she also uses email, albeit very slowly.)
And because I can't recall ever needing the advanced features of LaTeX. I don't even use all of a WYSIWYG word processor's features -- when I use a word processor.
I'd have modded you offtopic, probably. Or flamebait.
Unfortunately, there isn't a moderation option for "Contributed nothing of value," or "Said nothing at all."
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days
Unless it's Excel -- which was the case last time I looked at the federal budget, if I recall.
why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
PDF != Acrobat.
PDF actually is an open standard, and is well supported by several open readers. While there are many Adobe-specific quirks, and Acrobat is arguably the worst PDF reader out there (heh, I just typoed it "Acrobad"), PDF is still very useful in a lot of contexts.
There are two problems with this: First, PDF is read-only (not everything should be).
Second, your mother doesn't know how to save as PDF. She'll still send you whatever the default format for her office suite is. It would really help if that default format was something we all know how to read -- that's the point of having a standard, so we don't have to think about this anymore.
So, you see, you actually should care about this debate -- precisely because if we win, no one will have to think about it anymore.
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software?
Both of these already exist.
let's just cook up a new extension for text files
And that about shows your complete lack of understanding.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
And it's not just word processing. It's presentations, spreadsheets, pretty much all office formats. But sure, let's pick the least useful of these for our most common example...
Everyone else has already pointed out my personal favorites -- Shoes, TryRuby, Squeak, Alice, and so on -- so I'm going to give you a piece of general advice:
He needs his own computer. Maybe more than one, but at least one, entirely to himself. And you don't get root on it unless he needs help.
He needs the freedom to be able to make his own mistakes, without it affecting anyone else.
I would even go one step further -- set up some virtual machines. Yes, he still needs to own the real hardware -- if nothing else, there's a psychological component. But virtual machines means he can deliberately sabotage a system without consequences -- what impact does "sudo rm -rf /" really have on a running environment? Let's find out!
Oh, and be prepared for him to make entirely different choices than you. Hopefully, he'll at least go beyond C -- point is, you'll know you've done your job when he disagrees with you on something -- and he's right.
#1... one key feature of the dedicated model for web applications is a stable, static IP address.
No it isn't. The key feature is a stable, reliable way to connect to your apps, wherever they are -- when I type example.com, I should be routed to the right place.
This means a built-in hardware load balancer, dynamic DNS, or anything in between.
Amazon's Elastic IP, for example, can take 15 minutes to switch between instances -- something like 10-12 minutes during which requests are sent to the old instance, then 2-3 minutes during which all traffic is dropped on the floor and no instance is reachable, and then, finally, traffic is routed properly to the new instance.
The only advantage is that if you don't have to do this often, you aren't paying for a hit to your DNS servers every few minutes, just in case.
#2... The API needs to be publicly available to everyone. Provide a credit card (that works and is yours) and you should get compute, storage, and RAM on-demand.
This is important -- not only are we moving beyond "submitting a ticket", but it has to be programmatic, not just point-and-click from a web interface.
For example, one could auto-scale on demand -- kill a few instances for the night, as no one's up at 3 AM, then bring them back up when you get traffic. Or bring up an extra few dozen to gracefully handle a Slashdotting.
But there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Autoscaling is nice, but consider that we might know exactly when we need power, and when we don't. We might deliberately spawn a ton of instances to handle a large batch encoding (like YouTube should have, when switching to high-def h.264), or deliberately turn off an instance when we don't need it (only really need a staging server and SVN/Trac during the day).
#3... I propose that cloud computers should support PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and the most common frameworks, libraries, gems/plugins, and application/web servers for each of these languages.
Absolutely not. That is the wrong way to go about this.
Specifically: What happens when I want to deploy an Erlang app, which uses a Smalltalk VM for a database, and forks off ffmpeg commands to do encoding? What if I like Ruby just fine, but I want to deploy, say, Sinatra + Sequel + sqlite?
I really like what Google has done with Python. All the low-level details are handled for you -- just throw a Python app up on App Engines and you're good to go. Probably not even OS-level virtualization -- could even be a language-level jail.
Which is all really great -- if you're running Python. And it's completely useless if you're not.
Compare this to Amazon -- they'll run just about anything that will work on x86/x86_64 Linux. It's up to the individual languages/frameworks to target Amazon.
So, to answer:
Essentially, a developer should be able to move between Joyent, the Amazon Web Services, Google, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, etc. by simply pointing the "deploy gun" at the cloud (having used the API mentioned above to spin up instances) and go.
This would be better accomplished by extending an existing tool like Rubber to support multiple clouds than to demand that every cloud hook into every possible framework.
After all, once we know enough about the requirements of the cloud model to actually draw up a list like this, and start working on standards, it shouldn't be too difficult to create a standard which allows Rubber (and friends, like PoolParty, Scalr, etc) to be portable without having to rewrite themselves for each cloud.
#4... Amazon is innovating with SimpleDB, Google has BigTable as solutions for the problem, but developers can't leave either cloud because neither SimpleDB nor BigTable are available anywhere else.
Again, far, far too early to create a standard.
However, we h
When a concept is so new that people can't even define it, now is not the time to be trying to develop an "open standard". Now is the time to be rapidly prototyping different ideas.
When we have several, stable clouds, then it might be time to talk about interoperability, or at least a compatibility layer.
I don't see any easy way to use EC2 with some third party solution for storage.
It's really no "harder", technologically, than using EC2 with S3. It's just that S3 is probably cheaper, especially when bandwidth between the two is free.
More specifically: An EC2 instance is just a Xen virtual machine. Amazon places no restrictions on what you run inside -- and as far as I know, they haven't even released their own S3 bindings, in any language. It's up to you to connect to S3, and it's exactly the same process, whether you're connecting from EC2 or not.
it would be lame if I had to go via internet for every request that should ideally be local.
That's exactly what EC2+S3 is. It's faster, certainly, if you're in Amazon's datacenter, but people can (and do) use S3 without EC2. Keep in mind that if either speed or reliability of the connection between the two is a concern, then you've chosen poorly for either hosting or storage.
But if you were expecting to, say, mount S3 as a local disk, you'll be disappointed. People have done so, but with deep black magic write-caching tricks that would probably work over a WAN as well.
that will only work for as long as some people think its wrong to pirate games.
Or as long as it's easier to legitimately buy a game than it is to pirate one.
I make a decent living. I have more money than time to throw at this problem. If the legitimate version was easier, sure, I'll buy it -- supports development and I get a better deal. But if I have to go to a crack/torrent site to fix my game, fuck 'em.
When all countries are like China in regard to copyright?
What China has that we don't is the infrastructure to support that piracy. You can literally walk up to a street vendor and buy a burned CD.
We don't have that -- most people here still think that the way to buy software is to walk into Best Buy and ask for help.
I think that reducing/removing DRM won't make people any more likely to attempt piracy -- I think it would make them less likely to do so -- and we already know it doesn't have any effect on how likely they are to succeed.
If copyright laws change, and if companies come out saying piracy is OK, that would change things -- but that's orthogonal to DRM.
Killing third party developer tools hurt Windows developers.
Only those working on third-party developer tools. Ordinary developers would now have a choice between free developer tools and paid (but presumably better) ones. There might also be an increase in FOSS tools, or in cheaper/free(beer) tools.
A wider ecosystem is a healthier one.
If Microsoft really believed that, I'd have Visual Studio Linux by now. No, keep it just narrow enough to make them money...
Try actually reading it. Third panel describes exactly what I was replying to.
You see, they'll introduce a new class that is so vastly superior to all the others that everyone stops playing the other classes.
Reminded me of:
Chaos World-Smasher -- balance problems
I've seen just as many asswipes in other games as in WoW. While many of them leave for WoW eventually, most don't -- some even bring back bad habits from WoW.
I think the other poster is right -- it's got nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with the scale.
Obligatory Penny-Arcade: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/7/14/
I didn't know he died until I saw it in these threads.
Just see it for yourself.
The more straight forward solution is to hire some rackspace and host your own solution.
Which might be very bad (server in a closet behind the women's bathroom -- it actually has happened). Or it might be very good. If you get good enough at running a datacenter, you might start renting out your spare capacity -- thus, Cloud Computing.
Unless you were talking about renting some rackspace in a datacenter owned and managed by someone else. In which case, what's your point? The only difference here is the pricing model -- you'll be paying for all that rackspace 24/7, even if you only use it for five hours a day. A properly scalable cloud architecture will cost you close to nothing at 3 AM on a Friday when no one's on your site, but will be able to handle the Slashdot effect if you have to.
'Cloud Computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software.
Actually, it's not about renting software, it's about renting hardware.
True, you could use all that hardware to build something like Google Docs, which is essentially renting software -- although "renting" is a strange word, considering it's free (ad-supported). Or you could use it to run something entirely different.
I think that's where the confusion is. This article is about 'cloud computing' as in Amazon EC2. You're thinking more of apps in the 'cloud' (as the newest buzzword for web apps just like any other), which is an entirely different discussion.
Steve Jobs isn't going to bust down your door, seize your mice, or nail an iPhone over your trackpads.
Not because he doesn't want to, though...
Parallel ports, PS/2 ports, and floppy disks were all declared "dead" a long time ago, but their corpses aren't being buried too quickly.
I will admit that parallel and PS/2 probably exist on my motherboard, but it's certainly not a consideration when I buy one, and I can't remember the last time I used one.
I have a floppy drive in a box somewhere, in case I ever need it. Haven't touched it in at least a year.
your consciousness is tainted with superstition. Even if you feel compelled to make a joke about it, you're still brining attention to and perpetuating the superstition.
And what is wrong with that?
Take George Hrab's "Religious Moron of the Week" -- is that equally stupid for "perpetuating superstition"?
By carrying on the discussion, you've drawn even more attention to this "superstition" -- and the fact that it is a superstition -- than existed before. Good job! You're not only a hypocrite, you're (by your own definition) an "incredibly stupid" hypocrite!
But if they don't charge for VS, then all of the third party tools will die out
I somehow doubt that. Look at Apple -- Xcode is free, but people still pay for third-party tools. They just have to be a lot better than Xcode at something.
But what is that saving them from, really? How would killing third-party developer tools hurt MS?
For example MS, note that it was only with XP that they even tried to introduce some anti-piracy, and it is decidedly half-assed and low priority.
I don't know about 3.1, but 98 at least did include anti-piracy. It was called a Product Key.
In fact, the new anti-piracy features in XP caused a bit of a shitstorm (read: storm in a teacup), wherein many people refused to upgrade. Things like having to call Microsoft just because you bought a new hard drive -- that's ludicrous, when you really think about it. It's just that copy protection has gotten so bad that we accept these things as a matter of course, now.