Saying 'No' to an Executable Internet 306
Dylan Knight Rogers writes "Applications are constantly being ported for usage on the Internet - either for a viable escape from expensive software, or because it's often helpful to have an app that you can access from anywhere. Operating systems that run from the Web will be a different story."
Forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Local apps give us a lot of freedom. It might be nice to be able to also have such a centralised system available, but even with access on planes, there are always times and places you'll be cut off.
woof.
Anyone RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yawn, we've been doing this for 15+ years (Score:5, Insightful)
I was horrified when I went back to set up networking booting in Un*xville, yes, horrified. "These people are dumb, not the terminals" is about the most polite I could be about the state of "the network IS the computer".
It's all about the service model (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is fine is the service doesn't disappear or go evil.
This article is one big troll. (Score:5, Insightful)
Taco, you should be embarrassed for posting the article. There's nothing here but a bad rant about how Windows is a terrible OS, and microsoft sucks. You may agree or disagree with that statement, but rants against Windows aren't news.
You need to do better than that (Score:3, Insightful)
There are few apps which can't run locally. They might run faster on the massive centralised hardware but if you can't connect, you're fucked. Anyone who can't afford to be fucked by the loss of a connection to any centralised system (like, say, a hospital) has a localised back-up already in place. It's not efficient but it keeps things working.
And you're also ignoring the cost. You'll pay for usage, either flat rate per time period or per-minute. Microsoft's been talking about working Office into this sort of model for more than five years now. Clearly they believe it would earn them more money.
woof.
The concept isn't bad, but the application stinks (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, a huge majority of these applications are going active-x or other proprietary format, and are limiting users' access on a more fundamental level - they expand the coverage range but limit you by your access point. Our ticket system has just gone to an active-x system. Now I cannot access it from my laptop anymore. So instead of making things more flexible for me and being able to access the system from any of the 200 machines in the building that I used to be able to use, I now can access it from less than two dozen machines, only one of which I have convenient access to.
Wonderful, just wonderful.
Worst Article EVER (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Point? (Score:5, Insightful)
And they're not English instructors - some posters can just speak English and find mistakes glaring and detract from the message (see Marshall McLuhan). But go ahead with your arrogant responses. It just makes it easier for the rest of us to filter you out.
People will mostly accept honest mistakes. When the offender instead tries to make out that their mistakes aren't mistakes at all, for whatever reason, when clearly they are, this is what tries people's patience.
This article misses the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
"factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to and still don't today would be gaming consoles..."
The X-Box and the X-Box 360? Microsoft put billions of dollars into those gaming consoles.
"As experience tells us, 'easily used' operating systems such as Windows are notorious for poor security..."
What about Apple's Unix-based OS X? That's often considered easier to use than Windows for new computer users.
"resulting in a poorly designed operating platform and ignorant users who don't know the difference between WEP and WPA..."
It seems like he's arguing that the users of an operating system determine the quality of that operating system.
Really, I think this article misses the point. Internet-based OSes will not be feasible now or in the near future, I agree; however, that has more to do with bandwidth limitations, and the enormous variety of hardware out there, than security flaws in Windows (Live?). Security will always be a big issue--especially when distributed to a network of hundreds of millions of computers--but the hardware and infrastructure issues will derail the process much earlier and more severely, IMO.
IT Phone Home! (Score:4, Insightful)
Gmail updates whether I like it or not. I'm always using the latest version, so now i'm stuck with a fking IM client for a mail host.
Hamachi doesn't run online, but phones home constantly and nags you relentlessly to "update to version X.X" every time they release a minor bug fix. When you give in and click "update" the thing is riddled with new bugs the previous version didn't have.
iTunes is similar. I never wanted all the bloat the latest versions give me. Thank christ its not an online prog. I can run the version I choose.
I spent $99 on HalfLife 2 and *cannot* play it anymore because of the very poor "Phone Home" code in steam that refuses to contact the server.
I got locked out of *my own* computer once for a day after an XP update. That wasn't cheap
I'm desparately trying to swap to linux to avoid the Vista DRM hell.
I love accessing my software from this computer remotely (using hamachi at present, but this seems to be an under developed tech) & would love to use a web interface to access info & software from my home PC from any device at any time, but I would like to retain the power over what runs on *my* pc & where that info is stored.
InternetOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummmm...
Can't you run thin clients (of some variety) over the Internet? Like the variety that consist of a boot disk (floppy, CD, or boot ROM) and pull the rest from elsewhere?
Re:errrr.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Meh. The whole "certification" theory seems to not tally with practice. Why does NT seem to have more security issues than Linux, even though Linux is, by the Orange Book, a less well designed system.
Seems to me like there is something important that the Orange Book fails to take into account.
Dumb Idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about having the network augment the user's computer? I mean, there are a lot of idle CPUs out there, right? What if your apps were designed to run on your own system just fine, but could tap into free CPU time as needed, SETI@home-style?
Now even to a non-computer person like me, security is obviously an issue here, but it seems like this could work pretty well on a company's in-house network, or over a LAN in your house, or whatever. Assuming the bandwidth was there in the network connections and the software could support it, couldn't you sort of turn your desktop and laptop into a dual-CPU machine - at least partly anyway?
And what about all those idle GPUs out there? They could be put to use in the same way too.
Just a thought.
Re:It won't necessarily ruin security. (Score:1, Insightful)
If I take a look at a linux system's
audio1, audio2, audio3
dsrp1, dsrp2, dsrp3
eda1, eda2, eda3
fb0, fb1, fb2
fd0, fd1
hda1, hda2, hda3
hdb1, hdb2, hdb3
ippp0, ippp1, ippp2
isdn0, isdn1, isdn2
isdnctrl0, isdnctrl1, isdnctrl2
loop0, loop1, loop2
I don't know about you, but what I see is most number systems starting from 0, a few fucktarded ones starting from 1 and a lettering system used to number drives just to spice things up.
In my (not so) humble opinion, that is fucking broken. There is no reason a user should have to go in and fix that. If you Linux guys really want to number starting from 1, at least be consistent and number _everything_ starting from 1.
It's shit like this why I hate Linux and love BSD. BSD feels designed. BSD is consistent. Linux feels slapped-together in the way that everything does something a bit differently than everything else.
*dons flame-resistant suit*
ND
Re:errrr.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me like there is something important that the Orange Book fails to take into account.
It's not necessarily what the Orange Book is failing to take into account, it's the observer. Microsoft Windows, thanks to Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft's maximum documentation overkill mindset, is childishly easy to write apps for, apps which themselves are ignorant of security and stability standards and free to traipse across the memory and hard drive under the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory. Also following this dictum of getting away with anything the OS will let you are the Windows users who will point and click their way to infection, compromise, and instability every chance they get.
Linux users on the other hand might for instance have to know how to read well enough to make us of a text editor like Vi or Emacs and edit yum.conf and include repositories that clash to begin fouling the system up with bad code. Linux doesn't make it easy to put good code on it never mind bad code.
Just wait though. If Linux adoption ever becomes what the wet dreams of the rabid partisans would have, then it will mean easy application writing and loading will have arrived along with technical specifics ignorant user base that doesn't care how it works, but just wants it to do whatever they imagine it should. "I thought that program would show me free porn movies. I didn't know it was going to turn the registry into swiss cheese, whatever that is."
Re:Questions for the blogger... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this an OS that boots over a network? Is it a framework for building applications that are partly server-side and partly client-side? How is this different from present-day web applications like Google Maps?
And, most importantly, what is the benefit of a web-based OS?
Re:You need to do better than that (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of your point was good, this part is horribly wrong .
The majority of US farm land has been idled due to the low cost of foreign food,
and the influx of huge Corporate farms like ADM(Archer Daniels Midland).
During Depression/World War II the people were told to grow a garden in there back yards
to deal with the situation .
My Grandparents still had this habit when I was growing up as a kid thru the 70's and 80's .
We had so much food we canned it, froze it, and gave it away .
The large cities of the east and left coast this is not practical, but there are large
patches of land throughout the mid west that were crushed due to Globalization and
Willy Nelson and Friends held a series of concerts called Farm Aid for all the farmers
whose families and lives were ruined by the globalization of food .
http://www.farmaid.org/site/PageServer?pagename=a
While it is good and great that we help the poor outside our borders, it is bad
that we make our nation vulnerable to shipping embargos and eat food from countries
that do not have the same pesticide rules as we do in the US .
Soil and water pollution levels in these countires are not monitored like they are here .
The taxes on land, the equipment, and the fuel are not on equal footing either, so the
US farmer cannot compete and a large number of small farms went broke .
The cost of living is higher here, as is the cost of doing business .
Outourcing our food will be something that will come back to haunt us in the future .
I was born and raised on a farm, and I dare say you were not .
Ex-MislTech
Re:errrr.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easier to develop code for Linux than for Windows. That is why there are so many more applications for Linux than there are for Windows, and it is also why developers, on the whole, prefer to use Linux when it is suitable. There are no evident alternative explanations for these facts.