On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 11:46:23AM -0500, JoeHill wrote
I've been reading articles like this for years now, in various forms proclaiming that the home desktop PC is a flawed and obsolete model, and that all of our software should be run from secure servers instead.
Personally, they can take my desktop when they pry it from my cold dead hands, but I'm curious about how others see this issue. Of course there's nothing *inherantly* wrong with relinquishing some control to networked servers,
While composing this email, I'm listening to an American Internet radio station that plays nothing but pre-Beatles rock/pop. This freaks out the CRTC (Commission for Repression and Thought Control) no small amount. When she became chair of the CRTC, Mme. Francoise Bertrand had a rant about "Canadians spending too much time visiting American websites" and by-golly, we're gonna do something about it... http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/ottawa-sun.18nov96.html Just be thankful that the web exploded and created itself in a big-bang event that caught the regulators flat-footed. Look at what happened with satellite TV. Following the same pattern, we'd now all have 9600 bps dial-up, and we'd only be allowed to view Sympatico.ca internal webpages. The CRTC has tried to "make the internet safer for children" on a couple of occasions, but gotten nowhere. However, if there only a few major servers running our programs, it'll make things "so much easier" for regulators.
but dare we trust our software when we don't have ultimate control over it locally, especially when we are talking about proprietary, closed source software that we cannot see what's "under the hood"?
Show-stoppers... If you aren't running broadband, forget about it. You have to get the data into the program. This means either downloading the program to your "set-top box", or uploading large spreadsheets and databases to publicly accessable systems. Yeah sure. -- Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> Email users are divided into two classes; 1) Those who have effective spam-blocking 2) Those who wish they did -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml