My alien soup

“ Auf der einen Seite die, die das Internet als eine Erfüllung des nie eingelösten Versprechens der Brechtschen Radiotheorie sehen, als ein Medium, in dem jeder Empfänger auch gleichzeitig Sender sein kann. Der amerikanische Internetpionier Dave Winer etwa spricht vom „Two-Way-Web“, davon, dass das Web eine „Umgebung für Schreiber, nicht nur für Leser“ sei. Auf der anderen Seite sitzen die Vertreter der Unterhaltungskonzerne, für die das Netz nur ein weiterer Distributionskanal der klassischen Medien ist, angereichert um ein paar interaktive Spielereien. ”

“ “All we’re saying is that the majority of the data that gets exfiltrated ultimately finds its way to IP addresses in China, and that’s pretty much all anybody knows, ”

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> since yes, the desktop is going away,

Oh pleaze. For all the buzz about "the desktop going away", the number of desktop computers seems to just keep growing. Homes that had one PC now have two. Or three. Individuals who had their own now have their own desktop PC and a laptop (or at least a netbook, which contrary to its name seems to end up spending at least as much "on" time doing stuff a few thousand feet above sea level, inside flying aluminum cylinders that are one of the last frontiers where internet access is still rare and expensive). Most of the people "making do" with a laptop as their only computer are people who formerly had no computer at all. The people who owned computers 15+ years ago won't give up their desktop until laptops routinely come with dual 24" displays and quad+core CPUs.

Cloud computing is the new paperless office. As more than a few have observed over the years, the paperless office was officially welcomed 15 years ago, yet 21st-century offices still seem to somehow generate at least twice as much printed output per employee as they ever did in the dark ages. The main difference is that back then, the paper copies were carefully stored in file folders for future reference. Now, they're stored in the SAN, and four dozen copies get casually printed on demand so everyone can pretend to read them at the weekly status meeting & use them to scribble notes on before tossing them all in the big blue bin after lunch. I'm quite confident that when the day arrives that I have a hundred terrabytes of data stored "in the cloud", I'll have at least ten times as much physically present within my home.

Desktops aren't going away anytime soon, any more than TVs with eight-foot screens are going to be displaced by personal media tablets. They might end up mutating into our own personal faux-clouds, perpetually connected to our PadPCs and phones, but at the end of the day, when you need to edit video (from the 25 years of videotapes you're still trying to digitize before they rot into grey digital goo), sort out 400,000 family photos digitized and captured over the years, do your taxes, and write cool software for your new phone to sell online for enough profit to buy a stale gumball from a vending machine, you're going to have one hell of a home PC that will make the most high-end PC available today look like a Commodore 64. With liquid nitrogen cooling to keep it from causing a mini fireball (it only throws off 10 watts of heat thanks to miniaturization & efficiency, but those 10 watts are concentrated in an area the size of a poppy seed).

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