Comments | atheorist: things

atheorist

things

Jun 01, 2012 18:32

Okay, so Cosma Shalizi is very smart, and reminded me about linear programming not actually solving the socialist central planning problem. And that reminded me of the New Yorker's View of the World. We each have our ecocentric perspective of the world. And perhaps that is a strategy of how to fight against "the move to 'the cloud'" (a.k.a. the war ( Read more... )

Comments 7

justbeast June 2 2012, 05:24:26 UTC

Heh, I was JUST reading the entry halfway through, and immediately thought "hmm I wonder if namecoin would be appropriate", and then there it was at the end of the sentence :)

atheorist June 2 2012, 07:49:57 UTC

:)

You would enjoy Cosma Shalizi's article, I think.

justbeast June 2 2012, 08:29:38 UTC

Yeah, I'm reading it right now, with great interest!

justbeast June 2 2012, 05:50:44 UTC

Also, I don't think the "move to 'the cloud'" is equivalent to the war on general purpose computing. At worst, it's only a small subset, and at best, completely orthogonal to the overall war.

atheorist June 2 2012, 07:49:22 UTC

Oh?

justbeast June 2 2012, 08:54:17 UTC

Here's what I mean. There are lots of small battles being fought, in the war against general purpose computing.

For example - Oracle's recent lawsuit with Google (which thankfully google seems to have won), where Oracle was claiming that API signatures were copyriteable. An insane, breathtakingly evil, troll logic move on Oracle's part, which would have killed a lot of free software and competition. (see http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operating_systems/240001347 etc). Battle against general purpose computing (that has nothing to do with the cloud)? Absolutely.
(All sorts of DRM/copyright law battles fall into this category).
Same sort of deal with Microsoft's Secure Boot/Trusted Computing initiative, which is trying to wrest control of the actual PC hardware from the user (especially when the hardware is running ARM architecture ( ... )

atheorist June 2 2012, 12:29:43 UTC

Here is an analogy. Imagine two elastic containers connected by a tube. The two containers represent the edge and middle of the net. The strategies you mention (locking people out of their computers) are like squeezing one of the containers. What happens if you squeeze one container? The other one gets bigger. There wouldn't be a point to locking customers out of their computers if "the cloud" (big datacenters with walls running lots of Intel chips) didn't exist for the functionality to go to ( ... )