Deviant Abstraction

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According to Joseph, one of my close friends, we are transitioning from history to “post-history”. Prehistory to history was marked by invention of writing. Post-history by keeping everything online.

We are in this time because everything someone makes/write is digital. It can be kept for a cost approaching zero. Future historians will have more than a glimpse of this time: they will be able to experience this time.

Digging a little bit more, this is not yet true: currently most of the dataset are deleted but the time where everything will be archived is not far away. We can see it coming thanks to a few archiving websites.

Another example: phone operators keep the content of all your SMS. Right now, only the police can access them (in Europe) but historians will be able to… And you too !

I don’t know how new is this idea but I find this idea fascinating.

Link

“We’re approaching a transition point in computing (…). It isn’t just the Internet or search or access to movies and music that matter, but all of those presented in a technological context that Just Plain Works. The importance of all our digital stuff along with our fear of losing it will shift us more and more toward central backup and storage. And once you have your life sitting on some company’s server, are you going to move it on a whim? No, and that means there will be a LOT of money to be made providing these services. Storage and automated backup and probably some form of netboot with a fresh OS image every time is the future of computing whether we’re talking about desktops or notebooks or mobile phones.”

This is an informed opinion and I agree with him (and I am not the only one: Fred?).

Link

I think now everybody know what is discussed on this subject.

Link (Via Klub42)

(From a Web based config)

I went last Friday to a Barcamp in Salzburg, Austria. I have taken some pics: here they are.

A lot of really neat project, really great people,… I highly recommend it.

The event was organized by Subnet.

Update Other photos are here. Of course on Flickr.

Link

Funny and concise article. Of course behind the rhetoric, nobody seems to address the real issue. This issue is simple though:

A lot of Internet users share copyrighted material. We cannot send so many to jail. But creators need to pay their rents. What do we do?

Link

If it makes you laugh you are a geek.

Via Boing Boing

I have recently relocated from a big city to a small town in the countryside. This lifestyle change pointed out several limits of the web application paradigm since I have now only a very limited Internet connectivity.

At first I tried to use web applications extensively for my private life: agenda, text processor, todo and so on…. But it turns out this is a far from ideal situation.

For instance:

• No confidentiality. I don’t want to expose all my data to outsiders especially on a wifi network. I send and receive sensitive data like my credit card number.
• Only online access. OK this one is obvious but my Internet access is limited and irregular. This is is the first time in more than ten years. It is destabilizing. How do I access my calendar even when there is no Internet around? Web application do not provide this.
• Silo effect. I usually process subset of my data with custom made scripts. Those scripts are not web aware. There are as far as I know no find or grep for the Web. Not even a universal and easy way to parse any HTML page from any computer language.
• Lack of customization. I have tailored my desktop to my needs and this is a huge value add for me. For instance, Evolution, Skype and Gaim are automatically launched at startup times, my SVN repositories are updated… Web application does not offer any way to configure them this easily. What I need is kind of NetVibes on steroids
• Integration with current application. Desktop applications are heavily integrated. For instance, I can load with my desktop computer my Ipod. I can not from web applications.
• Interactivity. I need speed and efficiency. This is the basis of interactive applications. Web applications (even Gmail) are slow and clumsy for obvious latency reasons. This is OK for email not for code editing.

One silly example that happened yesterday. I need to fill online my tax declaration. For this French’s government is generating a certificate. But no web applications allow me to store this certificate for me (and for good reasons).

You might object that I could have built a web application to take care of those needs, this Netvibes on steroid. Actually I started but I found in between a much more elegant solution: the use of a remote desktop system. One issue remains though. Its cost: a dedicated server is expensive.

(USB systems have also their own limit mainly “no background mode”.)

A virtual machine paid by the hour such as EC2 is perfect and nearly free (it could even be financed by advertisement if a company wanted to operate such a service). It is my Personal Virtual Machine (PVM). Some companies have started offering them for free (ie Desktop On Demand) but their offer is unreliable, slow and you cannot run all the applications you want/need.

In the end I installed KDE and NXE on my dedicated server (NXE is a great WAN remote desktop tool. Truly impressive). It solved all my problems really fast although it is costly (more than 30 euros per month). Marketing hype is on web applications but now we should start to explore alternatives especially if they empower users and are a cheaper alternatives (I can demonstrate it if needed). I can access it from my corporate PC, my cellphone or a cybercafe.

As a final note I am not saying that WebApp are bad. Just that they are not the universal panacea. Especially for lonely, interactive and heavily used applications. I will discuss this in more depth later. The PVM vision is not either the perfect solution but for heavy computer users such as myself it offers real advantages: no need for backup ever,r power consumption alway the lowest possible, you access your machine at your will without leaving it on.

The next steps is to be able to tie a virtual machine to a physical computer and then sends it back in the cloud. VMware system allows such trick. I will discuss this later in more depth too and I will tell you how it was to use this prototype for a month.

What do you think of this idea? Would you like me to explore those ideas more in depth?