Deviant Abstraction

This is a quite interesting interview about how fiction and reality are mixing themselves up. It seems this is nothing new except now this is done on a much bigger scale.

Link (in French sorry)

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?

“I hate it when my ideas are the best in the room. That just means I didn’t make the room big enough.”

Chris Anderson

What is there to add?

(via BoingBoing)

This post is an excellent introduction to the Semantic Web Vision and current issues associated.

Link

We all know this chart is already obsolete and somewhat irrelevant. However, reflecting upon it is always useful.

What it really shows is the mainstream view of these technology. You can see VoIP or Web 2.0 but not P2P which is an emerging system trends (in the sense that a lot of its potential is still untapped). Some points are senseless (Grid computing: what does it mean? MPI is already there and battle-tested) and mix commercial application (VoIP), applied research (sensor networks) and fundamental research (quantum computing). In a way, this is good: it lays down some frontiers the academic community has artificially created.

Via JdN

Scary data gathering by Tim Oreilly. This graph is the aggregation of book sales by language.

What do you think?

Via Tim’s Blog

This article proposes a valorization of a network of n log(n) instead of n^2 according to Metcalfe’s law. They try to differenciate value in each link through this.

A must-read.

Link

MySpace is all the rush now. Everybody thinks social networks those days (therefore graph and OR) . And they are right. This post blogs about vertical social networks. They will be probably be really important. Who would like his LinkedIn and MySpace profile to intersect?

(source: leighblackall from FlickR)

Here’s another good point:

“Markets are social networks, with some specialized rules, and we will continue to see the enhancement of markets for everything including cars, jobs, and the like.” This is both true and untrue, bue quite well written :p

Link

From Tim Bray, his own état de l’art analysis. Quite interesting. Especialy for someone like me with a strong focus on distributed computing.

I will comment on it later (after my exams probably, right now I have a lot, a lot of work)

Link