People, in their Internet-aholism, seem to care less and less about their privacy. Are we regressing on some level?
But what's even more amazing is that this seemingly endless source of revenue makes people think it actually enhances their lives, whereas the added value to their lives is doubtful, at best.
The Economist talks about the new tech bubble: http://www.economist.com/node/18681576, and this time, it seems like it's here to stay. All these new "technologies" look like they have something in common: depriving people of their freedom (the so-called "cloud", social networks, increasingly intrusive search engines...)
Will I eventually be proved wrong? I hope so.
So why does it seem as if everybody wants to make us dependent on a 24/7 connection to the web, and why does it seem everyone wants to turn the browser into the building block upon which everything else depends?
Because it's a potentially endless source of revenue. It's really that simple.
In soviet OS, everything is a persistant object.
Kidding aside, I see several major issues with this concept: the increased risk of losing valuable data, the slowness, the very low interoperability (how do you exchange data with other OS's?), the whole span of programming languages that are not supported (I don't want to be coerced into using Java or C#, what's that about?)
Another issue is that I think the "object oriented" paradigms that are in use today are flawed in some aspects, and instead of basing everything computing-related on that, maybe we need to work on the concepts first.
IF I HAD A MINE SHAFT, I don't think I would just abandon it. There's got to be a better way. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.