I'm probably the least fan of Microsoft in the world, but I have to agree with you on that. More generally, cloud products are extremely convenient on the surface, but beneath the water there is an iceberg of trouble.
Especially when you don't have your own backups of the data, as usual with these kind of services. Outages, unexplained data loss, services being shut down, users being locked out for unrelated reasons (oh you didn't put your real name in G+?), unexpected changes to the interface and software, the list goes on.
The vendor lock-in is even worse than when using closed-source software with DRM. At least you can keep running those (if necessary in an emulator) when discontinued, or reverse engineer them...
You left out the bit where Google invested massively in one of the few credible alternatives to Office, and forced Microsoft to reengineer their products to enable online collaboration. So, it's a step or two backwards on support and a leap forward on functionality and access (You can get fully functional Google Docs for free, just not on your own domain, Office 365 seems to be £80/year).
You can also get free Microsoft Office apps in SkyDive, which are actually better than Google Docs (and don't screw up your documents). These apps don't need an Office 365 sub.
Despite the name, Office 365 isn't really about Office -- you already have it -- it's selling web-based SharePoint and other services.
a) we're not allowed to put phones in it due to the lithium content.
b) I doubt in the moment of anger at the piece of shit, taking it home and politely disposing of it would have the same mental satisfaction as smashing the bastard thing to bits on the motorway.
Irresponsible or not, humans aren't perfect unless they make condescending remarks on the internet.
It's easy to criticize from the couch, but throwing a phone from a car window is VERY irresponsible. I doubt that in the moment of anger she looked first to see if there was someone else on the road.
Being hit by a phone while riding a motorbike doesn't seem fun.
Throwing anything from a moving vehicle should lead to instant driving license annihilation. You make light of it but people get killed that way.
If you can't control your impulses to throw stuff out of your car in fits of rage then you don't belong on the road. It's a shared resource, and using it is conditional on your behaviour.
I'm sure some people are just crap hoarders. I've got a 128gb ssd and my data backup size for the last 30 years is about 12Gb including music and photos leaving the disk about 60Gb used.
It's reasonably easy to fill a 16GB card with < 1 yr's worth of mountaineering still photos from a modern digital camera. Documents are small, but images and video, especially at high quality, consume a lot of space.
Are all the photos great? No. Will I know which ones will prove useful in the future? Only approximately. Storage is cheap!
Acetate rocks, especially when its well written and you can pop into the prof's office and have a tea and chat and do some photocopying. I learned much more this way.
Chalk, we spent more time dictating and deciphering the babbling fool who can't communicate it all concisely from memory.
I understand your feeling, I know it very well. But that isn't a choice. There is no way to "stop technology". Humanity has always been about technology, from the moment we started picking up sticks.
All we can really do is make sure that technology, and knowledge about it, is more evenly distributed, so that central control is more difficult: make sure it isn't seen as kind of magic to people that they deem is impossible to understand and out of reach to them. Technology is simply a set of tools and should be regarded as such.
Centralized technologies with easily controlled, single points of failure are by far the most dangerous, and the most attractive for oppression. This is why DRM, for example, is really bad. It lives by obfuscation and being hard and/or undesirable to understand.
Also: the tech industry needs to grow up out of the prevalent libertarian attitude[1]. There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction against government action but because that's a fantasy, it usually becomes an excuse for doing nothing at all. As a community we spend far too much time protesting inevitable tends when we should be calling for reasonable, workable regulation – e.g. we're never going to have a world without your personal information being collected in various places (this is the tech-libertarian equivalent of the belief record company executives have about DRM) but as a community we could make significant improvements for security, independent oversight, liability for loss & errors, etc.
1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.
"glibertarian" and implying immaturity are a good start, but you missed references to roads and Somalia if you want to hit all the anti-libertarian straw men.
I guess it was a good thing I outlined the specific positions I was referring to – otherwise someone might have only made a cursory reading and complained about straw men rather than addressing the problem.
Except those aren't straw men. Those are valid objections to some extreme Libertarian and/or Anarchist positions that haven't been answered, only painted as straw men.
Unfortunately technology's progression via marketing has turned it into a king of magic that is impossible to understand and is out of reach of them (past consumption). Look at most consumer IT products these days - black boxes for milking people.
DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.
I'm fully aware of what is happening, and how things appear to be going the "wrong" direction, at least according to the tech news. Don't let that despair you.
What I proposed was something we (as in people with intimate knowledge about these things) could do to make this better. A lot of technical people are content with being high priests, and a lot of "consumers" content with not understanding what is going on. It may be possible to change that, albeit slowly.
Looking beneath the surface level hyper commercialized pooha, there are quite active developments by in distributed protocols, mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and people working on technology that is open and can meet basic human needs (for example see http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...), and so on.
Another thing is that centralization makes things fragile. Even though centralization may be more efficient at first glance, once centralized systems collapse enough, people will look for more decentralized solutions.
I don't agree with you. The problem with IT technology is that it's connected. It is (evenly) distributed, but connected. This gives people who want bad a much wider perspective.
Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.
And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.
Difficult to comment without knowing the specifics but I assume there is some transfer of data/code under specific conditions? As in your customers can't just say "gimmie your code , we want to fork it".
That's a little bit different and in most cases for consumer SaaS (facebook,gmail etc) there is no way to get at the software itself. All the consumer gets is a thin client layer.
What is the problem with being connected? I think it is good to strive for connectivity as it encourages cooperation. Of course you need to be careful with what you trust and what you don't trust, and spread the risk when a connection goes 'bad'. This means not relying too much on any one connection.
I don't understand what you mean by "easily broken by revolutions". I also don't see what is bad with a wider perspective, unless it is somehow restricted to "bad people" (the classical panopticon?), but that'd require a very centralized system.
The same "technology" that enables us to develop antibiotics so we can live also creates the biological threats that can massacre us during conflicts. Every knife cuts both ways.
Technology just magnifies the power of a person, so in saying that you would rather have no technology, are you not also implying that people who's incentives you dislike, already have more power in the world than the rest?
Technology doesn't cause these problems, it magnifies them.
Pragmatically speaking, technology causes new problems. You might say it's already a problem that there exist crazy people who want to destroy the world, but really this is not a substantial issue nor one that is tractable to solve. So if there were a piece of new technology that meant that everyone had the power to destroy the world, that would for practical purposes be a new problem.
There is an established, reasonable position (e.g. Watchmen) that it is bad to increase the power of individuals, because when large power can only be wielded by large societies this limits the damage it can do, compared to the same power in the hands of a single individual.
Technology makes certain kinds of oppression (and means of gaining and keeping power) easier or possible at all, and makes certain other kinds harder or impossible.
Both sides are present though, it's a pretty balanced arms race. Technology also helps people gain freedom, you can't simply look at one side of a sword, and say it has one edge. Many of the protests in Egypt were planned through social networks, and things like TOR can't be ignored either.
North Korea on the other hand, manages perfectly well to oppress it's people without technology. Imagine what would happen if those people had an internet connection.
It's definitely not balanced. It's a cat and mouse game with temporary advantages on both sides.
However, all advantages are lost the moment someone legislates always in favor of the rulers which is what happened in the UK. Now we're tied and gagged with permanent threat of imprisonment for having an opinion (this has happened a LOT recently).
Her election success is only because the voting system here is biased and most of the population aren't really evolved past primate level. The media control the outcome of an election.
Her popularity is a myth perpetrated by the media.
There is no respect from anyone who knows the facts.
Yep. I saw this with my own eyes once. I had a disreputable youth in the 1980s which involved trying to steal linesman sets (for phreaking) from those old yellow BT Bedford vans (anyone remember Busby?)
One of them turned out to be a spook wagon. This was in Islington in north London. Really nearly got in deep shit on that one.
People might think you are nuts but its spot on and its worse now than ever.
10 seconds on wikipedia would show the answer is "no".
This is kind of a problem when trying to import UK shows into the US, aside from being two nations separated by language, its hard to figure out how to shoehorn "an hour" of show into our 1/3 advertisement schedules. Even PBS has about 10 minutes of ads and "sponsorship ads" per hour.
My superficial opinion is BBC shows transmit at an IQ around 100 or local population average, compared to USA TV around an IQ of 60 or so. I believe this discrepancy is demanded by advertisers wanting the eyeballs to be more gullible, a more easily duped audience. So aside from imports being "too long" for US viewers, imports assume the viewers actually graduated high school, etc, which is another impedance mismatch. Its hilarious comparing shows that jumped the pond, like scrapheap challenge/junkyard wars. Similar, yes, but a definite class distinction of being aimed at grade school level vs high school level.
Not only that, Office even works ENTIRELY offline.
And it opens all our documents absolutely perfectly EVERY TINE.
Yes this is facetious: Google have forced peoples standards down.