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That's like being sad about the emergence of banks, because everybody's money is being kept in a small number of vaults instead of under each one's mattress.
by euyyn 10y ago
That's like being sad about the emergence of banks, because everybody's money is being kept in a small number of vaults instead of under each one's mattress.
- hackuser 10y agoA good point, but there is an up and downside to everything. The centralization of IT does impact civil liberties and possibly innovation - unlike FOSS and other local systems, aspiring hackers can't tinker with Facebook code and see how it works.
- euyyn 10y agoI don't understand how Facebook relates to this, as they don't rent their cloud. Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.
- hackuser 10y ago> Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either. They could tinker with the binaries, something many did with game binaries. But your point is well taken; open source is also very valuable to innovation.
- euyyn 10y agoWeb apps were also very useful for learning JS and browser APIs, before everybody started minimizing and obfuscating it. I learned how to write a rich-text editor just by looking at the code of Hotmail's email editor.
- hackuser 10y agoFair enough, but think of that free and open stack: (layer 1), Ethernet, IP, TCP/UDP, HTTP/SMTP/DNS/etc, HTML/JavaScript. How many cut their teeth on those? The apps on top, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., are not so open and much of what they do is out of reach from the user. Also, I meant to add above: People could tinker with data files (e.g., Word docs), configurations, etc. The whole system was local and accessible. You could write local code, such as VB or for Windows, that integrated with those systems.
- hueving 10y agoCreating 3 massive banks that the entire world gets to choose from would be terrible.
- euyyn 10y agoNot sure the banks:mattresses and cloud-companies:IT-companies ratios are that different.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat strategy resulted in the Great Depression and later 2008 crises. Damage was so high that country had to be rescued by the federal government. So, banking is a decent example of how such consolidation into private hands can go wrong. Now we just apply that to IT services and data.
- euyyn 10y agoThat's a ridiculous argument: Banks started being a thing at the end of the Middle Ages. The Great Depression and the Great Recession were not caused by banks emerging, nor by people putting their savings in them.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoNot emerging. Just being themselves with all their schemes and an economy dependent on them. A distrust of banks and their schemes at a national level might have reduced their ability to cause those problems. On top of the smaller stuff such as them delaying deposits or withdrawing stuff for bogus reasons.
- euyyn 10y agoPutting your savings under the mattress instead of in a bank account wouldn't have prevented the Great Recession. It was caused risky mortgages (debts, not savings) being sold as low risk from bank to bank, and then defaulting. Putting your savings under the mattress instead of in a bank account wouldn't have prevented the Great Depression either. The only thing it would have accomplished is making your savings easier to steal.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoStoring gold or other valuables instead of Gederal Reserve notes for sale or bartering wouldn't have helped during Great Depression? I havent heard the angle that there was nothing to barter with on top if worthless dollars.