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The majority of users out there do not have the computer savvy that Richard Stallman has. What about my mother who's hard drive is always on the brink of failur
by diggydo 18y ago
The majority of users out there do not have the computer savvy that Richard Stallman has. What about my mother who's hard drive is always on the brink of failure and doesn't care to know what's involved in properly backing up her photos or documents? I encourage her to use services like flickr and Gdocs for this reason. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks like privacy or portability. Anything that is so sensitive or important is on paper and in a fireproof safe like it should be. Don't get me started on Privacy.. what are you people doing that's so sensitive??
Until every computer user has sys-admin capabilities, making use of the "cloud" makes perfect sense in my opinion. That being said, I think its important to pick services you trust and who make it easy to export your data at will.
- there 18y agodata loss and temporary outages at those big companies are not unheard of. using flickr to share your photos with everyone is not the same as using google docs to store all of your personal and private documents. but why not simply set your mother up with an automatic online backup system to store a copy of her files in the cloud instead of requiring that the master copies be there? that way she retains privacy (assuming the encryption of the provider is trusted) but gains portability by having a copy available online. something like dropbox comes to mind here.
- Zev 18y agoI can't remember ever losing an email or photo from gmail or flickr. Yes, there's some downtimes (one big one with gmail and a few small ones spread out with flickr), but nothing show-stopping (note: you could still access emails with html-only gmail if you needed)
- diggydo 18y agoShould we also home-school our children, keep our money under our mattress, grow our own food, give ourselves medical exams? There are companies/service providers out there who we outsource those things to because we don't have the time or the expertise. Seriously people have been using web-based email for over a decade. I've yet to hear of any doomsday failures but I do know I've had a couple hard drive failures during that time span.
- shard 18y agoShould we also home-school our children, keep our money under our mattress, grow our own food, give ourselves medical exams? Hmm, my family does all of the above as a supplement of commercial/public versions all the time. (In the case of home-schooling, we plan to once our child arrives.)
- tjpick 18y ago> Should we also home-school our children, keep our money under our mattress, grow our own food, give ourselves medical exams? There are companies/service providers out there grow some salad greens and tomatoes and eat those instead of McDonalds? self check for breast or testicular cancer (whichever applies)? take an active role in your child's education? I should hope so. I'll give you the money under the mattress point. No return on investment. However you should be managing it yourself in some form.
- ntoshev 18y agoThe cloud is statistically much more reliable than your home computer.
- ntoshev 18y agoExperts in specific areas develop blindness to problems in certain areas of their solution. Usually the framework they use to approach the problems makes certain simplifying assumptions, and these assumptions become their blind spots. These frameworks solve the hard problems they are designed to solve, so the biggest remaining problems remain hidden under these assumptions. Examples: Economists assume rationality. Java developers don't notice all the boilerplate. Lisp developers don't notice the brackets). Stallman doesn't notice all the sysadmin burden.
- tjpick 18y agoBut that's not true in Stallman's case. He openly acknowledges it by stating that we should choose freedom over convenience. He recognizes the burden and encourages people to choose it anyway because freedom is worth fighting for. That's at the core of his message. Its not in the article unfortunately but he does say this at his talks.
- sabat 18y agoWhy not have choices? Cloud computing for those who don't want a bunch of admin work (me), and pure freedom for those who want it? Why does it have to be black-or-white?
- jodrellblank 18y agoYou have the choice - Stallman is just encouraging you to chose the bunch of admin work that you don't want, arguing that the freedom is worth more than the admin work costs.
- tjpick 18y agoor choose to pay someone to do that admin work for you. There is always a cost: your time, your money, or your freedom. Your choice.
- ntoshev 18y agoIs this a true choice? I am choosing convenience, if I need freedom later I can pay the price and get it. For example, I am developing on the closed Google App Engine. If what I'm doing becomes successful and I hit limitations of the platform, I can reimplement the whole thing on an open source stack. But I don't want to pay that cost up front. Edit: Thanks for clarifying what Stallman offers.
- wmf 18y agoOTOH, PCs worked before they were connected to the Net. People self-administered their computers for a long time; was it an anomaly?
- edu 18y agoHow many people had computers then? And Today? Also, it was a way safer environment.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]