- Joined
- Oct 20, 2008
- Gender
- Timecube
For the last six or seven years I've noticed an increasing trend in things like software companies kind of realizing their own futility and thus turning to snake oil like "cloud" services and such in order to try to remain relevant. The biggest thing nowadays seems to be to take an existing piece of software or service and host it on a company server instead of letting the end user put it on their harddrive, and then charging monthly/yearly/whatever to access it. It's really ****ing silly because this is like a modern recreation of terminals. Originally you had say for instance, IBM mainframes that would run various software, and then you would have terminals that displayed the data and offered some interactivity. Then you had the unix/vox systems that were multiuser and allowed up to 16 or so people to do different things simultaneously, but eventually individual computers became so small and powerful there was no need, it become nonsensical to do this.
So now, Microsoft, Apple, etc are recreating this kind of technological limitation by imposing arbitrary rules and limits and making you pay for access to a service instead of just letting you download the software and running it yourself. It makes them marginally more money and makes everyone stupider. We have these stupid terms for it of course, like, the cloud. No there is no ****ing "cloud". It's a network of servers. That has existed since the late 60s at least, in various forms.
I find that basically this is all "IT" is. It's just bull**** snake oil for a new generation and it gets stupider by the day, and with the exponential increase of not only computing power but also our knowledge of computing and access to ever more sophisticated software, it just seems so banal that companies even try this. It would be like trying to sell people gas lamps as revolutionary when they can use flash lights instead that are infinitely cheaper. It's so common and yet so many people know that it's nonsense. It's especially laughable when you look at the work of the open source community and linux projects, and find that it's like comparing a dark age society to a intergalactic civilization. With proprietary OSs you see **** like, oh now we can support 128GBs or RAM!! or now everything is 64bit!!!! or whatever, when the casual release notes for the linux mainline are things like, up to 4,096 concurrent processors now, or can now support X TBs of RAM, etc. Proprietary software has to do so much marketing and spend so much time and money on promotion simply because it's so bad and primitive, it perpetuates itself through "solutions" to its own self imposed problems and limitations.
So now, Microsoft, Apple, etc are recreating this kind of technological limitation by imposing arbitrary rules and limits and making you pay for access to a service instead of just letting you download the software and running it yourself. It makes them marginally more money and makes everyone stupider. We have these stupid terms for it of course, like, the cloud. No there is no ****ing "cloud". It's a network of servers. That has existed since the late 60s at least, in various forms.
I find that basically this is all "IT" is. It's just bull**** snake oil for a new generation and it gets stupider by the day, and with the exponential increase of not only computing power but also our knowledge of computing and access to ever more sophisticated software, it just seems so banal that companies even try this. It would be like trying to sell people gas lamps as revolutionary when they can use flash lights instead that are infinitely cheaper. It's so common and yet so many people know that it's nonsense. It's especially laughable when you look at the work of the open source community and linux projects, and find that it's like comparing a dark age society to a intergalactic civilization. With proprietary OSs you see **** like, oh now we can support 128GBs or RAM!! or now everything is 64bit!!!! or whatever, when the casual release notes for the linux mainline are things like, up to 4,096 concurrent processors now, or can now support X TBs of RAM, etc. Proprietary software has to do so much marketing and spend so much time and money on promotion simply because it's so bad and primitive, it perpetuates itself through "solutions" to its own self imposed problems and limitations.
