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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

  > As the cloud is moving in (gmail, google docs, etc) and
  > slowly replacing more and more of our traditional applications.
  > What can we do in order to free the web from closed source
  > systems which we can't just use, share and adapt as we like.
  > Can free software compete with this or are we forced to live
  > in the last century where everything is hosted on out own
  > computers?

I know it might go against the grain here on HN (with all the Web 2.0 buzz that goes around), but why is running applications on your local computer now considered 'old fashioned?' While things like Google Maps/Earth are really awesome, I'm not about to say that we get rid of locally stored maps (or turn-by-turn directions). What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

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It's considered old-fashioned because in the olden days, you didn't really have a choice. Programs started on mainframe systems (client/server with a very dumb client) then moved to PCs once they had enough horsepower. For most applications, a network architecture was just not feasible.

About the same time the Web was spinning up, network bandwidth and computer performance both started to drop in price, giving software designers the option of retaining a portion of the processing on their end. While it does not replace the standalone desktop app, a "cloud" app affords many advantages which are too great to ignore. (Compare Google Maps to the Road Atlas CD-ROM.)

You make a good point about "what happens when we're offline". We suddenly can't use those awesome cloud apps, but that's the nature of the game -- these apps do things which are just impossible for a standalone app to do. Networking is the price of admission.

I hope we'll see a popularization (commercialization?) of mesh networking in the not-too-distant future. Pervasive mesh networking becomes more and more feasible as we have more and more wireless devices around us, and while it comes with its own set of unique technical constraints, it would go a long way to achieve a self-healing network at its outer edges.

> Networking is the price of admission.

Obviously it is, but there are way too many people that seem to assume that networking is a given.

I have an internet connection at home and at work, but I do not pay for 3G on my cellphone or just for my laptop. Where do I fit into the world where all our computing happens 'in the cloud?' Will I be forced to start shelling out money for 3G in addition to the other costs that I incur to access the internet already? What happens when my carrier has a dispute with me over billing and they cut my 'everywhere' wireless access? Am I now powerless to get any work done on a computer, until I patch things up with them? Should this be considered some sort of blackmail since they are threatening my ability to use my computer when they threaten to take my internet connection away from me?

I'm sorry in advance, this comment is worded poorly. I don't mean this as an insult.

This line of reasoning sounds like "As the world moves to computerized bookkeeping, am I expected to take on the extra expense and burden of buying a computer so i can keep up?" In the 80s.

Times change. Technology marches on. You can't always do the same thing forever.

I view it as an apples to oranges comparison, because you are comparing a fixed cost with a variable cost.

Why should I pay $40-$50/month for home Internet and just to pay another $50/month for 3G Internet (which isn't even 'everywhere Internet' because it only covers certain areas; metropolitan areas better than rural obviously)? Keep in mind that these are monthly costs, not fixed costs.

> Times change. Technology marches on. You can't always do the same thing forever.

Things aren't always better just by virtue of being new.

Why should you? Because you want the advantages that doing so brings.

Why shouldn't you? Because you don't want the advantages that doing so brings.

But it's expensive! So make the decision more carefully.

But I want it to be cheaper! And?

Sorry, I'm not being cranky because I think that WebApps shouldn't exist at all. I'm being cranky at the notion that running things locally at all is 'old fashioned' and that at some point in the near future all of humanity will toss out locally run apps in favor of doing everything 100% in the cloud.

It really annoys me when people seem to assume that 24/7 Internet connectivity is a given, and something that every single American has right now ('has' as in 'really has' not as in 'has access to if they want it').

"It really annoys me when people seem to assume that 24/7 Internet connectivity is a given, and something that every single American has right now "

I don't think here's anyone out there who assume that.It's just that some people decide to target only those that do. You're complaining about being left out of the new stuff while at the same time refusing to adopt the new stuff. If you want to continue working with your local software fine, nobody is stopping you. You just sound like a whiner when you go 'oh I want to stay at the forefront of technology, but I don't like where that is, whaa it's so unfair'.

Most people already have. Look at what most people run on their computers - browser, email first and foremost.

24/7 internet connectivity will be a certainty in the future. We'll have complete global coverage. You'll be diving and able to tweet. You'll be checking facebook on that space shuttle.

The idea that everyone needs a large computer with a lot of horse power is outdated. And the hassle that comes with is not something people want - lost data, viruses, maintainence, etc.

People want small 'appliances' that connect them to their data and applications in the cloud. They have spoken. That's what they want.

> Most people already have.

For varying definitions of most. People living in Silicon Valley and/or San Francisco and spending all of their time with other techies have a skewed perspective of how many people out there actually have access to 24/7 Internet. I'm not talking about a broadband connection vs dial-up here. I'm talking about an Internet connection no matter where you are (which 3G only brings you if you live in urban areas... as long as you don't hit a deadzone or a tower that's congested... ).

And even we privileged techies sometimes have to take our phones into the subway or onto a plane.

"24/7 internet connectivity will be a certainty in the future. We'll have complete global coverage. You'll be diving and able to tweet. You'll be checking facebook on that space shuttle."

I question that, or, at least, I question that the quality of coverage will be in the same class everywhere. More likely, coverage will be better in wealthy areas, and not so good—and more expensive—in the poorer ones. So will running networked applications be viable in the poorer areas? It depends on the app and how network intensive it is. The optimism about network apps, everywhereallthetime, has optimism about infrastructure catching up implicit in it, and (for reasons beyond the scope of a deeply nested comment) I don't share that optimism.

Every decision has costs and benefits. It doesnt matter if it's fixed or variable, the equation is he same. A smartphone with 3g has been life-changing to me. I'm actually replying to you on mine while waiting for my friends to finish what they're doing.

You're right, new is not always better. But neither is old. Maybe you wouldn't get the same utility out of things. That's fine. But I'm certainly glad that more applications are cloud-based. It means ill actually use them.

> Every decision has costs and benefits.

I respect people's right to make decisions. My issue is with the idea that 100% of computing will be done 'in the cloud' in the future. In this case, my decision isn't, "Do I want to use cloud-services and always-connect-Internet?" The decision becomes, "Do I want to compute at all?"

Assuming your home has 3G coverage, you could just have 3G. For some people, this is already cheaper (especially with pre-paid options). This is situation only going to get better. [I'm going by Australian prices]

Is 3G less reliable than fixed line? I don't know - but networks in general aren't always available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

When the spectrum is freed, mesh networking will become pervasive, given, free, and at no cost, except maybe a small government tax. 3G as a business model will die. Even homeless could have a 24/7 internet connection, provided they don't sell or lose their pocket computer. What's left is your dependence on centralized services. But I think people will host their web site and send their e-mail[1] before the spectrum is freed.

Of course, such an utopia won't happen tomorrow, nor in this decade. But it could happen in the next one.

[1] Most people today don't send their e-mails. They ask their web-mail or their ISP to do that for them.

WIth 3G GSM and Wifi, there is hardly a time when a modern American would not be able to be 'online' but be able to use a phone/pad/laptop/whatever. The only time in recent memory I can recall NOT having on-demand, relatively high speed internet access (or cloud access if you will) is during takeoff/landing on a flight. I wasn't allowed to use my gear then ANYWAYS.

I'm sure you can look at a coverage map and see that 3G service does not cover 100% of the continental USA let alone the world. Just because you live in a city (or major metropolitan area) doesn't mean that it's the only way of living.

It's like talking about how easy it is for Americans to get a variety of foreign foods nowadays because you happen to live in an area that has a diversity of people and food markets, while ignoring that there are places in America where those foods aren't in enough of a demand to make a speciality store feasible (or profitable enough for a major supermarket chain to carry them). [i.e. Just because you live in an apartment above an Indian food restaurant doesn't mean that it's just as easy for someone on the other side of town to get the same food from the same restaurant. -or- "It's sooo easy to get good organic food these days for all Americans, you just have to go to a Whole Foods! What? Whole Foods aren't in every city in America?"]

Some of us don't like paying for internet access twice to get it over our cell phones. Nor paying $100+/month for access that doesn't exist everywhere anyway.

As to encountering lack of internet access (ignoring cell access, which I don't have), how about all the time while driving? Or 95+% of the time when stopped, and not near a free, unencrypted wifi location? If you want to use your computer to get directions, you could save them locally... or lose access to them the moment you lose internet access, and nuts to you if you're lost.

that's great and all but that's not everyone. Often, especially while skiing or taking road trips far away from a major city I can have horrible service if not none at all

I think that there's another important point, which wasn't directly addressed in your post, and doesn't seem to have cropped up at all in the follow-up: Relying on web-based services involves trust in a much more serious way than any desktop application. (This occurred to me when I read someone else's comments below about relying on web-based back-up for a photo collection.)

First, I have to trust companies not to be nefarious; second, I have to ‘trust’ them not to fold, or simply decide to stop providing their SaaS. I think it's clear that it's naïve to expect companies not to act nefariously, or, even if we impute to them endless goodwill, not to make mistakes that expose our personal information (cough Facebook cough); and, even if we trust both intention and ability, if everything is on someone else's servers, then there's not a lot you can do if you show up one day to find those servers are no longer serving.

This, more than problems with connectivity (which presumably will be resolved after some growth pains), is what really frightens me about the whole-sale rush to online applications. I want to have my resources on my computer—preferably only on my computer; and, while most current services offer some way to do this, it's clear that it's regarded as less and less important, and I fear that it won't be long before it goes away entirely.

IMO a better question is why does every Web app now qualify as being "in the cloud?" Cloud computing started off (if I remember correctly) as being related to on-demand servers (coined around the time Amazon EC2 was released?). Now it's like everything is the cloud. Like the Web turned into the sky.

"The cloud" was originally a metaphor for the Internet between you and the server you were actually talking to. You know, routers, various ISP's backbones, DNS servers, BGP etc, basically the part of the Internet that you don't have to care about to get your work done. There was some talk, at least a decade ago, that data and/or computation could be extended into the "cloud" as well. For example, instead of asking a specific server for a specific file, you just ask "the cloud" for some information. It's an extension of "the part of the internet you don't have to care about to get your work done" to include location and ownership of disks and CPUs. It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks.

> It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks.

That is the "good" cloud. The "buzzword" cloud, however, is much more about centralized computing and client-server networks. In other words, about many helpless customers being dependent on a few, powerful, corporations.

As soon as being "in the cloud" became progressive and good, everyone who could spin it began billing their services as "cloud-based". Use as a marketing buzzword transformed it's colloquial meaning.

I've caught one of our sales guys during a pitch describe our webapp (which is our product) that "we use cloud computing, so there is no software that you need to download to use our service"

there is a million and one reasons that have gone over the benefits of web applications.

as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)

You can retain a subset of the functionality of the webapp while offline, but that doesn't really cut it all the time.

* Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic.

* It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline.

* If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless.

* If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline?

I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

My other point is this:

As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?

Minor correction: Gmail has an offline mode that gives archive access.

Personally, I use my web apps for backup already -- images go on Picasa so I don't have to worry about whether my local drive is going to die or not. (I already have Time Machine configured, but that's mostly for music.)

  I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it
  seems that most people are too focused on their
  strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.) Local mail app can get DB corrupted too.

> It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.)

That's not necessarily an excuse. People don't deal with total system failure on a daily basis, but that's not an excuse to poo-poo'ing the idea of having a backup plan that is tried and tested.

Also, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use WebApps, but the idea that the industry is going to completely get rid of locally run applications in favor of doing 100% of your work and data storage 'in the cloud' is short-sighted if we are ignoring the weaknesses of such an approach, no?

You're right, but such an attitude can lead to a global risk: when Google (Gmail, Blogger, Youtube) is down, everyone shuts up. When they burn, everyone lose their memory.

And I didn't mentioned the temptations associated with massive centralization yet…

> What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.

> but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.

One of my points is that operating on this local data becomes impossible if we make it so that all of our computers are thin-clients to the cloud (which is what I think a lot of people are pining for).

In that scenario the user is totally disempowered and at the mercy of unaccountable masters. It's that sort of tyranny over users that Apple played upon with its original 1984 ad.

Why are candles old fashioned? Sure electric lights are convenient but what do you do if there's a power failure?

You light a candle. What's the back up plan when all your applications are online and your internet cuts out. Even if you have the data backed up on your computer what use is it if you have no way of interacting with it.

I was being sarcastic! My internet access is reliable enough for this not to be a problem.

For many people (like myself) a computer is pretty useless without internet already. My email is on there. My work is on there. Facebook. News. My games require it. Without internet I don't even bother turning on my PC. And I'm not alone.

Why is this such a big deal when internet is just as reliable as electricity? We don't go out of our ways to have paper systems for everything for in case the power is out, do we? Why not?

http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00...

An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.

Except in the "I can make it myself" survivalist way. ;)

Diehard4

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