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On 03/20/2013 05:44 PM, Ralf Corsepius
wrote:
On 03/20/2013 09:32 PM, Temlakos wrote: Ah, but I never said a smartphone would carry terabytes of added storage. The pundits are saying that you "won't need all that storage." All your data will stay on The Cloud, and you will access it with a username and password, same as you do for any subscription service today. You will create and save documents on The Cloud, with a back-end word-processing application. Then you will send e-mail for a short document, or if it's much longer, you'll send a read-only link to your book-length manuscript that will stay on The Cloud, at your designated directory, and you will need your username and password to get read-write access. Turbo Tax for Business will go the way of Turbo Tax for individuals: completely on-line. Smartphones might bring back the stylus, so you can draw your cursive signature to attach to any document that needs one. So you sign your tax return and send it to the IRS (or Inland Revenue, or Der Finanzwaltungen der Länder, or whatever tax office have you). For really important documents, you print to the nearest print device having a wireless connection to The Cloud. Typically, such a printer will reside in the office of a local Notary Public or Justice of the Peace, or in a courthouse or law office. That's the vision. Now I realize that many of you simply can't believe that things will ever come to that pass. Now what else do you need 4 TB of storage for? The usual large file is a video for a one-, two-, or three-hour motion-picture or television program. The next size down is a music track. The idea here is that everyone will subscribe to one of a handful of services. Pay a fixed amount, say 20 USD or 15 EUR; get a link to play a certain movie title, or album, to your smartphone wherever you are, whenever you want. (And maybe 1 EUR or 1.3 USD for what we call a "single" -- one track.) No more CD, DVD, Blu-ray, or other optical medium. No more ripping. Now the one thing the pundits have not addressed adequately is: security. They define security strictly in terms of "accidental loss of data." Against that, The Cloud is getting better every year. In ten years, it might be well-nigh impervious. And "accessory to copyright violation" will go away, if everyone now subscribes to digital content, as I described above. But: what about "unauthorized access to data"? And what about "malicious destruction of data"? Maybe The Cloud can guard its servers against brute-force erasure or corruption. But what about the one who maliciously corrupts the user database, so suddenly The Cloud forgets who you are? Or worse: hijacks your account so that you can't even tell The Cloud who you are, and your data, finances, etc. are in the hands of an impostor. Here in America we call that "identity theft." (Identitätsdiebstahl) And--I realize this is almost totally off topic, and beyond scope for many of you, but I'll say it anyway--there are classes of individuals who keep very sensitive data, in the form of political broadsides or plans of preparation against economic and social collapse, that they do not want known. Especially by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard, La Sureté nationale, Der Bundeskriminalamt, Interpol, etc. I think you can well imagine that members of that class of computer users will feel threatened as they never felt threatened before. And they won't be able to afford a "private Cloud." OK--those are the two sides of the debate on whether mobile devices will ever totally supplant laptops and desktops, and who would, and who would not, want that change to happen. And those are the issues I have seen raised, and that I have raised when no one else did. Temlakos |
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