Paul B. Webster VK2BZC wrote:
> Mark A. Walsh wrote:
> > <snipped old fun tech talk <G>>
> > Every week I had to kiss the asses of the "gods" who ran the data
> > processing department before I could get our job run.  ...  The
> > monopoly that the DP jerks had was broken. ...  I swore I would never
> > be held hostage by a data processing department again.
>
>   Well, as a student (a prolonged one actually!), one did that.  Of
> course I've been back to the computer rooms 15 years down the track and
> ... they've gone!  Well, the big machines in the glass rooms have gone,
> but the room has been broken up into a cube farm.

  Not just student, at work I was stuck against this mentality - and the
state of Washington still has a DP department that's affecting my life
far too much for my liking (Still mainframe-based, running COBOL
programs, I'm going to be laughing a LOT come next year when they aren't
working at all due to Y2K, I assume!)  The UW CDC systems were taken
apart, though, and parts given away (Wish I'd had a place to take the
old CDC 6400 to, what a fun toy <G>)

> > Now I keep hearing people say that all software should be kept at
> > central sites and run across the internet.
>
>   ROTFL.  Who are these people?  You must have made a mistake.  I know
> what you are thinking of - the "pay per view" entertainment industry
> where Net-PCs are merely a merge Super Nintendo, interactive games and
> cable TV with on-line shopping.

  I've heard Sun etc. saying that "Client/Server is the way of the
future".  That consumers don't need hard drives, they can pay
professionals to manage and store their data for them.  Yeah, we can
trust said people implicitly, too, not to accidentally lose anything
they disagree with or dislike <G>  Web-TV etc. are fine IMHO as an
OPTION, but not as our only option - I'm completely uninterested in
giving my choice of standalone computing up, ever.  (Easier for an
embedded systems type to implement this than for someone who cannot set
a VCR clock, heh!)

  Sorta hard for you or I to use PGP for privacy (for example), if we
have to submit our key to a company to request that that company encrypt
the data they hold for us.  Private from everyone but them, maybe, if
we're lucky?  (You could say I dislike the client-server ONLY scenario.
I love having Altavista and other search engines around - and using eBay
and other "server" applications - IMHO having that and being able to own
multiple personal machines, maximizes my choices here & empowers me more
<G>)

>   No doubt that will happen, but let's not confuse "soma" for the
> unemployed, consumer entertainment and the long-overdue electronic
> telephone book with commercial/ scientific/ personal uses of computers.

  It'll happen, and there'll be "some reasonable fee" for everything,
more likely.  And some would be priced out of the market.  A blind
friend uses an XT to read text to her - how would she access a "server",
would the client be accessible for her or for people like my girlfriend
who're functionally quadriplegics?

  Also, I've been trying (for example) to get the local Telco to make
their LATA table information freely available (i.e. which prefixes can
freely call which other prefixes) for years, for a network of local
BBS'es - only way I could do this is to gather the information manually
and type it in, out of phone books.  Expect companies to hold onto
information sources as tightly as they can, even if it'd be handy for
you and I if they made the info easily accessible (We were trying to
look at where to place additional backbone BBS'es for networking
purposes.  Would have meant more income for them.  Nowadays we just use
the Internet.  And BBS'es are becoming rarer.)

>   To me at least, the Internet is a marvellous repository of
> information, but it falls into two categories; the ephemeral which I
> browse and enjoy, and the "hard" data which I carefully file away.
> While I hope certain sites remain a long while, there is *nothing* about
> the Internet with the reliability I'd need to store important (personal)
> data.
> --
>   Cheers,
>         Paul B. (1200 in a week, albeit ternary)

  Definitely!  Mirroring on the web can be a good thing...

  Mark