Downloading

Sabayon 5.0

Can the spankiest, sharpest Linux distro have got any sharper?

On a related note, I'm starting to wonder why everyone appears to be copying M$/Apple when it comes to OS interfaces. Makes me wonder very much if Google's Chrome might actually be innovative, or whether it'll simply try to move all the things we do locally into 'the cloud' to make users dependent on and locked into Google?

One of the things that makes the current OSs so powerful for users is that none of them truly lock users in: all the data is there, on your hard drive, often in (increasingly these days) non-proprietary formats that can be moved from one app to another. Install the latest thunderbird, for example, and it will ask if you want to import emails from outlook. Moving cross platform is trickier, but not impossible, especially if you're willing to buy apps that will help. I'm hoping to move my thunderbird emails across from a winbox to Linux at some stage in the near future too.

But what if your data is 'in the cloud?

We're used to that to a certain extent, with gmail, hotmail etc (none of which I use) but it always brings to mind the comment from Microsoft "all your data are belong to us". But what if all your documents, images, audio files, movies and emails are held on some nameless server in the cloud and for some reason, legal or mechanical, you cannot access them?

To me, that's a really scary prospect. If Peter Mandelson does manage to push through the laws that he has been 'encouraged' to support (for non-Brits, after having enjoyed media tycoon hospitality PM wants 'downloaders' to have their net connections disconnected) where will that leave people who have allowed their content to exist online only? Not because I'm worried about the prospect of being caught downloading, but because mistakes are, shall we say, not exactly unknown in the IT and legal industries, while the pace of rectification is often glacial.

There was an interesting cartoon I found not long ago that suggests both M$ and Apple should be very scared as Google was not only planning to give the OS & apps away, but that people also trust Google where they very much don't trust either M$ or apple. I wonder how long it will be before they learn that Google is just another large company with US corporation ethics. Of course if they work in the publishing industry they will already be aware of that.