Internet Cloud

SICP, 1986:
- recursive tree walks
- AI
- lisp
- prolog
- magic

2013:
- overengineered nonsense like visual studio and java
- hipstr.js, a new "framework" that uses 120% of your CPU to do nothing useful
- "cloud" computing, a return to 1960's remote-access services in lieu of personal computing, for the greater profit of software giants
- fisherprice "apps" the design of which assumes computer users are 3 years old

Today Apple with their "user-friendly" unprogrammable devices are king, enslaving people into believing that a "computer" is a gadget for wasting time on websites and not a means of computing things

If you don't buy new "devices" every year and contribute your share to world pollution, you're not cool. Even though we now have many gigahertz of CPU and many gigabytes of RAM, upgrades are considered proper etiquette.

When software lets you connect with customers when and where they want, that's business with .NET.

When objects fall back to the ground after they are thrown, that's business with gravity.

As they said in the olden days before this website was run over by spammers and racists, DISCUSS.

Internet Cloud is a cluster of computers which
1.provides redundancy and scalability for the user
2.allowing storing and modifying data
3.allowing remotely uploading and controlling programs on the cluster
4.provides an interface that makes the cluster an application

The thing about the past is that you're only looking at the examples that have survived in some form. It's a process that excludes the shit, and there was a ton of shit. I remember seeing an mid-80's ad for a program that kept your shopping list on your computer. Price: $80. There's still crap like that floating around, but now it costs what it's worth: nothing.

As for cloud, well, people are rightly leery of it. But the corruption of these companies are the same forces that brought us Linux and FreeBSD in the first place, and the worse these assholes get the more free (in both senses) options there will be. The only real danger is that they worm their way into legislating away free software, which is a genuine threat in my opinion.

I think another danger is that one of these proprietary companies might come up with a programming tool that is in some way genuinely superior to the free alternatives, and is difficult to duplicate. That would prevent neckbeards like us from climbing the economic ladder should we wish to.

But if you really believe lisp to be superior to .NET or Java, use it. Write something usable in it and share it. That is how you will prove your correctness. Writing will never do that.

Apple devices are not unprogrammable, and the tools for it are certainly better than Google's craptastic mess.

What programming language is this? I agree, but I think it's actually impossible for a bunch of suits and pencil pusher ``software engineers'' to compete with open standards.

>>1

spammers and racists

We all know you use ``racists'' as a code-word for White Europeans.

>>4
On a scale from the south in the civil war to nazi Germany, how much of a racist YOU are?

>>5
Himmler

But if you really believe lisp to be superior to .NET or Java, use it. Write something usable in it and share it. That is how you will prove your correctness.

Sorry, too busy making money with Lisp (and also fucking around on /prog/).

What a bizarre, incomprehensible rant.

This thread makes me want fuck a dog, and punch a cat.

>>7
who Are you le quoting xD

>>10
You think you're going to normalize your greenmeming by shitposting the canned condemnation of it, but it isn't going to work. No one wants you and no one will agree with you.

The thing about the past is that you're only looking at the examples that have survived in some form. It's a process that excludes the shit, and there was a ton of shit. I remember seeing an mid-80's ad for a program that kept your shopping list on your computer. Price: $80. There's still crap like that floating around, but now it costs what it's worth: nothing.

nowadays you can buy a miniturized pc with gps, two cameras, gravimeter, magnometer, etc that runs code about the same speed as back then =^)

However, since the development team have full control over Gonk, the developers can fully expose all the features and interfaces required for comprehensive mobile platforms such as Gecko, but which aren't currently possible to access on other mobile OSes. For example, using Gonk, Gecko can obtain direct access to the full telephony stack and display framebuffer, but doesn't have this access on any other OS.[50]

Since the software which runs on baseband processors is usually proprietary, it is impossible to perform an independent code audit. By reverse engineering some of the baseband chips, researchers have found security vulnerabilities that could be used to access and modify data on the phone remotely.[1][2] In March 2014, makers of the free Android derivative Replicant announced they have found a backdoor in the baseband software of Samsung Galaxy phones that allows remote access to the user data stored on the phone.[3]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor

why does a piece of software have more right to privacy than I ??

mfw 100% of cyber-crime is committed by computers

>>15
Epic memes /g/ro!

>>15
who Are you le quoting xD

I actually like writing Scheme on my iPad. S-expressions are well suited for touch devices.

When people try to explain the wastefulness of today's computing, they commonly offer something I call "tradeoff hypothesis". According to this hypothesis, the wastefulness of software would be compensated by flexibility, reliability, maintability, and perhaps most importantly, cheap programming work.

Tell a bunch of average software developers to design a sailship. They will do a web search for available modules. They will pick a wind power module and an electric engine module, which will be attached to some kind of a floating module. When someone mentions aero- or hydrodynamics, the group will respond by saying that elementary physics is a far too specialized area, and it is cheaper and more straight-forward to just combine pre-existing modules and pray that the combination will work sufficiently well.

I used to believe in the tradeoff hypothesis as well. I saw demo art on extreme platforms as a careful craft that attains incredible feats while sacrificing generality and development speed. However, during recent years, I have become increasingly convinced that the portion of true tradeoff is quite marginal. An ever-increasing portion of the waste comes from abstraction clutter that serves no purpose in final runtime code. Most of this clutter could be eliminated with more thoughtful tools and methods without any sacrifices. What we have been witnessing in computing world is nothing utilitarian but a reflection of a more general, inherent wastefulness, that stems from the internal issues of contemporary human civilization.

Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful "tumor material" in one's own economical portion in order to avoid losing one's position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs.

Using a software development metaphor, it can be said that our economic system has a fatal bug. A bug that continuously spawns new processes that allocate more and more resources without releasing them afterwards, eventually stopping the whole system from functioning. Of course, "bug" is a somewhat normative term, and many bugs can actually be reappropriated as useful features. However, resource leak bugs are very seldom useful for anything else than attacking the system from the outside.

Bugs are often regarded as necessary features by end-users who are not familiar with alternatives that lack the bug. This also applies to our society. Even if we realize the existence of the bug, we may regard it as a necessary evil because we don't know about anything else. Serious politicians rarely talk about trying to fix the bug. On the contrary, it is actually getting more common to embrace it instead. A group that calls itself "Libertarians" even builds their ethics on it. Another group called "Extropians" takes the maximization idea to the extreme by advocating an explosive expansion of humankind into outer space. In the so-called Kardashev scale, the developmental stage of a civilization is straightforwardly equated with how much stellar energy it can harness for production-for-its-own-sake.

I am convinced that our civilization is already falling and this fall cannot be prevented. What we can do, however, is create seeds for something better. Now is the best time for doing this, as we still have plenty of spare time and resources especially in rich countries. We especially need to propagate the seeds towards laypeople who are already suffering from increasing alienation because of the ever more computerized technological culture. The masses must realize that alternatives are possible.

A lot of our current civilization is constructed around the resource leak bug. We must therefore deconstruct the civilization down to its elementary philosophies and develop new alternatives.