Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today’s link roundup.
- F*ck the Cloud – Jason Scott’s brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without thinking about. Jason, an Internet historian, has a unique perspective and I think what he says makes a lot of sense. “[I]f you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service”.
- Pirating the Oscars – Andy Baio summarizes online piracy of the Oscar-nominated movies, as he has done since 2003. It’s interesting to see what’s new this year: movies are taking longer to leak, but more of them are being leaked.
- Webkit Owns Mobile – Alex Russell lays out the case that Webkit “has mobile all sewn up”. I’ve been saying for the last umpty years that the Web is at a Windows 286 stage of development–we need 3.1 to come along and standarize the widgets that presently everyone reinvents. I recognized that in this line from Alex: “If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go”.
- New Staff Find White House Tech in Dark Ages – they’ve gone from a startup to The Enterprise (not Star Trek, alas, just a big company) and now are learning the pain of IT rules that are bigger than they are.