Benton Barnett

I found this on the internet: The lesson of the Sidekick failure

The “cloud” — hosted, centrally-managed services — cannot be your only copy of data. Just as RAID is not its own backup, cloud services are not inherently backed up, although they usually make every effort to maintain data integrity and regular backups. But even when done well, that only accommodates for a subset of loss scenarios. For example, if someone gains access to your account and “legitimately” (as far as the service is concerned) deletes your data, or a botched sync operation unhelpfully synchronizes a mass deletion across all sync clients, cloud infrastructure probably can’t help you. Even if they have offline backups, the chances of them accessing them just to get your old files from an isolated incident are slim.

You aren’t in control of your data if you can’t easily and frequently make useful backups onto your own computer and your own media.

I found this on the internet: The Xanadu Dream

The current world wide web does basically one thing: simple, stupid, mindless hyperlinks. But even that alone was enough to build a functional and useful internet for the world. And Google was able to build a zillion dollar algorithm out of discovering the relationship between those dumb hyperlinks.

All that, when the most fundamental building block of the web, the hyperlink, barely works at all. Hyperlinks are fraught with peril and pitfalls even under the best of conditions. The current state of hyperlinking is almost literally the stupidest thing we could build that works. Frankly, the current system sucks beyond belief, as Ted himself notes:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent — ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

I found this on the internet: What is a browser?

I decided to conduct a highly-scientific (read: not scientific at all) survey of my friends and got the following results: