If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing.  No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs.  They will lease it all from the cloud.  (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter.  I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home)  There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone. Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography.  I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos.  I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others.  It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive.  I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment.  I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality.  Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus.  So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them!  Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit.  It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer.  This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone:  bandwidth limits.

As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging:  One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all.  Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it.  In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother.  I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services.  Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter.  And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica.  So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce.  On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services.  I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for.  So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.

Another micro-blogging post?  What’s going on here?  Well, when I first did my micro-blogging post, Identi.ca had just gone public and I didn’t think there was a reason to join yet another micro-blogging service.  But two things came together to convince me to check out Identi.ca.  First of all, I’ve overcome my reluctance to using micro-blogging services.  Second, I heard an interview on Linux Outlaws with the creator of Identi.ca.

As you can see, it’s pretty much inspired by Twitter.  It has a very similar interface and reply mechanisms.  I got a good vibe from it - as I did with Twitter.  Something about the aethetics just made me want to use it - just like Twitter and unlike Pownce.  Of course, there are some negatives with Identi.ca being inspired by Twitter.  Chief amongst these is the reply functionality.  Only Plurk (with Pownce in a distant second) have correctly implemented replies in a way that makes sense.  Without a threaded reply, it’s pretty hard to correctly follow the conversation that may come out of something posted on Twitter and Identi.ca.  Of course, maybe that’s done on purpose.  Perhaps replies are an afterthought because that’s not what these micro-blogging services believe micro-blogging to be about.  I’d LOVE to see a mode in Identi.ca (just another tab, really) where posts could be viewed in a threaded fashion to be able to follow the conversation better.  That would help Identi.ca leapfrog over Twitter in useability and functionality.

It’s been about a month since I signed up for a bunch of micro-blogging websites. So what do I think after about a month? Let me start off with Twitter.

In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future.  So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.

A lot of websites have funny page-not-found (404) and maintenance pages. I got a good chuckle out of Plurk’s maintenance page.

I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.

I’m uninstalling BitTorrent 5.0.9 from my Windows computer because every time the computer starts up, if I don’t exit from the program, all of my internet-related programs lose their connections. This is way too misbehaved and I’m sick of it. I’m moving to Transmission or one of the other ones that aren’t crap. I can’t believe the original program has been surpassed.

Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering.  Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos.  I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.

When most people think of the GPL, if they think of it at all, they tend to think of Linux and perhaps other operating systems.  However, there are many benefits to using the GPL for programs on a smaller level.   For example there is a Go Application in Facebook.  This programmer could have gone through the near impossible headache of creating an implementation of Go.

However, as Wikipedia mentions, it is very tough to create sofware to play go, “While the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players ( Deep Blue beat the world champion in 1997), the best Go programs only manage to reach an average amateur level.”  This has to do with the high complexity level of the game’s strategy.

The jokesters over at Johncow.us let us know: (click the image for a full-size version)