![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Link Sausage
Lots of tasty link sausage this morning:
For the cloud skeptics and former Sidekick (l)users, a good opinion piece:
Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it's the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger's been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.
My real question is how much is your data worth? Not the cost of the data streams you pay each month, but how much value does your data have to you personally? Recently, when I visited a client, I was asked to check my laptop at the door and I was asked how much my computer was worth. The guard was somewhat surprised at my stated value of my system. "Is this computer really worth a two million dollars?" he asked. "No," I replied. However, the information on it is worth that and perhaps more to me. Could you re-create every document or email you've ever written? Re-acquire every song in your collection or re-take every photograph in your catalog. Perhaps you could, but even if so, at what cost and what effort?
For the furries reading this, a robotic tail. Here's another article.
For the filk videographers, the Zoom H2 is now available almost everywhere for $250. Must... not... click... buy... button...
For those of you who are worried that the publishing industry may go the way of the music industry, here's more to worry about. Probably 99% of my reading is on the web these days, so, yeah.
... And here's an article on file-sharing sites teaming up to promite indie films.
no subject
no subject
no subject
If everything lives in the cloud. What happens when the network goes down? I occasionally lose my internet connection. There should be at least two local storage spots. One on the device and one on a secondary computer or device. One thing I hate about the New Phones, is that a lot of them don't let you download your data, even as back up onto a home computer or additional memory device.
One thing I liked about AT&T and Motorola is that I have a program that lets me download everything from the phone onto my computer. The fact that I can make ringtones and modify the address book on the computer is useful but secondary. I did lose the data on the phone once, and it was easily restored, Locally.
If you bought the same phone from Verizon, you could only store that data on Their Servers. We know now how secure Anyone's Servers can be.
Clouds are nice if you travel and need access away from home. But local back ups are Necessary.
And I worry about the local booksellers as well. I buy books from the locals as much as is reasonable. But even most of the "local" books stores are the Big Chains these days, so they hardly qualify as something I desperately need to support. Yes, I love browsing through Real Books, but I don't feel a loyalty to Barnes and Nobel the way I do a true local book store.
As the overseer of Book Creation (Mythopoeic Press), I also see the other side of this. Our cover price for the next book is $23. Why? Because after Amazon takes their discount, we barely break even on the production costs. We do give the same discount to the little guys, but they will be selling it for $23 or close to it, to take care of their other expenses. We do appreciate the person who buys it off our website for the cover price, then we make enough money to support other Mythopoeic Ventures. I do advise our web person to make the Paypal link easy, and the Amazon link a bit harder to use. ;)