I think the whole computer thing is heading toward some sort of Borgland. A few years back I was talking (to whoever would listen) about a highly networked economy and how it might look and could it get away from capital and "just do it." This was after my time in East Germany during the fall of the Wall. There I ran into a group of people who worked for the old East German Ministry of Economics. We started by talking about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff vis-a-vis computers, how they had pilfered IBM technology and reverse-engineered themselves IBM mainframes. They said IBM even came over secretly and toured their facilities. This led to how they basically ran the economy as a great big input-output matrix (Leontief), and that if they had had some really good distributed, networked computing, they could have made a serious go of it. Hard to imagine, but it would be one of history's wilder ironies that East German socialism running on Linux/cheap Intel might have been the first real JIT, input-output, zero capital, cloud economy. Anyway, yes, some sort of cloud will eventually settle in over the world. Personally, I'm interested in the intersection of functional programming with virtual machines, a la Scala, a la Clojure, two functional languages on the JVM. That's getting pretty cloudy. OGM,MN --- On Thu, 7/1/10, Justin Krejci <jus at krytosvirus.com> wrote: To get back to the subjet of the OP.... I think there will be a place for a variety of methods of running computers for a long time to come and that perhaps eventually there will be a de facto winner but even that will eventually fork out into other variations perhaps coming back to older concepts yet again or else maybe we all get network jacks installed into our brains and we interface directly with other resources of the globalnet like a mix of skynet, the matrix, ghost in the shell and other cyber-ish type stories. It is an interesting philosophical and theoretical debate as to what is best and why though marketing will likely unevenly skew peoples ideals. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100701/aeea954a/attachment-0001.htm