The Downsides of Cloud Computing
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
There are advantages to using cloud computing services such as Google Docs, but there are also some definite disadvantages. Chief among these are the potential loss of access to your data, and getting what you pay for.
Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…

Boy this takes me back. The title for the linked article is a bit inaccurate, since some of the products did actually die. And for several of them, only the naming rights have survived.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped to a 68% market share, while Mozilla’s Firefox is at 21% and Apple’s Safari is at 8%. In this case, at least, competition leads to innovation, which is good for the user.
Adobe has posted a fairly important update to its Flash player. You can download it from
I did instant messaging “back in the day” with ICQ, but it’s only in the past year or so that I got serious about it. And what a mess! Because the people I chat with are on different networks, I had three IM clients running at the same time. But there is a solution. Pidgin is a free, multi-platform IM client that can simultaneously connect to 16 different IM networks, including Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and, yes, ICQ.
On Jan. 19th, 2038, Unix/Linux systems will run into a major date-related problem. The current method of representing dates/times does not work for dates past 3:14:07 UTC on 1/19/2038. We may start seeing problems beginning tomorrow (Saturday 1/19/2008) because 30-year mortgages will extend past the end date. The migration to 64-bit computers will resolve this issue for many, but the real problem is with embedded systems and some file system formats.
