Check out this prescient 2003 presentation by Jeff Bezos on the internet as a utility, and then forward to this 2007 presentation on cloud computing by Kevin Kelly.
In the past month, I’ve had to reinstall Windows on my laptop twice, I discovered my parents’ Windows laptops were riddled with viruses, and I had to rebuild Hoi Yin’s desktop due to similar operating system problems. We almost lost her email, and I spent countless hours restoring our backup data. However, I’d migrated almost all my work to GAFYD, and none of my business files or email required any recovery effort when I bought a macbook. Hoi Yin saw the benefits of my setup but wanted to stick with Windows, so she asked me to migrate her Outlook accounts to GAFYD too. She’s really happy with it.
I’ve come around to the perspective that we’re switching to using DNS as a sort of root directory for personal data and computing in an inverted model of reliance, using the internet for persistent regular computing and our own machines as merely transient machines that we expect to break eventually.
Sam, I’m not a big supporter of Mac’s but they are great for development. You also get the benefits of running Windows and Linux in it as well. I have it setup so I run Mac OSX on one screen and Windows XP on the other. I also have a setup to test easily across all browsers. I can send you info if you ever want to know how I set it up.
Hey Judah, that setup for testing across browsers sounds great. Can you post that info or something?
Here you go, http://www.judahfrangipane.com/blog/?p=241.