Your apocalyptic visions of "Net-Terminal Enslavement" shall not
come to pass.
It is highly unlikely that $500 dollar machines will ever insinuate them-
selves into every single home, eliminating the conventional PC, for
several glaringly obvious and rather painful reasons.
First off, as you said, the $500 net terminal would mean that we would
no longer be able to select the software we use on our own computers.
How so? These terminals will be diskless, and all the software will
be provided by Java applets, a mainframe and terminal-slave 1970s
scenario.
But you may say that there will be a wide variety of Java software
on the Internet. Well let me remind you that these are APPLETS.
An "applet" according to MS Windows terminology is a miniature
application program. You could run lots of miniature software on
your Java net terminal, but what if you want to get some real work
done with a word processor or a graphics program? Forget it!
Java is not designed for writing full-fledged software, (the kind we use
when we're not aimlessly clicking around the web) and even if Java
was capable of creating such program, the 14.4 and 28.8k connections
that most Internet users have simply lack the bandwidth to support
multi-megabyte applications.
But what about the non-computer users and computer novices that
the "easy-to-use" terminals are targeted for? Well, a $500 dollar web
terminal is very similar to a $200 video game system -- it's very limited.
A game system can only play games, a web terminal can only surf.
When these novices discover the limited potential of these terminals,
interest will fade as desire for capability increases, besides the fact that
they will not truly learn how to use computers.
As you can see, the net-terminal does not suit the needs of neither the
experienced or novice PC user. It's just a very attractive package,
empty inside, designed to exploit the Internet hype and earn money for
a few companies, namely Sun Microsystems and Oracle.
--Magnifique |
