wavephorm

  We'll still need several GB or TB of local storage, be 
  it spinning disks, SSDs or permanent RAM.

Yes I should have clarified -- I expect memristors to be on the market within a few years. Once they're ready I bet we'll see all laptops and mobile devices move over to them. Between memristor based local storage/cache, and large/cheap cloud storage, I don't see much reason for having hard disks, software, and data in our local computers for very long. Just keep all your data and apps on the cloud, and use web-based apps for accessing them. The foundation for this type of computing world is absolutely being built right now by thousands of companies. It's definitely coming.

  Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media?

Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need.

My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.

I want a "cloud filesystem", but want it controlled by ME, not Apple, and not iCloud. That's the problem. Apple wants to control the filesystem, and I, and others are not willing to accept this horrific scenario.

  Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching
  for vast landscapes of local storage systems.

We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete.

  Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. 
  Network... is not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to.

Not yet, but I think we are steamrolling toward this conclusion.

Apple might have successfully convinced everyone into thinking that downloading software and installing it is some fancy new thing, but really just it's old-fashioned nonsense that is only necessary for their arcane software platform to work.

I'm only a prophet if I'm correct. If I'm wrong I'm just some dude on the internet.

Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has designed their platform to be a dead end. It is almost comical that that Google, Microsoft, and RIM have been trying follow Apple toward this dead end.

On the development side of things I believe we're going to see a massive shift back to web-app development simply because of economics. There is no way any small group of developers can build desktop, iOS, and Android versions of their application simultaneously. This iOS fad WILL DIE because of costs, and that fact that Android numbers are rising dramatically, and people need to come up with a way to support each mobile platform and be able to use that app from their desktops too -- mobile web apps are the answer.

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. Native apps running locally on your computer are going to be thing of the past, and it simply blows my mind that even people here on HackerNews completely fail to understand this fact.

The computing landscape is changing right now, and any company that revolves around servicing Windows desktop software is going to be in for a real hard time.

Whether or not Google's Chrome OS is the eventual successor is not clear (I don't think it is), but their general idea is correct. The all-network, all-cloud world is coming whether you like it or not.

  The OS market is fragmenting.

This is precisely why the web will win. The time is already here where people have to decide whether to build a desktop app, a smartphone app, a tablet app, or a website that can support all three form factors? We're already there folks. The logistics of supporting 3 different paradigms are breaking down. At the same time a small team cannot build out an iPhone and Android ecosystem simultaneously, and definitely without leaving the Web entirely behind. Whereas if the focus on the web experience they can support every possible paradigm simultaneously.

For an already funded company, that already has traction, I personally wouldn't consider a less than 1% equity offer. But for startup, that is still getting going, pre-revenue, I seriously would walk away at 5% or more because it is probably much better to start my own venture.

  Life before the internet was incredibly boring most of the time.

It's pretty boring most of the time today too. It seems to me as if the more "painless" our society becomes (less hard labor, more free time, movies, and porn), the more boring it becomes. Reading Twitter gives me a headache these days. Oh, you retweeted that someone I don't know went to a concert that was good. That's nice. Really, I don't give a shit.

I constantly switch sides. The internet makes me think we're heading toward the Huxley scenario. And the government, with their SOPA/CISCPA actions make me thing we're heading toward the Orwellian scenario. And it is still to be decided which direction we end up.

This reminds me of that guy about 10 or 15 years ago, who made some amazing claim that that he was going to live in his house, sustaining himself entirely from work he did and things he bought from the internet for a year. And then basically everyone forgot about it. I don't even know how that ended. The truth is nobody really cares. Stay on the internet, don't use the internet... nobody cares.

It's all about software delivery. Native apps, whether they be desktop or mobile based, will always pale in comparison to the simple act of clicking on a link, and immediately running the software - no downloads, no install, no headaches. Mobile natives apps can never provide this level of pain-free software experience. This is especially true if every app that can exist in the future needs to be moderated by a central authority (Apple). Mobile apps are not the future, it is the past, in new clothing.

Mobile apps are essentially a re-invention of the CD-ROM software era, in a new slick iPhone interface. Millions of people constantly re-downloading and upgrading the same software millions of times again and again. It's basically Windows freeware/shareware all over again. Some of these apps might have connection to a website, but it's just tacked onto an ancient software paradigm. Whereas when you starting building a web-based app, you already developing for that new hyper-networked paradigm.

In "the future", your web browser becomes the desktop, or the mobile UI, and the internet is the software. I promise you, in the long term, it does not matter how successful Apple, and previously Microsoft, are at deceiving you of this future. It will happen. And it is happening. Everywhere right now, there are millions and millions of developers building HTML5 apps, and every improvement to today's browsers is building our future software paradigm -- and it will not be controlled by Apple or Google.

Does it work in the latest (hexxeh) ChromeOS release?

Amazon's tablet now holds > 50% of the Android tablet market, which makes them a major mobile player too. The article was written around a headline, instead of around facts, and actual statistics and trends.

  We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

Yawn. The person writing this is clearly clueless. The web is not going die. Anyone who says things like this is clearly an iPhone junkie and not really paying attention to the larger picture, and the fact that web apps are quickly catching up to iPhone app experiences, and are quickly going to overtake them. Native mobile apps are a short term fad. They're toast in the long run, because they go against the natural order of things -- network-based software is the future regardless of how cool a silly game you just downloaded is. Data is moving to the cloud, therefore software will move the cloud (not your mobile device), and nothing can change this trend... not even Apple.

  This is just further proof that people don't really 
  want an iPad, they want a laptop

It's not really about hardware. I think what people really want is to escape the desktop operating system paradigm.

When someone buys an iPad they are escaping the hangover of using Microsoft Windows for two decades. You'll find most iPad owners love their tablet precisely because there is no concept of files and folders, and drivers, and a long bootup process, and hard drives, and defrag utilities, and spyware, and virus protection... None of that stuff really improve users' experience.

Ordinary people just want to get onto the internet, play some games, and read facebook. Whether the hardware that lets them do this in an easy way is a tablet, or a laptop form factor is irrelevant.

  We can't compete with being a founder on equity.

Why not? If you need quality developers OFFER THEM FUCKING EQUITY!! They'll listen, trust me. Offer them 0.07% equity and the most talented developers out there will brush you off and joke about you while downing beers with their friends on the weekends.

Why did they call it 802.11ac when there are already specs for 802.11a and 802.11c? This is only going to confuse people.

If you use web technologies you can build for more than just iOS devices.

The Phonegap project (now called Apache Cordova) is maybe a bit better because it supports more platforms:

http://incubator.apache.org/cordova/

This is from 2010, and the landscape has become quite a bit worse since then:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...

I think we are about to witness a Software Patent World War unfold in MAD-style (mutually assured destruction). The software patent laws have trapped everyone into corners from which it is no longer possible to innovate without trampling on someone else's intellectual property. The absurdity of our litigious bureaucracy is going to de-evolve into madness that will make patent lawyers every where squeal with joy and the make the lives of technology workers everywhere suck.

The 15" Air's will probably be out soon, I'd wait for that.

Meh, nodejs makes this type of service obsolete. I can host my own messaging system now, thanks anyways.

More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them.

Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?

  I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are

No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced.

Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier.

The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for them. Unfortunately the FOSS community has burned into developers' consciousness to never pay for anything, ever, which produces and environment of extreme lack of innovation.

Our development tools completely fucking suck precisely because developers are no longer willing to buy quality development tools.

It's like business economics is flipped upside down in Silicon Valley. Social networks that make little or no revenue are valued higher than companies who do have revenue. Is earning money a stigma? It's as if you're better off not even trying to earn money, and just pretend that when you do try to monetize that money will magically flow into your bank account.

If Google loses, they will be known for making one of the biggest blunders in tech history by not buying Sun Microsystems. I assume it was Eric Schmidt who axed that deal. I curiously kind of hope Google loses, it would shake up the mobile market quite a bit.

  These laws usually come from the same group of people, not even the 1% but the 0.1%

Granted, yes, the 0.1% are the ones pulling the strings. They ultimately are the ones demanding a totalitarian World Government, and they're going to get it unless citizens revolt, and overthrow their governments. But that is unlikely unless the economic situation deteriorates significantly over the next the few years. If the US dollar collapses, all bets are off the table. We could be looking at total world-wide civilization collapse in that case.

As I see it, within 5 years, we will either see a wide-scale revolution, or the governments bring themselves down in absurd stupidity like we saw in 2008.

But the actions of these governments recently says otherwise. They all clearly want to implement the Orwellian big brother system. All of them are working together to lock down every from of communication, and make complementary laws that target cybercriminals that might circumvent the system. These governments are demanding total power. If you encrypt the data on your data on your hard drive, or use a PGP-based email system you WILL be deemed a terrorist, and subject to all USA anti-terrorist laws. You don't even need to be a US citizen in this scenario, any member of this World Government will gladly hand you over to the Americans and send you to Guantanamo for not relieving your hard drive's PGP encryption key.

This is absolutely NOT the Huxley scenario.