I just created a /. account a few days ago, and today, I was moderated for the first time. I got a +1 along with an 'Insightful' modifier. If you're interested, here's the comment I left. I plan on being on /. a lot now.

Thanks to Evan Langinger, I just discovered Writely, an amazing peice of web based software used to create, store and share documents over the internet. There are lots of different paradigms surfacing right now, and I'm wondering which one everybody thinks will take the cake, whether it's the web based paradigm exemplified by companies and products such as Google and Writely. Nevermind, I just remembered Hegels dialectic. I think that smaller devices, such as smart phones which can already access the internet will continue to become more and more advanced and will eventually be able to load their entire (smaller than desktop) operating systems from the internet and everybody will be able to load their lives onto such a device: their address books, important documents. And the bluetooth capabilities of such devices mean that information would be instantly transferable from one device to another, or from a presentation based device (such as a projector). The only things I don't see having a place in this new system are complicated programs for creating content (3ds, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro). But maybe there will be a gap between normal computing devices for the consumer, who has no need to create such content, and professional computers that will have that ability. And honestly, everything really heavy duty that I can think of has to do with graphics. I believe that compilers could be used over the web, html pages are just text, word documents will become Open Document Files, which is already an xml based format, perfect for transport over the internet. And most importantly, I see all this happening in the next decade.

Exciting

Test Document

So this is what an online text editor looks like. I think that this is the future. We'll have a ton of completely inexpensive dumb terminals whose only basic functionality is to connect to the internet and load an operating system from a server. The necessary speed is almost here, and pretty soon all but some of the most intense functionality will be able to be loaded remotely, like this. It would be pretty easy to put OpenOffice on the internet, and then just have people load and use it from there. If people only stored on their hard drives the actual files they use (and even that might be unecessary), and loaded all of their programs remotely, then for the casual user, a labtop (what's the point in having a desktop computer if all you're doing is connecting to the internet?) could be brought down in price to $100 or less without having to sacrifice computer power.

Now, I'm going to invite Evan to join me on this document just to test that feature out. Enjoy Evan. I hope you used your gmail address to set up your account here 'cause that's where I'm sending this.