Re: Personal Firewall Day?

["Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>]

Crispin Cowan wrote:
> I submit that dumb terminals are dead & gone

I said we needed to kill general-purpose computing, not go to dumb
terminals. Why did everyone assume I was talking about dumb terminals?
Basically, I think we need to go to locked-down devices that do all the
intesting processing locally but store their interesting stuff on a backend.
There are plenty of examples of viable and excellent divisions between
front-end appliances and backend systems that allow the front-end to
be "disposable" yet still do 99.9% of the processing. AOL is a good
example, as are some of the massively multiplayer games. It should
be feasible (technically) to produce a desktop that can drive an IMAP
client, a browser, an office automation suite, HTML editor, and image
editor on the front end with remote file storage of personal data (non
system info) on a backend. None of this is rocket science. But we're
addicted to general purpose computing because we (mistakenly)
perceive a need to upgrade system components in order to save costs
over time. We also ae addicted to general purpose computing because
our software base is so buggy that we need to upgrade software
components constantly in hopes of finding something that doesn't
crash. General purpose computing also brings gigantic hidden
costs in terms of system administration and GP systems vulnerability
to trojans and viruses. Reverting to a monoculture would actually help
us address a lot of these issues.

mjr. 

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