Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

The power/electricity analogy here is what's really key - there will come a time when the ubiquity of being "online" will be the same as the ubiquity of "the power is on." It's so prevalent in modern society we really don't think about it.

It took me a while to realize that this is where Google is headed with ChromeOS/Chromebooks. Ultimately, "applications/apps" will not exist, there will just be the web and all personal computing devices become thin clients. What to use photoshop? great, go to //photoshop.adobe (or something); Office? //office.microsoft; play the latest COD? //callofduty.activision. [EDIT: also note the importance of search in this scenario...]

I think google's bet is that just like CompUSA and other computer retail outlets have died, so too will "app stores" that sell digital equivalents of physical boxed apps. All apps will become services available openly on the web.

It's definitely exciting, though I realize it makes a lot of people scared and there are definitely security risks that need to be kept in mind. But overall I see it as another step in the democratization of access and knowledge. A few hundred years ago, only the privileged had access to resources enabling them to read and write and create things. A few years ago, only those with some serious cash could (legally) purchase a license to operate a copy of Adobe's products. Now, any kid with 100 bucks and a decent laptop can spend 3 months with the entire Adobe catalog available to them. Pretty soon, that "high-powered" hardware requirement will be gone and the market opens up even further and pricing will drop even more.

That's pretty awesome.

Adobe has spent decades worrying about color accuracy in their applications in every path it can take to your eyeball and they're not just going to screw up the last hop because it didn't occur to them to take the effect of whatever remoting technology they're using into account.

He uses other people's phones because it doesn't give any information about him when he does that. If nobody else around him had a phone, he just would get on life without making that phone call, or he would wait until he found a landline to make that call. But if the convenience already exists, he'll use it.

He's actually quite internally self-consistent. The principle he's adhering to is (1) he doesn't want to be tracked himself but (2) if someone else is already tracked, that doesn't necessarily track him. He still thinks you should choose to not be tracked yourself, but if you already made the choice to carry a phone, it's too late.

He will use servers or devices which aren't entirely free software because it's not practical to modify them. This is why he makes a big distinction between free software and hackable hardware. He considers these to be two different things. He believes that once you have the actual device and it's modifiable, you should be allowed to modify it. If the device is soldered and hardwired from the beginning, then it's simply impractical to require that hardware manufacturers allow you to modify it. This is why originally free BIOS wasn't such a big deal, until all BIOS became flashable, so now Coreboot is one of the causes of the FSF.

Saying that he will use any server that runs non-free software is a simplification of his position. He considers that sometimes you are merely being provided a service, and you should consider the conditions under which this service is provided. That's why he eschews the word "cloud", because it conflates a bunch of different things and makes people stop thinking about their relationship to a server. He does think that merely requesting a web page from a server running, say, Microsoft Server is ok, because that's just information the server is sending him, and it doesn't matter how that information got generated. He might consider that Microsoft Server would harm the sysadmins using it, not him.

His positions make sense. He's a huge aspie, so he spends a lot of time making sure everything he says falls into place logically. Part of his aspie condition is that he has tantrums and eats toe cheese. You should view those acts as that: a condition he has to live with. But this condition also makes him think very long and hard about the ethical and technical implications of the decisions we make about our computers.

Do you think that works well over airport or coffee-shop wifi?

Free can also be Free/Libre/Open. You don't pay for Wikipedia and you're not a serf as a reader / user, you're not the product.