kamidev
I stopped buying any kind of Sony hardware years ago, the first word that comes up in my mind when I hear Sony is "lock-in". Obviously, they don't care that their brand is already tainted in the eyes of many technical people. But losing this kind of lawsuit would be harder to ignore.
Most of my Facebook "friends" really are personal friends or at least acquaintances that I know for non-professional reasons. They are nice and often interesting people and I enjoy staying in touch. But I won't do business through FB and would consider it an incredible waste of time to follow status updates 24/7.
On Twitter, I follow several loosely connected circles of people. Some I consider friends, others I don't know and have never met. Shared professional or cultural interests is common. Keeping an eye on my stream through a good client gives me a narrow, personal and often useful heads-up about things that interest me.
In other words: it's all about selling stuff to consumers. Which is a great thing to say if - like Baekdal - you are marketing yourself as a guru to people to want to sell stuff.
Many "usability" discussions have the implicit (sometimes explicit goal) of making it easy for users to do things without having to learn anything first. This may be fine for generic routine tasks that everyone has to do from time to time. We are all thrilled about our shiny new phones. But consider this:
1. Not long ago, most things were hard, confusing or impossible to do on any phone 2. Even if 80% of all things you can do on an iPhone are dead simple - are these things that really matter to you?
Things worth well are usually not generic routine tasks. When you love what you are doing and try to make it as good as you can, using the right tools in the right way is a major part of the experience. But that kind of experience is impossible without making an effort to learn new things.
My personal belief is that those of us who want to create our own experiences benefit from getting our hands dirty with technology now and then.
Anyway... I don't think there is anything to worry about here. I just downloaded the source, built Lunettes under Snow Leopard and tried some of my favorite videos. There is no GUI to open some file types yet - but for those it can handle, everything seems to work and it does look great!
4 GB of RAM isn't strictly necessary but makes things more comfortable. I fully agree with jballanc about Spaces and full screen mode - that is really nice!
Consider also that VMWare has good support for virtual networking. For instance, you can have your Debian server running in one virtual machine serving desktop clients running in their own virtual machines. Testing client/server stuff that way has saved me lots of time.
Perhaps this really is the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps we already know everything we need to know about economy and politics. But personally, I don't think so. And I enjoy when hackers speculate about these things.
The article's main argument was that some things are too risky without multiple supervision. The extreme and current example is letting financial institutions supervise themselves. How to use computers is just one part of the problem.
Many things can run unattended - but under what circumstances should they? What are the necessary safeguards? Pilots on commerical airplanes don't do much flying, they are onboard to make sure everything is safe and works.
Eventually it's all about acceptable risk. We already know automated trading can be dangerous. But the danger lies in bad human assumptions, bad human models and the widespread idea that somehow no human being remains responsible.
As a complete aside - I worry whenever I hear cheerful talk about "the drones we send to kill militants". That kind of convenient and unaccountable power over life and death in other countries is both morally suspect and open to abuse. Killing by remote is still killing and relying on technological quick-fixes to "solve" terrorism is a dangerous strategy.