What’s wrong with Cloud Computing?

Propreitary = fail, every single time. 56 years into space-age technology and we get

1) epic fail in the most simplest of issues (this thing). No general solutions from user habits/patterns that should be anonymous (i.e. no spying please); most primitive would include client caching and backups which require no actual application context at all. Free backup software; -> okay; do that shit in a background thread with X portable hard drive. You shouldn’t even need to search for software there should be up/downvoted lists for niche functions. Windows 8 could have even done that well. (“I need to burn this to a DVD for some reason” -> yes install this compressed software you downloaded automatically a few weeks ago when I downloaded a Windows IE9 webpage test image/vhd. Time = everything when talking about the user experience.)

2) punching-in individual letters to write code (wut?/shameful) (MANY game designs, applications, websites are actually simple constructs/templates which everyone duplicates anyway, causing (in web design) CSS designs to be painstakingly produced/edited for volatile webpage layout. $$$/time wasted but hey web devs need to keep their jobs right? Booo machine automation, go away!)

3) 0 systems that interlock / inter-compatible (even a simple Excel Evernote, *batch* copy & paste, without diving into command-line specifics like a systems admin or some other hardcore/experienced computer user. Not here, not happening.. yet essential.) (Or something like; I write a blog post, and it’s a blog post, so it can be posted anywhere anytime or delay-posted to Twitter (same for “ebay sniping” or that could be a restricted exception). A browser could even be an “interface”/proxy to a browser, letting you use things like Twitter from the OS to guard against where the site fails because of connection latency or some other primitive issue of coding which shouldn’t be a problem in an age of smart software. [It’s just an input field])

4) OS with long-standing UI problems (Win 8 / the text cursor is 2 pixels off of where it should be (no intelligent text navigation), the scroll bar jumps to the top if you drag the mouse pointer to the middle of the screen.. volume can jump up to max suddenly on an audio driver/speaker I have. Stuff like this. Users COULD fix it, if there was an OS “scripting language”, but nobody cares even though OS features are so fundamental to computer use the world around. Quite stupid in the broad sense.)

5) game devs still learning everything anew (OGL/DirectX, my god) and then never making anything original, mostly in truth because everyone’s too tight-assed (oh, the short-sightedness of capitalism..) to share a good game engine tech that’s not Ogre or something else shittily convoluted or requiring intimate, intricate knowledge (build systems / DLL hell) or even worse, simplifying it but not always in the right places and then making non-backwards-compatible changes (fuck you XNA, I can’t install 3.0 and 3.1 on the same machine, what the hell)

Things like rigging/animation, you have middleware (Havok) which is mature and extremely smart/fast, but actually should just be consolidated down to generic build steps (that intermesh or convert intrinsically to python or whatever crap you want) for Blender, and so on .. but everyone has eyes glued to the money. The common religion. So this kind of intuitive & simple yet powerful stuff never happens. And the mainstream ends up worshipping Steve Jobs.

Really there’s no excuse for this shit tier level of dedication to *service* that I see [and professionalism or defending COD4 as a professional work is not an excuse; criticism can be broader-reaching than that], but nobody seems to have these tech issues bad enough to care about blogging about them or making the changes. They’re still real problems; real losses of money and time and quality of life.

On the tangent of games /v/ had a good thread on shitty game journalism, it’s in the archive, image comparing (unfair) critical reception of games vs. films.

/rant
I basically said something to the same effect about 5 years ago on Gamedev.net but nobody took me seriously then.