Opera chief: history will silence Unite doubters

Hang on...

does this Unite thing mean I (or more probably someone else) could write an app to mimic something like facebook (which maintains connections ("friends") with other Unite users) all while leaving my personal details, photos and such like on my machine far, far away from the filthy grabbing of user generated content that facebook and their ilk can do what the hell they like with once they've got their greedy little mits on it???

If so... someone write a plugin for FireFox that does the same... Opera are a bunch of f*cking whingers!!!

On the castro.

"told The Reg this week during a sit-down in our San Francisco offices.", the 'offices' been a private booth at the Blue Oyster Bar.

@Hang on...

Thats exactly the point, imagine your website with your data, controlled by and licenced to you.

Subbing

"But this kind of service will be very prevalent in the future... And if we sit town in ten years time, you'll say 'Yes, this was a big deal. Not everyone saw that in the beginning.'"

Should be;

"But this kind of service will be forgotten in the future... And if we sit down in ten years time, you'll read it in a nostalgic feature of 'top 10 whatever happened to' in a PC rag"

Wake me up when the non-existent fad passes. I'd hit snooze but it'll be a whole 9 minutes before the alarm goes off which isn't long enough.

::rolls eyes::

"But if you're technical enough to do this from Apache or anything else, one, there's no problem with that, and two, you're probably not going to understand Unite anyway."

1) Aw, gee, thanks for your permission. Idiot.

2) In other words, techies with a clue grok that Unite is about marketing, not technology.

As for their product being too complex to be FOSS, all I can say is that is probably why the BSD and Linux kernels work as poorly as they do, and on so few devices ... I'll leave it there.

This guy really isn't trying to endear himself to the techie community, is he?

Too complex for open source?

In other words, the codebase is a GIGANTIC CLUSTERFUCK because it's full of silly cross-platform code that doesn't need to be there and they're afraid of the reaction.

Open Source is for marketing purposes?

No, it's for allowing more people to contribute back to your source code making a better product. Something that Opera isn't interested doing in as they're too busy complaining about the Internet Explorer logo.

Story of the internet

"If so... someone write a plugin for FireFox that does the same... Opera are a bunch of f*cking whingers!!!"

That's pretty much how the browser war works.

I fully agree that Unite is revolutionary

It's putting back your data where it belongs: on your PC.

No more Facebook selling your photos to who knows whom. No more school superintendant or recruiter demanding you give them your login info. No more outage for millions when one server goes down.

I'm sure Unite still needs a fair bit of tweaking and develoment. But having your own social website, with widgets, custom apps... is worth it.

And remermber, Opera is not MS: their security is better. I wouldn't trust MS to do that, and Apple wouldn't do it anyway, since it doesn't help them sell any content. Unite is a true, old-school, user-driven thing.

@ jake

"This guy really isn't trying to endear himself to the techie community, is he?"

No. I don't think he is. I think that might be the point though.

Looks like he's aiming to fall into the middle ground. Between the hassles of a geekalicious diy website or other homemade sharing solution at one end of the spectrum. And the hassles of posting your life on the web2.0 flickr/picasa/deviantart/youtube/vimeo/twitter/facebook/last.fm/myspace/delicious/digg/blogger/wordpress cloud at the other end of the spectrum.

Unite seems to be pitched at those who _don't_ want to bone up on HTML, & Apache & NAS setups etc or _don't_ want to to 'go public' or 'social' or use p2p, but _do_ want to share photos, and files etc with family and real life friends.

And after viewing the Unite vid clips on their site, I can see where he's coming from. It looks like a boss idea.

Basically seems to boil down to being something that lets you easily turn portions of your PC into a remotely accesible NAS. And/or saves me faffing and uploading a bunch of photos to picasa/flickr. Instead I can just arrange MY files on MY machine as desired, set the folder to share, email the link to my folks.

Simples. I plan to give it a whirl.

But whether it turns out to be decent or not, Opera still come across as overly whiney in relation to this IE installation malarkey.

The open source comments are plain odd. I understood open source to stand for transparency and a wider net of feedback into the development, rather than being about 'marketing'. Although, to be fair, it's their code and company and their perogative over what they do with it.

Finally, to the overly snippy folk: why the hate? Opera is a capable browser and it's nice to have some options that don't come from MS or Google.

oh dear god....

Hey, I am a staunch opera fan, but,.... the chief is now sounding like an old war veteran, under the delusion that they are still in the war years, with a lot of power at their command....

- not the full ticket, he seems to have lost it, the tiny share must have addled his brain into thinking he is the best ... " hey our market share recently increased by 50%!!!! "

Sorry, that means it went from 2% to a massive 3%....

and a lot of forum members are saying why can they not work on actually fixing the compatibility issues, not this unite that only a small percent will use....

re: I fully agree that Unite is revolutionary

So you have to keep your PC running just in case granny wants to show her friends some pictures of her grand kids? Apart from tree hugging power use concerns, that's a security nightmare. Ever running PCs make for nice bot farms. Nothing provides better security than encouraging people to turn off/disconnect their PCs when not in use.

If you really think your photos etc are so valuable that FB is going to sell them then you're either a brilliant photographer (and should probably have a commercial website) or you're deluded.

Uptime?

@Martin 6

"Thats exactly the point, imagine your website with your data, controlled by and licenced to you."

Yeah but it also has to be provided and maintained by me. I predict uptime of about 50%.

Two other thingies, pointed out by my wife.

Let me preface this by stating that my wife isn't technically inclined. She's a horse trainer, and teaches riding. She's damn good at what she does, but views computers as black boxes that allow her to get her message across to a larger audience than she could otherwise reach.

So ... I'll let her type it ...

I don't want other people in my PCs. Nor does my ISP. The contract clearly states that I'm not allowed to run server software. That's the first point.

On the bright side, my ISP has given me plenty of space to host my web site. Using FTP to upload files allows me to take advantage of their always-on servers. There are plenty of HTML authoring tools out there that allow people like me to write and up load web pages (my husband usually takes care of that, but I can and do make changes). Sharing pictures and or video this way is trivial, and a lot more friendly than sending them via email. With no third party needed. That's my second point.

I see no reason to even try Unite.

(That's probably the only time SWMBO'll ever post here ... She does read occasionally.)

I can already do this

And I don't need Apache or Unite.

TeamViewer, and I can control who comes onto my PC and what they see.

Sorry Opera, well behind the times, nothing revolutionary, won't change the Web, that'll change long before Unite takes off.

+do we not get into an anti-competition legal morass with this?

Thwanggggg!

I've got no problem with a webserver for dummies. I reckon that's a reasonable idea......

But did nobody tell them that the dummies are all behind ADSL.

@Unlimited

You seem a trifle confused ...

"Upload" means transferring files from a local[1] storage device (hopefully) under your control, to a remote[1] storage device not necessarily under your control.

"Download" means transferring files from a remote[1] storage device not necessarily under your control to a local[1] storage device (hopefully) under your control.

[1] "local" and "remote" are of arbitrary distance ... if you have to ask, please don't. Ta.

@barth - I fully agree that Unite is revolutionary

If you think that you'd be amazed what people can do with these computer thingies and a revolutionary new toy called the internet.

I'd be a very rich man if I had the courage to try and sell what the internet provides as basic as some new invention. I can never work out if its pure ignorance or blind greed that makes these people think they can sell something thats 40 years old as new.

Got to agree with AC@01:23

The fact that firefox is open source means as little to about 99% of its end users as the fact that opera is closed does to 99% of its users.

Firefox == open source == hardly anyone cares

Ah, yes, truly revolutionary

"But if you're technical enough to do this from Apache or anything else, one, there's no problem with that, and two, you're probably not going to understand Unite anyway."

So... If I'm smart enough to set up an Apache server, then I'm too dumb to "understand Unite anyway"? That sounds remarkably like Apple's marketing department.

"What we're trying to do is take something that currently is very difficult and make it easy. We're tying to give you something that you can describe to your parents or even your grandparents. And I believe we've achieved that."

So did Geocities. And look what happened to them. I'll just point out a couple of reasons this will spectacularly fail:

1) Most ISPs (such as Comcast and Verizon) explicitly state in the Terms and Conditions that you are not allowed to run servers of any kind.

2) Upstream speeds. Most ISPs provide people with relatively little upstream speed (1Mbps for Comcast cable, 128Kbps for Verizon DSL), so anything hosted on your system will be displayed to your visitor very slowly. This will be exacerbated when you have multiple people trying to request data from you simultaneously.

3) VoIP. Go ahead and host your files on your own system, then wonder why your VoIP connection is choppy and poor quality.

4) Always-on requirement. Most people don't leave their computers powered on all the time, so trying to connect to their "website" will be hit-and-miss. Some people may choose to leave their computers powered on all the time to combat this, but will probably change their minds once they realize the additional electric cost (and heat) this will cause.

5) It failed before. People don't care where their files are stored as long as it's easy to make a "home on the web". And there have been many software apps and companies that made it easy for people (Geocities, Netscape, AOL, every ISP I've ever had, etc). The thing is, it's a gimmick. People stick with it for a while, then they lose interest. Then again, considering the global dumbing-down of people in the last 15 years, this point may be nullified.

Hello 1995

Welcome back Microsoft Personal Webserver. Where have you been all these years?

Missed you, we did.

Microsoft PWS and DynDNS.org - a marriage made in heaven!

Re-inventing the web, like ActiveX did.

So this Unite thingy makes stuff on my machine visible to Grandma with any serious complexity on my part or grandma's part. That would imply...

1) that the average user gets to perform no significant review of which material is exposed,

2) that the software bores its way through my NAT by itself,

3) that it is all advertised to the whole world (dynamic DNS?),

3) that it is all exposed to the whole world.

Dropping item (1) would require serious effort on my part. Item (2) is probably beyond me because I'm a n00b, right? Dropping item (3) would require that Grandma find me. Dropping item 4 would require that Grandma authenticate herself.

Step down ActiveX, Opera have just announced your replacement.

I've got my doubts, but...

This really does just look like a P2P mechanism, that the user explicitly takes ownership of. Plus, it is just hypertext, going in and out through port 80. I'm no big fan of P2P technology, but I'm in the minority in that respect. This looks a lot easier to monitor and, potentially, control than a lot of the P2P stuff people stick on their machines. How many home users download some torrenting application off a shareware site, and then just run it - never stopping to think what illegal porn, crack warez, Jihadist propoganda and God knows what else, they have flowing through their machines?

Who wrote the torrenting application? "Who cares? Some Russian, I think." What is it actually doing? "Who cares? I get free movies and stuffz. It can't be evil, because its got a dorky name and an icon of a cartoon dog* - and it's P2P, and P2P is, like, Robin Hood, right? RobinHood never shot anyone in the back!"

At least you could take Opera to court, if they borked your PC!

*I'm not singling out any particular shareware torrenting application, here: substitute a "dog" icon, for a "frog", a "ginger moggy", a "piece of fruit", a "laughing pig on a Bicycle" or "Santa Claus" - depending on what shareware site you got the app from; whether the day of the week had 'T' in it, and how close to Christmas, it was at the time. I see them all - the laughing torrenting applications - sitting there on the desktop, grinning at me, whenever I'm called in to work out why some relative's PC has suddenly started acting strange.