Unwittingly, your analogy with DNS illustrates my point very well. DNS is open, standardised, distributed, multi-vendor, etc. If Opera opened up the Unite ‘plumbing’, allowing other organisations to host the proxy service (or develop their own to some standard specification) it would give Unite users choice and I might be more interested. For comparison, see how Google published the Wave protocol right on day 1.

You claim that “for YOUR OWN DATA, you are now in complete control.” Tell me something, how much control will you have over your family’s data if your house is burgled while you’re on vacation and your NAS box is stolen? This happens every day of the week.

Finally, to be accused of hyperbole for criticising a product that claims to be “radically extending what you are able to do online” and “allowing all of us to help define the future of the Web” is actually pretty funny.

“If it’s not listening on 80 or 443 and is not capable of accepting requests from clients without the assistance of an external proxy service, it’s not really a web server as far as I’m concerned.”

that is absolute nonsense.

HTTP is not restricted to port 80 or 443, and layering via proxies is a perfectly valid and appropriate architectural choice.

You will control your own data and share it when and if it pleases you.
Your PC will contain and own all the data!

Who the f?&% cares about upload-speeds… until now. the upload speed of today is more than sufficient to stream music.

I actually don’t understand the problem that you guys have with this service.
I love the idea and will embrace the technology. Cloud-computing is a good idea, but then your data will be “elsewhere”!

But YOU still have absolute control over YOUR OWN data.

You will NEVER get around someone else controlling your access. Your ISP controls it already.

You will ALWAYS rely on someone else for access.||”

If we always rely on someone else for access then why not all rely on the same set of servers completely? With cloud computing your computer is inside of the server already talking to each other will be as if on a lan. Noone would have to access the internet for anything except that set of servers.

Some of you might say that the servers will be overloaded, but if all servers were combined then there would be the same amount anyway.

With something as available and unownable(is that a word?) as the internet we are limiting ourselves by having separate sets of servers.

I was excited when I first started reading but what it really is is a social networking service inside a browser, mush like gmail where you can combine all of you email addresses.

Having a web server also cripples your internet when you can only fford a 1-2 mbps connection. I tried to host one but my internet was cut in half. I have no qualms about letting other servers host it.

I think that if the internet is “owned” by major corporations and their servers then what will really reinvent the internet is when we have real internet servers all our own. No more ISP’s that is when browsers themselves will become facebook, twitter, and opera unite.

The cloud will only reach its full potential when everyone contributes to the cloud as well as use it. How will everyone have their own servers? If you have read up on the onlive service you know what I am talking about. File/media/web sharing will be instantanious because we will all be on the same server. Because one day there will only be one server.

But YOU still have absolute control over YOUR OWN data.

You will NEVER get around someone else controlling your access. Your ISP controls it already.

You will ALWAYS rely on someone else for access.

But for YOUR OWN DATA, you are now in complete control.

So your claim that this “falls flat on its face” is simply hyperbole and a huge red herring.

“Just because they call the embedded browser software a web server doesn’t been that it is.”

If it isn’t a web server, then what is it? And who cares?

“is not capable of accepting requests from clients without the assistance of an external proxy service”

Yeah, and http://www.intomobile.com is not capable of accepting requests from clients without a DNS server. Your point being?

You completely missed the point and managed to criticize Opera Unite for something it never was presented as in the first place.

Why the negativity, exactly?

Uplink speeds will catch up, no doubt about that.

1. Opera’s claim that Unite takes servers out of the picture falls flat on its face once you realise that in this new model their own servers will become absolutely critical. You’ll still be “playing in somebody else’s sandbox” only it will be a distributed sandbox, and one to which they will control access.

2. Uplink speeds are still just a fraction of downlink speeds. Retrieving any sizeable amount of data directly from an end user’s computer (or mobile device!) is going to be a heck of a lot slower than getting it from a real server in the cloud. There’ll be much higher latency too because of the need to traverse a proxy in both directions.

3. They’re abusing accepted terminology a bit too. Just because they call the embedded browser software a web server doesn’t been that it is. If it’s not listening on 80 or 443 and is not capable of accepting requests from clients without the assistance of an external proxy service, it’s not really a web server as far as I’m concerned.