One exam I inherited at a certain community college where I taught required the students to bring in a formatted floppy disk to the exam. The idea was they did wrote the exam using the computer  (it was for an Oracle SQL course) and then saved their answers on the floppy, which was turned in to be marked.

You have no doubt already guessed that the "blank formatted floppy" was formatted but not blank entering the exam. After completing the exam, the students would simply erase the "no longer required" files on the floppy and submit the answer disk.

Of course on a few occasions someone would delete their answers and submitted the cheat files by mistake. The other thing was I had an undelete utiltiy and could easily see the erased files.

Mostly I just got a chuckle out of it.

The latest chat feature by YouTube does exactly that, it is trying to lock their users in the "walled gardens" of YouTube:

"The idea is to keep the sharing experience within YouTube instead of switching between other applications, which the company hopes will create a less cumbersome experience."

Not unlike the way FB Messenger and Viber keep offering to use their applications for actual phone calls, instant messaging and also to replace phone's native SMS application.

Sigh - more fragmentation. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this. After dropping its extremely unpopular attempt to tie YouTube comments to Google+ accounts I am a little surprised that Google is attempting something that appears to be even worse, especially given the fact that the company was once admirably committed to supporting standards like OpenSocial that were designed to support such interoperability. As usual, Facebook is much to blame - it has deliberately sucked people from YouTube and hidden what they post, and is now a major video provider in its own right, so I guess Google felt it had to respond. This is not the way to do it, though.

In fairness, realtime chat, video, audio, etc has historically always been prone to proprietary lock in, partly for technical reasons but, I suspect, mainly because ephemeral stuff like that can more easily be locked in: people seldom need to use it or share it beyond the immediate context, so they can (in theory) flit between systems as they please. It's annoying if you do wish to record and refer back to it, but it's not so disruptive if you lose access, on the whole. There's not the long-term investment, nor much need to reify such dialogues. After initially thinking things like Viber etc were a great idea, I am now very much less enamoured, especially since Apple and Google joined the party. Beware what happens should you ever switch from an iPhone to an Android phone or vice versa. As for WhatsApp, words fail me. It's easy to see the appeal, though, to the companies of fragmentation as a business model. I wonder whether there is a business model that makes defragmentation worthwhile? A good book that has much to say on such things is The Master Switch, by Tim Wu, which gives an historical (though very US-centric) account of things like the telephone system, radio regulation, cable TV, etc, and looks at the Internet in the light of that. Few answers, but a great analysis of how (in the US) such things evolved.

ps - for a glimpse of one alternative approach, it might be worth checking out https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2091933/open-whisper-systems which is open, non-commercial, and free as in speech as well as in beer.

Interesting,

I would agree with the premise of the article. There is a balance that needs to be found between the need for structure and the need for autonomy. Large organizations like Google have found this but they are from a new industry that does not have the legacy management issues as older companies or Governmente organizations.

Interesting Post.