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Cloud Computing Is Retarded: Or, The Pendulum Swings Back
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Exactly!
I guess your wording is better than mine, but this is pretty much word for word what I meant.
EDIT: It looks like Folding@home on the PS3 is pretty energy-efficient.
For my remote marketing people, being able to web vpn in and load up a demo is keen and doesn't involve having to load an entire fake environment on their laptop or rely on the client's available machines not rendering something oddly.
It's a corporate thing, and won't pick up too much for home use beyond specialized systems (dumb terminals for things like pandora are actually kinda neat if overpriced, and your cable box pretty much IS a dumb terminal.) Cloud computing for home users with no advanced need of anything should start at google apps and end at amazon backups. Which is cloud applications (because office is goddamned expensive for features grandma doesn't need) or web based email (which is really just google apps: Outlook), and cloud based storage for backups (not primary copies, just data backup because home users never have a good backup system in place and it's cheap to do it this way). Like everything, it will be overly pushed on end users by the vendors to try and make more money. But it's only a tool that can be used for specific applications, just like VMs shouldn't replace everything on the planet, just large volumes of underused systems. Or their virtual desktop shit in extremely selective cases.
At work, of course, it would be lovely. I just don't see there being near enough benefit for me to go through the hassle at home.
Edit: Gmail is useful, but I don't see there being a huge issue with basic utility programs. It's difficult for grandma to find without the help of an enterprising youngster, but Open Office works perfectly well in place of Word. You can pretty much supply a basic user with every program they need for free.
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And greater efficiency = lower cost. In my current shop we run virtual server clusters simply because we can't afford to waste all of our money buying tons of boxes for retarded apps that demand to run on their own server but sit there 95% idle 95% of the time.
And in my last job working as a contractor before I moved to this job, we were doing diskless computing deployments for school districts, mid sized businesses, etc. (using Neoware who are apparently part of hp now...) It vastly decreased the amount of problems you had to deal with on computers (reducing the number of required pc technicians needed) and the thinclients were cheaper than fat boxes too.
Somebody fuck up their pc and call your helpdesk? Tell them to reboot. Rebooting basically wipes them out from zero, as it is reloading from your golden image (which has been pre-built for their needs and is easily updated) and then mapping mydocs and desktop
It's actually more efficient to do it from home machines than massive datacenters energy wise for two reasons:
A) Cooling. It costs an absolutely stupid amount to cool datacenters. It's god damned ridiculous, and leads to datacenter space actually being sold by space for cooling, and not how many racks you can cram into a room. One of my old companies owned an empty cage in a colo due to power per space per room cooling requirements meaning we needed to physically possess more blank space just to put more racks and power into our other cage <3
B) Power stepping! Most electronics are able to step down their power usage based on how much you're actively doing right now. It's why your machine gets hellishly loud for a second while everything spins up when you open a game after browsing the web for a while. It's variable power draw to save you money. Servers have this ability, but it's mostly turned off by default to prevent horrible lag times on random processing if the machine hasn't been doing much. It also messes with some applications. I've had a few machines it works well with, but for the most part they run full blast all day long and never think they're idle enough for a long enough period to drop their power draw. Plus by default servers draw a dickload of extra power for all the redundant drive setups and number of internal fans.
It hit like 130 degrees in the server room D:
ppls all calling ever 3 minutes saying their servers crashed
The idea that a small business with multiple locations can implement a VM infrastructure with multiple connections to the internet to effectively centralize computing and replicate data while providing effective disaster recover is very appealing. Its a throwback to the old mainframe design, but using current technology and proving to be very cost effective.
It's really cool, but to do it yourself it takes some know how and a semi-dedicated computer running all the time. It's not necessarily that cool. Let the cloud take care of all that crap.
Does anyone know what kind of expectation of privacy 'the cloud' has? Would the 4th amendment cover, say a VM running from an encrypred virtual hdd, that the provider has no access too? What about whatever the gdrive is? Customs and cops have something near carte blanche when it come to searching digital devices and media these days. If it's something like a thin client, there aren't any files on the devices to be found, and worries of it being physically stolen don't really exist.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
In the way that you may not own the server it's being stored on. Think of Google in this application. Sure you "own" the Gmail account, but they own the server it's stored on, and really could do anything they wanted with it. This is something that is prevalent across most consumer-model cloud computing applications, and the reason I don't like cloud computing in general. I want ownership of my data, hook line and sinker. The data, the medium used to store that data, and the equipment used to operate and read that medium. Admitedly this is based off my mistrust of others when it comes to something that can directly affect me, but I feel safer when I know exactly what is being done with my data. This is the reason I operate my own "cloud" in the form of 3TB of NAS on my home network, parked behind a decent firewall.
Also if the equipment fails, I'm the one responsible for it. I'm not a company that is going to claim bankruptcy anytime soon, taking all my services with me. The only way I suddenly blink off the map is if I die, at which point I don't care. The only thing that prevents me from access to my data is catastrophic hardware failure, or no electricity.
I never finish anyth
I never finish anyth
Won't this kinda, you know, seriously stymie hardware advancements? I mean, I'm a standard gamer. I like my games to look pretty, and so I buy the latest hardware. This creates demand for more advanced hardware. Game (and other software) developers see this trend, and develop for more advanced hardware. This also creates more demand. So chipset developers, graphic card developers, all these guys they keep pushing the envelope with faster, more powerful machines. Hardware improvement++
Now let's imagine the games are all run on a central server with a single hardware spec. Why upgrade? What do you have to gain? The gamers are all locked into your hardware if they want to play games at all, so it's not like you gain much from upgrading all your hardware every six months. All you do is blow money.
I suppose you could say the PC gaming model would more closely resemble the console gaming market, where you have a number of companies competing with different hardware sets, and that competition would drive the companies to keep upgrading. But if we look at the console model, we see them changing their hardware every 5 years or so.
Of course, console developers are constrained to 5 year cycles because console gamers don't want to abandon their system every 6 months. There's a lot of investment in those consoles, so they need to last awhile. Maybe you think this wouldn't apply to the service providers who could upgrade incrementally. But A) they'd have a lost of investments in their hardware, too; B) every upgrade would require extensive bug-testing, which would disincent them from upgrading frequently and C) seriously, they would likely be lazy about it because everyone else would also be lazy about it. It's cheaper to just sit there and hock the same stale hardware specs for a few years.
But still, let's say the hardware cycle becomes 2 years instead of the 5 that's standard for consoles. We're still going from a 6 month cycle to a 2 year cycle, and the market will have shrunk dramatically. So: massive stagnation.
But I wouldn't have to run the games on my own machine!
Whee? I guess?
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
The same is true for cloud computing generally. There are cases where it is worth the risk, but it is a case by case basis.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
Not to mention the benefits of allowing a singular working file for anything that's collaborative. This will be great for the construction industry since you'll only have to make the contractors aware that you have updated the drawing file rather than having to save it as House_3-26-09 or whatever and ftp it to everyone again.
Which is something that corporations have been doing for a long time, and is really nothing new. Files stored on file servers, with permissions allowing multiple users or groups of users access to the file. They save it and the changes are saved on the server.
I think they need to make a separation between cloud computing and cloud storage (as if we need more buzz terms). Cloud computing is basically remote computing, running applications on a server but outputting them to a client. Nothing new really. Cloud storage is simply storing data remotely and accessing it locally. Also nothing new.
I'm detecting an overall theme here, known colloquially as "same shit, different pile."
I never finish anyth
I never finish anyth
It's just someone else is providing Software as a Service, Hardware as a Service, or Storage as a Service.
You're assuming that there is no competition in the central-server gaming industry. If there is, which I have mo doubt there will be, you would see faster advancement in graphics technology.
why does it need a large server located in Rwanda? Even if you are scrapping the bottom of the barrel for terminals, they ought to be able to render web pages. Run them from a static image, when they shut down there is no cache. It takes a bit of ram, but it's very cheap these days.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
You might own a copy of outlook express, but microsoft has the right to stop patching it and updating it tomorrow.
There are some problems with cloud computing, but most overlap exactly into personal computing. OnLive or whatnot is a silly use, since it requires enormous downstream bandwidth to deliver to the consumer, however there are huge numbers of excellent uses. Code that operates on gigs of data but delivers a single number output, data which needs to be available anywhere and so forth.
Like I said, there will be competition. I just think there would be less competition in a market with a small fraction of the demand.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Except with outlook express, your e-mails are stored on your computer. So if Microsoft stopped updating it you'd still be able to use the program to access your e-mail. Google shuts down and your e-mails and the program that you use to read them are gone.
Excellent uses that aren't one of the most latency sensitive uses in computing. This is streamed gaming, right? I don't see what could possibly go wrong.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
No but depending on the implementation your talking about the clients would be. Business, Schools, Libraries, and some others are better served with one or multiple implementation of cloud computing. As long as it is those business's or their contractors that own and or control the "cloud", and those ideas have been around forever.
Home users are a new idea. Anything a person actually has to pay for should be done and handled completely within the parameters of their equipment. If a file is deleted, you should be able to know that it is actually deleted. If you purchase a program it should be installed on your computer. If you pull a trigger in a fricken game, it should pull the trigger then not another 40-80ms later. The worst though is the idea for home users, Cloud OS's, seriously the idea of having services loaded from the net on the most important part of your system, the one thing that makes all of the rest run, relies on an internet connection and a server you have no control over.
Here are some things that did not exist with mainframes/terminal computers:
• Webmail and instant messaging
• Social networking sites
• Blogs and personal webpages
• Online stores
To say nothing of "cloud" applications like Google Docs. More and more of our culture and economy has moved into this newfangled space between computers. Moreover, the actual computers used to access and create this information are basically irrelevant and interchangeable. I can code my Wordpress story just as easily on my Macbook as I can on my parents' computer.
The structure and philosophy of the Internet seems to lend itself to a cloud model.
I also don't see the downside to "centralization" if that centralization entails ubiquitous access and input. Granted, I know nothing about computers, but I honestly think my documents and information are a lot safer in my Gmail and GDocs than they would be as Word files on my laptop.
I just have a RAID 1 setup for my data drive. Simple and I dont have to remember to do anything for it to work. But yes, the odds of me losing my google docs is much smaller than something fucking up both of my drives and me losing everything on my pc. They have a redundant enterprise level backup system. I have a 200$ RAID setup. No comparison
Agreed on the first part. But that doesn't make it a good thing.
On the Second part, is accountability. Its safer because the effort to make sure information isn't lost falls on someone else hands. The problem is one you leave a task with someone else, its hard to get that back. Google keeps a literal history of the inter-webs. Once they scan a web page its in their system for life. How do you know if Google or another company is doing the same with your documents, how do you know that every variation isn't saved for the heck of it, and how do you know when you have deleted something its gone forever? How do you know what someone isn't reading that copyright form you are finalizing and attempting to steal your idea? What happens when Google or Microsoft thinks you have broken their TOS? Do they give you access back to the documents they have saved? I don't think the inability to uncomfortableness of those answers is worth the peace of mind that I can replicate with a CD burner.
The internet itself wasn't a terribly new idea when it finally came about, we had just finally gotten to a point where it was reasonably viable to be implemented and so got implemented. Getting the various products and services that 'cloud computing' entails to actually work well enough that it will be broadly accepted is rather new. Hopefully it leads to some beneficial and interesting places.
I think Google, in particular, has gone a long way towards defining the moral parameters of this space.
With respect to the problems you brought up, some of them are incredibly troubling, but they reflect a mindset that regards activity on computers as taking place in "private space." I think this will shift with generations. 10 years ago, if you imagined someone at a computer, you probably conjured up an image of someone hunched over a keyboard in a dark room, blue light from the monitor glowing against his face—in other words, being on the computer implies you're alone. 10 years from now, I bet more people will conjure up images of online gatherings, of people communicating and sharing information with friends in this new "Internet space"—being on the computer implies you are connected.
Just as everyone knows there are certain things you just don't do in public space, I think people will start to "know" that there are certain things you just don't do in "internet space." At the same time, people have struggled very hard to ensure that public space is used fairly, and I imagine that people will similarly struggle over their "rights" in Internet space to ensure that the controllers of this space are not abusing things like terms of service and unjustly denying access (at least I hope, but the trajectory of net neutrality is giving me good reason to hope.)
My primary point is that "cloud computing" doesn't really mean anything.
Can anybody offer a concise definition of "cloud computing" that is not already covered by a better, more precise term like "distributed processing" or "software-as-a-service?"
As far as I can tell, from this discussion and others, all "cloud computing" means is "anything that uses the Internet."