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Personal cloud to replace PC by 2014??

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RAMA said:
There's plenty of bandwith to be had.
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That's the exact opposite of what major ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner are claiming. Admittedly, they are completely full of shit about this, but they'll use this false demand to boost rates through the roof to cover their so-called "costs" while making record profits just like they did with cable television service.
 
^^^ While also strong-arming congress and the FCC to release more spectrum to them using their substantially high-paid lawyers and lobbyists.
 
137th Gebirg said:
^^^ While also strong-arming congress and the FCC to release more spectrum to them using their substantially high-paid lawyers and lobbyists.
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You might be a bit confused. Cable and fiber companies don't use radio spectrum for their services. Perhaps you're thinking of cellular providers lik AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless and Sprint.
 
Yep - I did get confused. I stand corrected.

I've lost track of the skullduggery these companies have engaged in to squeeze us dry. Sorry for the incorrectly-directed rant. :scream:
 
sojourner said:
RAMA said:
Again, you're thinking one dimensionally.
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No, I'm basing my comments on observation and experience.
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Regardless, potential internet speed with the cloud in place on my ISP is 100 times that what it was in 2001. If they put caps on when the rate was 15MBps then the cap would likely have been higher than my initial best speed...same thing when the speed reaches 150 or 200. Besides there are ways round caps and throttling.

RAMA
 
The day "the cloud" takes over is the day we lose our last chance to save ourselves from tyranny.

Information left in the for-profit hands of corporations and their political cronies will become a commodity item that is kept from the masses by exorbitant and omnipresent access fees and subject to continuous attack by those wishing uncomfortable or damning facts to "go away".
 
Clouds are part of the sky, and "net" is short for "internet"...

Sky... net... wait a minute!

SKYNET! We're all doomed.
 
Ian Keldon said:
The day "the cloud" takes over is the day we lose our last chance to save ourselves from tyranny.

Information left in the for-profit hands of corporations and their political cronies will become a commodity item that is kept from the masses by exorbitant and omnipresent access fees and subject to continuous attack by those wishing uncomfortable or damning facts to "go away".
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That's certainly a hyperbolic bit of hand-wringing.
 
Being able to access my own data from any tablet or terminal or mobile device sounds great, but I want to have the data on my own home PC. A "personal cloud" if you will. I'm not giving everything to Google or some other company, that's idiotic.

Storage and processing power is becoming so cheap and ubiquitous that there's almost no need for centralized processing or data storage anymore. I've got 3 TB of hd space in my house and thousands of movies and songs and video games on several devices.... why would I want to give all of that data to a private company?
 
FordSVT said:
Being able to access my own data from any tablet or terminal or mobile device sounds great, but I want to have the data on my own home PC. A "personal cloud" if you will. I'm not giving everything to Google or some other company, that's idiotic.

Storage and processing power is becoming so cheap and ubiquitous that there's almost no need for centralized processing or data storage anymore. I've got 3 TB of hd space in my house and thousands of movies and songs and video games on several devices.... why would I want to give all of that data to a private company?
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The answer, for most people, is "convenience." They don't know (or want to know) how to set up something like that, so they leave all the hard work to a third party. Thus far, no one has made a home solution that's "so easy a caveman can do it."
 
RAMA said:
sojourner said:
RAMA said:
We'll see, but Google Drive already promises over 99% uptime...hard drives at home don't necessarily have 99% uptime, or home networks.
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You're not addressing his main point.
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The companies diving headfirst into don't seem to concerned about it, they are devoting huge amounts of resources into making it happen, I think business will adopt it to a higher degree than individuals, at least at first.

Neilson's law of internet bandwith:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html

Exponential growth at work. There's plenty of bandwith to be had. I got a DSL modem in 2001 and cable modem in 2002. Speed varied from 1Mbps to 3 Mbps...now I have 35Mbps, and my cable provider goes over 100Mbps on the high end.
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Really, I'm still stuck on ADSL and had to wait until 2006 even to get that option. No date yet given for ADSL2+, or even FTTC.

Chances of ever getting cable where I live are 0.00000000000........ 1%

Satalite would no doubt be prohibatively expensive.

Mobile phone coverage signal strength wise is 1 bar at times. Enough to make a phone call not interent.

If you live in rural locations are on costal areas where mobile phone coverage is weaker. Your options are more limited than in more urbanised areas.

By going down the cloud route and getting rid of storage at the user end aren't you discriminating against a group of people.

Sure the cloud has it's use but it's best use is to suppliment the current system of local data storage. If you need access to you'r files in multiple locations then you can upload it the cloud.
 
Robert Maxwell said:
Ian Keldon said:
The day "the cloud" takes over is the day we lose our last chance to save ourselves from tyranny.

Information left in the for-profit hands of corporations and their political cronies will become a commodity item that is kept from the masses by exorbitant and omnipresent access fees and subject to continuous attack by those wishing uncomfortable or damning facts to "go away".
Click to expand...

That's certainly a hyperbolic bit of hand-wringing.
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Is it?

Seems like every other day we're hearing about some new "data cap" or "usage restriction" or someone got their account deleted at some site because they said something the owner didn't like.

Kindle has had problems with content providers simply reaching in and deleting content w/o so much as notice to the owners.

Game companies are trying to move to a "lock" system so that you can't buy used or borrow games from friends so they can keep you on the hook for access fees in perpetuity.

Knowing as we all do the dark things governments and corporations get up to, do we REALLY want to give them that sort of power over information itself?

How could we ever be sure that what we read is what we read yesterday? What's to stop documents and sites that are problematic to the powers that be simply vanishing with the press of a few keys?

The operations of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 could only be accomplished because data was fully editable at will by the ruling authority.

Is that what we want for society?
 
Yep. My backup drives do me a lot of good. I just installed a 160GB backup drive in my system yesterday, after rummaging through a netbook that 'sploded. So now I've got more than enough to back up everything (I have a 500GB HDD, and 660GB between two backup drives).
 
I've used "cloud computing" in my work - a lot of supercomputers in academia are now actually PCs coded to use both CPU and GPU to run code, and making an off the shelf cloud is now rather easy. Quite a lot of UK universities now have one.

I've tried cloud gaming as well, as I was curious as to if it could live up to the hype. OnLive is quite convincing, but the audio is patchy as hell and I've found that Gaikai is visually stunning when it works but I find the latency still doesn't match up to playing on a home PC or console. I think that the tech hasn't quite caught up with it yet, and there's bugs to be ironed out before it's ready for widespread use beyond those curious about it.

Once they iron out the problems with games, though, I'd imagine that most TVs will come with an inbuilt link to a cloud gaming service and that consoles will probably become more of a thing for hardcore gamers, because if the masses can get CoD on launch day via their TV without having to queue, I'd imagine that would be very attractive.
 
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