Online computing

[Tiago]

I am sure that would also lead to another concept: CPU power/time cost:
You would be able to buy 1 hour of CPU power at 10GHz to process your 3D project rendering, and the day after buy 1 hour of CPU power at 2GHz to process your word document... but you have to be carefull your kid would wake up in the middle of the light grab you access code and will request 15 GHZ of CPU power and other 5GB-Video RAM for 3D video to play that game he saw in a magazine...

The pros:
- You can have less and high power depending on what do you need
- You only pay for the real time you are log on...

The cons:
- privacy...
- the feel of open the case and setup new hardware :-)
- DIY is fun, that concept would end...

[Stephen Coates]

Harrison's sentence

They remain completely in control of everything.

sums it all up quite nicely.

How about open source stuff? Linux etc. Since that is not driven by profit it would be less likely to end up with a situation such as what harrison describes.

[Harrison]

Linux could be a driving force behind the server end of many such cluster storage and online OS solutions though. And don't forget that all mainframes tend to run UNIX, which is the forefather of Linux.

[Buleste]

The problem with online computing is online speeds. The speed of your computer will depend on where you live, what time of day it is not how good your hardware is. To me that sounds like total cock.

[Harrison]

Very true. In an ideal world we would all be connected at our broadband's maximum limit and remain at that speed. But we all know this is far from true, and recent studies showed a large proportion of UK broandband customers are actually receiving less than 2Mbits, and many only 512Kbits still. Far below a useful speed for such technologies that rely on a stable and fast connection to work. Gaming this way is completely out, and has anyone tried the Google apps on a slow broadband connection? Trying to open a spreadsheet in their software online even on a fairly fast connection is hopelessly slow, so I just don't see the technology or broadband infrastructure being anywhere close to the stage needed to deliver on these dreams.

In 10+ years time maybe, but not at the moment.

[xpect]

The problem with online computing is online speeds. The speed of your computer will depend on where you live, what time of day it is not how good your hardware is. To me that sounds like total cock.

Yes, but if we think that 10 years ago the best you had was RDIS connections at 64k, and since 2006-07 you have 24+Mbit connections and now you're starting to have common fibre at 100Mbit and now 300Mbit services, we just see how much technology and services evolve in 10 years time.

I wonder that in 2019 1Gbit connections could be the most common services for household internet. So what today could be an utopia, till the end of the next decade could be common standard.

What Harrison says it's very true. With a system like that, piracy would be like 0% and I believe has soon the technology can sustain such kind of demands, all big (and small) software houses would jump without thinking twice.