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0 pointsjahmed14y ago0 comments

>But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything.

One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity. Its in the very infant stages but its coming. For what its worth Im typing this on my Cr-48 which has 3G so I'm pretty much there.

I'm inclined to agree especially in cases like movies or music. The idea that we all have a copy of a song on our hard drives is odd. Leaving aside ideas of copyright and licenses there really isnt a reason all media shouldnt live in some kind of shared music/video folder in the sky. I'm going to watch Breaking Bad S2E4 maybe a handful of times and eventually forget about it. Keeping it in the cloud frees the user from needing to think about keeping it or backing it up or deleting it.

Or maybe I'm biased from living in a fairly cloudy world already.

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6 comments · 4 top-level

kristopolous14y ago· 2 in thread

Well this is because the word "computer" needs to be dismantled a bit.

Computers as a personal mainstream entertainment device will eventually work much like television. Data retention policies will be at the whim of the content distributor and consumers will select from sets of content dictated by different price packages.

Computers as midrange workstations for engineers, artists, musicians, and scientists aren't going anywhere and will be the same as they always have. Same goes for the NOC and the Datacenter. Devices that collect and analyze data will work much in the same way. The people that will create and maintain the consumption paradise will continue to do things on traditional configurations. The biggest change here is that display and input systems will continue to diversify in form and function. However, the machine will still be a rectangular block, with all the internal components you are used to.

The million dollar question is how will people that do mostly office-productivity work? For instance, the person at the dentists office that makes the phone calls and does appointment and billing management. Most could probably get by with a desktop version of a smartphone, but nobody has produced the right one yet.

But this doesn't mean that say, the traditional computer will exodus from the dentist office. Just the opposite. They are in every room now, hooked up to cameras and xray machines, talking to redundant servers either on or offsite.

jahmedOP14y ago

Agreed. Many people are starting to ask less for a general purpose computing machine and more for something that can go on the internet or watch netfix or use skype. They want a simple to use appliance like an iPad that simplifies the experience. Want Netflix? Push the Netflix button. Want facebook? Push the facebook button. Technical people will still want general machines that do what ever is demanded of them. I think this will lead to more divergence in the OS market with very simple OSs taking over the 'I just want it to work and I dont care how you do it' market and more technical OSs that let you destroy your computer for anyone else.

One worrying thing is that when things just work you lose some people that might have otherwise played around with things, possibly (probably) breaking things along the way, and learning important lessons. I learned to use Dreamweaver from downloading it illegally and playing around with it but it made it easy to write HTML and got me to learn ColdFusion and SQL. Poking around a DOS prompt and accidentally formatting your computer teaches people some important lessons.

To me the million dollar question is how to keep kids engaged in the transistors and languages of computers when we start to pretend they dont exist. What happens when the next would be Linus grows up in family with only iPads and iPhones?

slurgfest14y ago

In the US, computers might work like television. In some other countries, they might work like cell phones: always bought unlocked, no service lock-in. It just depends on what we tolerate. There's no historic inevitability to the kind of peculiar consumer exploitation that goes on in the US in markets like cable TV or cell phone data plans.

jasonwatkinspdx14y ago

"One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity."

Much of the world lives with unreliable or intermittent electrical power, and likewise unreliable or intermittent internet service.

Also with mobile devices you're talking wireless bandwidth which is shared by everyone in a given area. The combination of crowds and streaming media is not trivial to engineer for. There are some promising technologies (MIMO, etc) but I don't believe any of them remove this fundamental scaling.

Local cache will continue to be important. What will be lost is the requirement to manage which device your shit is on.

cookiecaper14y ago

>One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity.

This is interesting, because I see things from the totally opposite perspective. I think a period of war is coming and that people in America will look back astonished that they didn't realize the value of what they had, including reliable electrical service.

Of course, the internet is far too fragile to successfully operate in a real war zone so I expect the internet as we know it will change rather dramatically too.

ceol14y ago

> One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity.

I don't think that day will be in the next 3 years.

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