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Why Microsoft Should Fear Bandwidth
Mike writes "Microsoft should fear increasing bandwidth to the consumer more than any other single factor as a threat to their monopoly. The average user has no desire to be the sysadmin of their machine(s), and telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this task from them -- for a nominal fee, of course, as application service providers. The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left."
when cars fly.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
'nuff said!
Its 2005... I want my flying car too. And my house that runs itself. Bah!
We've heard this how many times so far? The ideas been spinning around since the early 90s at least.
Repeat after me. As long as there are laptop computers there will be a strong demand for locally-installed software.
Repeat after me #2. Laptop sales have been steadily rising and will probably continue to do so.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
are you kidding? Microsoft would love this (and I think they've already tried). Just think, instead of all those pirated copies of Office, you would have to actually pay to use it from your "application provider"
tham nice fat pipes connecting people to the internet makes it easy to download big Linux ISOs too :^)
And in 20 years, we're all going to live in round houses on stilts and fly cars that look like eggs with windshields. Oh - and don't forget the SHADOW INTERNET! OOOOOOOOOOOH!
.... By allowing users to easily reduce what bandwidth they have with spyware and botnet software ....
No one has the right to run my computer NO ONE I SAY. If centurytel came down here to my house and said that if you are going to use our DSL then you have to let us manage your computer. Well there phone box would be removed from this house via shot-gun.
Looks like the "the network is the computer" argument again. We're already past the twenty year mark of that prediction, I believe.
Some people may be happy with just a dumb terminal as it does reduce the maintenance headaches of running a pc.
However I'm not sure I would want any company to have that level of control over my desktop system. Not to mention having all of my apps and data held hostage to a subscription fee.
People have been predicting the death of PCs since PCs were invented, but it hasn't happened yet. Anybody remember when network computers were supposed to be the next big thing?
"this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It's also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.
With a car, for instance, this exposure to complexity is a necessary state of affairs. With inevitably increasing bandwidth, this is definitely not a necessary state of affairs for computers, and the time of the personal computer as we know it will soon be at an end, I think.
Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee."
No they wouldn't hand it over to someone to do it for a fee when they know the likes of me will do it expecting nothing in return, even though I know its often good for £10 or a small bottle of whiskey.
Nerds us are the reason this won't work. Hell I've even started installing tight VNC on every computer I build for people know so I don't een have to bother to go around to them to fix (And for 2 people clean out there comp twice a week over vnc).
Might seem i have alot of time on my hands but all that whiskey and money is great for college students.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
I think there is one thing that will make MS be happy with lots o' bandwidth - TV over IP. They own lots of patents in conjuction with it and started really developing after they realized that one monopoly (cable TV providers) doesn't like another (MS). Ignorance of the Internet by MS is so '90s - they had the money to make up for their ignorance.
"You need a license to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp." - Red Green
You seem to be missing the point... what good is exchanging one overbearing corporation for another? Oh, it's M$, they're automatically evil, right.
For those who didn't read the article, the reason why Microsoft should fear bandwidth is that control of the computers will be turned over from the home user to a remote company. That is a good enough reason in its own right, but there are other reasons for MS to fear high-bandwidth connections. People stuck on a dial-up are less likely to be able to download Linux and other OSS. The propogation(sp?) rate of viruses, worms and other malware greatly increases because always-on connections spread them constantly - and quicker, which helps to highlight weaknesses in Windows.
http://unelite.freelinuxhost.com - Rock/Scissors/Paper and RPGs shouldn't mix.
The future certainly seems to be heading that way.
However, the main problem I have with the authors point of view is that of a Modern World perspective. As evidence that this future is still many a generation away from becoming reality, we need only look at the Third World countries and witness the total lack of infrastructure in supporting such a society of high bandwidth and low local maintenance computing.
The local computer is a fast, simple, and easy way of getting the required (or needed/desired) computing power to the people in poorer nations without worrying about the HUGE commitment in upgrading or installing the infrastructure that we modern nations are beginning to take for granted.
So while we sit here behind our NATs, and use our computers while eating pizza and sipping on a latte, and think that the future is all silicon, we run the very real risk of not seeing the digital divide grow ever more quickly.
At some point in the future, our societies will have grown so far apart that computers will cease to be the "big" problems that we ultimately face.
Sure, they MAY become ASPs (doubtful), but who do you think will supply the software these companies run to supply services to the users? Microsoft. They will make server licensing comparable to retain their current profit levels so nothing will change.
Don't get me wrong...I too like the idea of the M$ monopoly coming to an end, but the author fails to provide any reasonable thought as to why Open Source will conquer M$ with inreased bandwidth.
They already planned to have their applications ported to the web, and then scrapped those plans because the world was not/ will never be ready.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Email phishing is on the rise. Big time. And unlike viruses, Trojan horses and spyware, phishing scams are completely platform-independent, affecting naive Windows, Mac and Linux users equally.
This all seems to easy, how can MS fail and others succeed while in the same space, nobody would know the difference between a local peice of software or from an ASP?
People only know through what they are given, if the content providers stay the same and continue to recommend the same, then how can Open Source gain a foothold, even already its free!
Besides, MS may be slow but they are not stupid, they'll slowly adapt and we might be back at square one again.
I don't like it when the future is trying to be predicted, there are too many variables.
Jonathanjk.com
so now a gay-ass blog entry will get you on the front pge of slashdot?!
these are dark days.
If just the mention on it get this reaction now, what do you think is going to happen when they try to put it in place? or do you think everyone that feels your opinion will be dead by then?
we can boot the whole OS from the net with ease.
Why bandwidth should scare Microsoft
-- Mike @ 9:30 am
More users than ever use broadband connections at home these days. Though it will take time, these connections will do nothing but get faster. With companies figuring out seemingly every day how to cram more information down the same pipes, and new options like fixed wireless and fiber to the door becoming available, connectivity options for the average consumer are ever-expanding, and with them, the speeds available.
This spells the doom of the modern computer, and the modern operating system as we know it - and this is not a bad thing.
Broad statements, I know, but this isn't an article about the flaming doom of Microsoft, for I believe they will have a place in the market for many years to come. However, it does spell the end of bloated, leviathan operating systems like Windows XP in its present form, and unless Microsoft is very nimble, it could spell the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
At present, we find ourselves in a situation unprecedented in all history - the average person, in charge of a machine of such complexity that it can calculate anything he or she would want to know in mere seconds. This is almost an untenable situation; this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It's also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.
With a car, for instance, this exposure to complexity is a necessary state of affairs. With inevitably increasing bandwidth, this is definitely not a necessary state of affairs for computers, and the time of the personal computer as we know it will soon be at an end, I think.
Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn't too high. I see this as almost inevitable.
With caching, smart usage of bandwidth, latency reduction strategies, etc., most users would hardly notice the difference between an application being provided remotely over a high-bandwidth connection and being provided locally by a spyware- and virus-infested home PC with inadequate memory.
In fact, given the above conditions, and a high-bandwidth connection, the ASP might actually seem faster to many users.
However, with Longhorn, Microsoft is trying to perpetuate the days of local computing, and I feel they are moving in the wrong direction. Like an off-balance fighter, the first time a company starts punching in the other direction, the momentum is likely to shift to the other fighter - in this case, cheaper, better-prepared applications such as Linux, Firefox, and other Open Source applications available for free.
Not that Microsoft couldn't also dominate this new bandwidth-based market of remote applications - they very well could. They have deep pockets and lots of research talent.
But that's not the direction they are moving, and not the direction they want to move. Like the RIAA with online music, they will resist this outcome to the end. They recognize innately that once it's not up to a billion individual users tied to the Windows upgrade path what operating system they use, companies will make the decision as to which is the most secure, most network-centric, stable and bug-free platform for providing applications to their customers - and this platform will probably not be Microsoft-based.
And this gives more nimble players, and more prepared players, like Linux and Firefox plenty of space to step into the breach.
In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn't matter, and there's no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopo
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The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left.
Yawn... heard this one before. The PC will live on past the next decade, if Microsoft doesn't steer the market into the ground first with Palladium, etc.
God is real unless declared integer.
This is a meme that reappeared in various forms for a long time. Essentially a return to the mainframe/terminal model. The first I heard about the modern implimentation I thought "Wow, this is going to dominate for Joe user...but I don't like that idea for myself."
...and I still don't. However, now more than ever I believe it is coming, and will arrive shortly. However, there are a certain type of user who will never accept the fact that they can't use a non connected computer...for a variety of reasons. A few being that apps may or may not be useful without a connection, fear of not being able to get to your remote data (should it be remote), etc, etc.
...Joe Hacker, on the other hand, will not care about the benefits, especially compared to any potential drawbacks. Joe hacker, and another subset of users who are nearly reknowned for their ability to demolish the backbone of whatever network they happen to be plugged into: Content producers.
For Joe user, and anyone who has to service their spyware, would have far less work and worry.
I fall into this category. Not only do I have hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes of videe and audio that I create...but I need instant, immediate, reliable and super-fast access to it. That, and the most important reason--I don't trust their server or their operators.
Which begs the question: Will general purpose computers still exist? Or will I have to pony up absurd amounts of money for a production workstation of some sort? I'm well familiar with the technique in the audio and video world...the vast gap between 'consumer' and 'pro' gear--specs aside. It seems that something just a little better on the i/o quality side, that is considered for professional use, usually costs far more...if for nothing else than a 'creation tax'....(I always thought it was a penalty for being a small thorn in the side of their pablum distribution business...but I digress)
~Dan
This assumes that user education will stagnate. I would hazard a guess that in ten years time the average user will be better at looking after their own machine than they are now. It is also conceivable that in a decade Operating Systems will be easier to manage...
Do you think that users would trust Telcos with their machines and personal data?
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The popularity of web based apps (I've sold a couple for small offices) is astounding. Install one place and go. LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql Php) or java (JBOSS) makes this very convienient. Only one machine to maintain vs many installs across multiple computers. Of course if the one server fails....
At my company more and more things are moving to web based colabrative apps (Notes/ Bug tracking/ timecards..).
Active X was MS attempt to control this market by making web apps work only with internet explorer. Fortunetly it didn't catch.
Web mail is another web app that is astoundingly usefull and has driven this trend.
The main thing holding it back is web browsers are cludgy to develop real slick apps with. Javascript helps but.. Gmail is pretty decent.
Most people don't care what OS they are running if the web works and they can get what they want. Computer purchasers are very unloyal to brand names. It remains to be seen if they remain loyal to MS windows.
Show me the money, honey. I've been hearing this prediciton since, oh, before you were born. I've yet to see it come true. I will *NEVER* relinquish control of my computer to anyone I don't know on a first name basis and trust with my life.
That's two, maybe three people, tops, and Verizon ain't one of 'em.
There is nothing unique about Earthlink providing the same service. Indeed, Micro$oft has an advantage because its engineers wrote most of the applications running on the customer's computer, so the customer is more likely to buy system administration from Micro$oft instead of an ISP.
Also, customers would be wary of buying system administration from an anonymous company. It could be a Chinese company pretending to be an American one and would plant malware, trojan horses, and other crap on the customer's computer.
Customers would prefer Micro$oft because it is a known name.
PC: I'm not dead yet!
Like the rapture, predictions of the PC apocalypse have been plentiful and consistently incorrect. And MS has been making the most progress in making their bloated GUIs manageable in large numbers. Don't be surprised if everything does go to an ASP model in some horrible future, MS will be there.
This story is neither from a reputable industry source nor a respected figure in the IT industry. In fact, I can find no attribution at all. Putting this on slashdot is a total editorial botch. Not only does the hypothesis completely fall apart unde the enormous weight of logic, but there is not even anecdotal evidence to support it.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Do NOT talk about Laptop sales
I've heard people say things like this before... oh, you just wait, when somebody invents a fantabulous operating system and gives it away for free, THEN Microsoft will come tumbling down. Just another one of those craaaazy-talkers.
My grandfather rented one of his phones at his house since it was installed. The fee increased every few years and finaly my mom noticed it at a whopping $5.95/year. She didn't bother removing it, as my grandfather was going to be moved to a retirement home. When we called to get the service connected the tech said that we had to return the equipment. They wanted something like $150.00 for the phone that was installed god-knows-when and was probably paid off in full ten times over. Just though it was kind of amusing.
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Say one ISP starts offering this service. They better have good security because when they go down, lots of computers go down.
" telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this [sysadmin] task from them [users]"
:P. In fact, those companies run as fast as they can from supporting terminal equipment, or the users attached to them: selling you the phone was a major judo flip of the consumer under 1980s telco "de"regulation. ISPs, whether voice, video, data or otherwise, are in the routing business, and little else. That link in the chain offers the least risk, lowest complexity, and most power in the entire system, therefore the highest profit over the longest time.
Right, just like cable companies are looking to take over servicing my TV, and telcos want to get back into supporting any wires or devices inside the network junction box they installed 15 years ago outside my house
In fact, *no one* wants to be in the terminal/user support business. That business is always a loss leader, to sell other, profitable products/services under the same "trusted" brand. Even Red Hat's support service business is only sensible in combination with their customization and other service package offerings.
Let's face it: computers suck, users are incompetent, and everything's too difficult to "fix" - it's much more profitable to replace systems and ignore problems, while sending more and more infotainverts down the pipe to keep people paying. However, for those of us locked out of the ISP monopoly tier dominated by telcos and cablecos, we can compete in their shadow. Even more interesting than remote desktop or even server sysadmin is firewall admin. Not only can small operations scale up with automation and global 24h distributed coverage, but central admin in the modern Internet offers advantages against worms, viruses, and other problems. Verizon vs Microsoft isn't much of a probability in the bandwidth landscape. But the BOfHAA is a new threat to Computer Associates, and even IBM Consulting. Let's go get 'em!
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make install -not war
This article is right on target.
What people really want is a Small consumer gadget that can check e-mail and browse the web, not a PC. Perhaps it would even work for corporate networks in the place of PCs.
I bet even Sun Microsystems might have some plans to dominate this market.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Perhaps we would need to broaden the debate a little to distinguish between computer maintenance related activities and the need for most people to have local storage capabilities. It really brings into focus a couple of important elements.
a. People would definitely and gladly give up the computing infrastructure maintenance especially if one is looking at savings in licensing costs, hardware obsolesence risks, smoother hardware/firmward/software upgrade paths and so on. Microsoft is weak here, unless of course they are able to move in that direction - remember M$ consumer products are really raking in the moolah these days.
b. People are less likely (even your mother I would hazard a guess) to give up personal information, and other information such as documents abnd such like data to an ISP or any of that ilk. Think about the difficulties of changing service providers, it doesnt make sense. Here M$ is on much stronger ground but perhaps not for long because people would then only be interested in storage and there are definitely a number of players who can give the best of both worlds, storage which is local yet computing which is requestesd and used on demand.
What does the slashdot community think about bandwidth becoming like our electricity - generated on demand and ubiquitos?
- ramas opines !!
What about people like me that do want to be sysadmins of their own machines?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Related to this, when is Linux going to get something like RDP? No, X11 isn't it. When you disconnect from X11, it blows away your desktop. VNC is closer, but boy does VNC suck compared to RDP. It's unbelievably slow. I know why it's slow, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it sucks.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee."
MOST users dont know what a system administrator IS to begin with - and those who do know that function enough to understand the value of it are the people who are going to be self sufficient.
this was Microsofts plan for more than a decade now, the whole plan was to have all your documents and applications on a network server some place. yes documents too! this is the whole windows file system that microsoft is trotting out!!
imagine having your documents on a netowrk server policed by Microsoft. and for every little thing you need to pay a fee of some kind. imagine your system crashes and you need to reload, wow the fee would be huge!
would you trust that? would anyone? not me!!!
I've been building and maintaining computers (tons of PCs and a few Alphas when they were still around) for myself, friends and colleagues for ages, but I've grown sick of all the hardware and software installation/tweaking that an end-user is supposed to do. It'd be nice to just plug a computer in like a landline phone these days, select all the software and services you wish to subscribe to and then just start using the computer. No installation of software, no hassle with network settings or myriad hardware/software complications. A subscription could be free for some software (OSS) whereas other software could be charged for.
My bet is that most people would want a such "workstation console": a relatively closed, highly standardized hardware/software combo. It'd be like a game console, but it would also run applications like MS Office or OpenOffice on a remote server.
The owls are not what they seem
Combined with Microsoft's incredibly poor security, the next generation of consoles, PDAs, and appliances should do it. People are sick of malware and new patches for glaring IE or Windows exploits. They want their internet and game box to be as reliable as a toaster or microwave.
If people are given a choice between buying a $500-$1000 PC + $20, $50 or more/year for AV and other security subscriptions; or $300 for a PS3 or XBox2--that is a better gaming platform than all but the most expensive PC--and a monthly gaming/computing contract that will probably be bundled with broadband... stick a fork in the PC.
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The more overbearing corporations, the better! At least with a little corperate friction and competition you will have options. Microsoft has exhibited many times in the past that they care about money much more than customer (or goverment) satisfaction. Look at the EU case they were fined in, and the overseas incident where they were banned from selling software in that country. There is no good corperation, ever! There are priorities, and 100% customer satisfaction is a myth for some-company that big.
Oh. Wait.
You may love .NET or you may hate it (there seems to be no in between), but you can't say Microsoft hasn't been thinking about this a bit.
This is stirring vague recollections of the "Internet Computer" that was going to be everywhere in the next few years way back in 1995. Most people may have no desire to be sys-admins, but they generally have a lesser desire to pay more money than they have to.
Also, sys-admin access-rights data for thousands of machines is oh-so-secure ISP databases? *shudder*
I'll believe it when I see it
-Thomas
You don't want your whole computing experience to be controlled by one or two companies. You really don't. Let's look at the cable industry for an example. My local cable company charges $15/month just for the stations you get over the air, and forces you to use a converter box. A cable subscription with most channels (but no premium channels) is $50/month = $600/year! Plus, cable companies are renowned for terrible service and prices that go up 10% / year.
Now imagine being forced to use THEIR choice of system in THEIR choice of configuration, with your data stored on THEIR server. Want to move or switch providers? Sorry. They've got your data. Want to install your favorite software? Sorry. Only their applications are allowed. Wishing for Office 2010? Sorry. They think Office 97 is good enough. Machine has a problem? Well, they'll have to send someone out at some point in the next 24 hours, and you'll have to wait at home for them, just like you do for cable.
And what makes you think that a cable company won't be vulnerable to all the attacks we have now?
All this would do is give us high prices, poor service, restricted choices, outside control of our data and usage, lots of ads, and little chance of improved security.
No thanks!
in that its been painfully demonstrated to us that common folks can't now (and prolly never will) be effective sysadmins of their public ip-enabled machines. if its off the net, who cares. but if its on the public net, then we all DO care.
so yes, allow for the thin client (yes, that old idea) for most button pressers; and of course still allow regular computers for those who can handle it.
the idea that every grandma and technophobe will be able to secure their site is flawed. it will NEVER be that systems fully manage themselves, and it will NEVER be that we can get everyone up to the level of being a good sysadmin.
so yes, the local device should be simple screen and keyboard/mouse and local storage. but the apps and o/s (so to speak) should be managed by those who can keep security updated and so on. the ASP model _can_ make the public nets more secure by taking grannies off the net with their polluting win98 cable-connected virus-ridden open-relay email-blasters.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
M$ will have problem not because of the ISP will replace them, but because people will easily download software, and they will nolonger have as much the distribution advantage as of today (interm of bundling). If downloading OpenOffice takes 3 seconds, then users would much more likely to download it. Ofcourse, computers must also be much faster to have it install in couple seconds, and start up quicker. If not, then M$ stil have the advantage of being more seemingly integrated.
Of course, such a system would need an opt out provision. I would not want my own personal use PC to be managed by anyone other than myself. I can imagine that when my kids got to a certain age they'd be allowed to use the "adults computer". I'd also be sure to make sure that, if my son or daughter developed an interest early on in IT and PCs other than just IM or music downloads that I'd give them access to an opt-out machine. Even with the risk of their being exposed to the dark side of the net, I feel it would be more important that they have a fully functional tool available to build their knowledge, if computers were their thing.
Some will say that the best way to control your kids internet access is to watch your kids. I agree, but, realistically, with the schedules we follow today combined with the nefariousness of the average teen boy in terms of finding ways to see naked chicks, dead people, etc., having the IT department of my ISP keep an eye on things would be a real blessing. Having the system prevent them from installing god knows what virus ridden dreck from the internet would save endless time spent in restoring systems, reformatting hard-drives, etc.
With the MPAA/RIAA lawsuites flying everywhere, as a potential parent, the last thing I want to find in my mailbox is a demand for hundreds of thousands of dollars because my daughter downloaded a Britany Spears song or two. (I blackly hate the RIAA but, as one guy on a budget, if they come after me, they win.) I know the risks and no ways to protect myself when using p2p networks, an average 10 year old, or an average 70 year old (my father just loves downloading movies) won't have a clue.
Ask IBM what they think of the future of the PC.
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Hardly. Who do you think will provide the ISPs and ASPs with their software? What do you think it's going to run on? Microsoft Office will become a subscription service running on Windows servers.
PC's are only about 20 years old but for the last decade people have been constantly saying that the "PC as we know it" only has a decade left. There still here and I can't see them going anywhere soon.
As for this proposed business model, what is it that people are actually paying for ?, people can be pretty dumb but they rarely give their money away for no perceived gain. The only way it could possibly work is for the ISP to guarantee protection from viruses and spam, I can't see how they could do that though.
I think Microsoft are probably much more clued up about this stuff than we think.
I've got one question: If we still have not managed to make standard thin clients popular (what percentage of the market is using sunrays, for example?) -- and these work over a LAN at 100Mbps or more, then what is making these people think that just because there's broadband, everyone will just jump over this thing? Thin clients are NOT a replacement for a desktop computer. They are, if they get them to work as good as a thin client can work, office workstation replacements. Nothing more. You can't play games or video at decent rates using remote applications. Not even over a 100Mbps line. Not even using Citrix. I've worked with citrix myself and while it's performace over a low-bandwidth link is impressive, the look and feel of a remote application is not anywhere near perfect at 100Mbps. It's just not the same. So, *maybe* some big company will start offering this service. My prediction is that a few people will subscribe to it, use it for two days at the very most, and go back to their "primitive" local applications as fast as they can. But i guess we'll just see.
I don't see, even basic computer users, wanting to give up local control of their computers. My IT department is looking to roll out a Terminal Server as a way of saving IT budget. This will run the OS and applications on Thin Clients from a centralized Terminal Server. Many of the users immediately balk at losing control of their local computer. Even those who aren't very computer literate. It is just a normal human reaction to someone taking away control. Into this add the current distrust of anything being done over the internet. How many people do you know who refuse to do "X" over the internet? With "X" being: home banking, shopping with a credit card, give out personal info, etc. I know quite a few and they are mostly the less informed users. I understand what an SSL encrypted connection is and basic internet security where as average users don't. This entire concept just goes against too many facets of basic human nature to take off. In my opinion people would rather have a spyware infested mess of a computer of their own that allow some one from outside to take control away from them
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Who the hell are you, and why should I care about what you have to say in your random "blog"?
Because, frankly, just because you managed to set up some search-choking "blogging" software, that doesn't mean anyone should listen to you.
I mean, hell, you can't even format your posts properly, why should I care about your random technology predictions in your random "blog" anymore than I care about some random fourteen year old kid's random day at school in her random "blog"?
If this is news, the quality of news has really gone downhill lately.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I just heard some sad news on slashdot - the Personal Computer will be found dead in ten years time. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss the PC - even if you didn't enjoy its work, there's no denying its contributions to slashdot culture. Truly a global icon.
If service providers offered configuration management services, would they then pressure Microsoft to, when adding features, make those features more amenable to provider-based management rather than end user based management?
Does Microsoft invest in any bandwidth providers? Should future investments in this direction make us nervous?
What about the mono-culture problem? When a provider applies the latest patch and clicks the wrong button, will a million PC's get trashed? Who's going to visit all those homes? Will grandpa have to wait until Microsoft and the provider duke it out in court before someone drops by to re-install Windows?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left.
Boy am I tired of this old chestnut.
If anything, adding bandwidth or any other features or functionality will only serve to keep the PC around longer - the more it can do, the more reasons you have to have one. Your PC can now edit movies, be a mutlimedia station, a jukebox, a gaming console...and as it begins to compete in these new areas, devices that used to provide these services are going away. If anything is going away, it's your VCR player or your DVD player. Or your 5 CD changing stereo. Next, it's probably your TV.
And the PC can't be replaced in some ways. Exactly how are you going to program on your PS2? Ever tried surfing the web on an iPaq? The PC solves certain kinds of problems exactly perfectly, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
In fact, I used to work at an engineering firm that made StrongARM platforms for embedded Linux and WindowsCE. Our CEO's business strategy was that the "death of the PC has begun", and we were ready to step in and fill the void.
They're bankrupt now.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
that would have to exist to provide this service. The server would be ultra-expensive to provide the same sort of service that the desktop does to hundreds of people. Plus they would have to make sure that it never goes down, can't get hacked, etc... Essentially this would introduce an enormous upfront cost that didn't exist before, into a system that will probably have addressed the problems by that time. This will never happen, its just simple economics.
Hell I've even started installing tight VNC on every computer I build for people know so I don't een have to bother to go around to them to fix (And for 2 people clean out there comp twice a week over vnc).
Which VNC are you using? OpenVNC? PCAnywhere? MS Terminal Server? Citrix Metaframe?
These range anywhere from just about free to catastrophically expensive.
[Oh - and which offers the best encryption/authentication?]
... fear astroturfing retards?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
But.. eventually it will happen.. 10? Donno.. might be too soon.
But in time, between people not wanting to deal with things, and having to lease even your OS, it will take place.. eventually.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A decade or two? How many PC generations is that? Three? Five? Any prediction in the tech. field trying to look that far ahead is a complete waste of time.
I just love these retards that think they know what the future holds, and they're usually so impractical that it's funny.
Bandwidth isn't going to hurt (or help) Microsoft. They don't provide killer apps. Microsoft's downfall is going to be their own doing. Lack of innovation will stifle sales. MS will try to buy companies with new "killer apps", but that might backfire. Killer apps are going to be helped by an increase in bandwidth. Although MS will jump on the bandwagon and try to steer it as soon as possible, they rarely come up with killer apps, and buying the next killer app could very well backfire. There are enough people that hate MS right now that if Apple got their shit together, they'd package cheap hardware and beat the living daylights out of MS. MS would survive on Office, simply because the whole world uses it, but OpenOffice might start to climb.
What you're likely to see in 10 years, people will be using "appliances". Hardcoded devices with the ability to run a browser, email client, some mild bookkeeping software, and multimedia software, along with games and subscription services. Every multimedia company for the past 20 years has been DYING to get to Pay-Per-Use. That's where the big dollars are. Most people, if the costs are low enough, are sheep-like enough to just fork out the dough and go along with it if that's the easiest solution.
No one, and I repeat, NO ONE! will want to trust the phone company or anyone else with system administration. Most people have too many personal records, taxes, email, p0rn, etc. to be trusted to someone other than themselves, or possibly a close friend or relative.
I just don't buy the "bandwidth is going to kill MS."
A real life comparison could be easily made here.
50 years ago when car's were expensive and walking was the norm downtown's thrived. After cars became cheaper and roads led everywhere the malls tore into the business the downtown core had thrived on. We now see big box stores killing downtown's everywhere.
Microsoft is as 'big box' as they come.......while there is no doubt that strategies behind operating systems and the internet will meld together I don't see it as a reason to see Microsoft to not be a prominent part of that.
...I see it as a potential new beginning in computing. I'm not saying I agree with the philosophies presented in this article; I mean to say now is the time for some young, intelligent, and enterprising individual to shake up the digital world as we know it by designing the next level of bleeding-edge computer technology that will represent new hardware and software technologies that can function independently of what we have today -- thus giving computing a "fresh start."
The basic assertion here is that there will be a rise of the Application Service Provider that will take the responsibility for application and OS purchase decisions away from the individual and give it to the ASP.
The company, we are to assume, is going to be smarter than the individual and will avoid Microsoft products. But this assumption is silly. Large organizations have already rushed into the arms of Microsoft, buying in to Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, and IIS.
Centralizing the market for applications and operating systems may lead to fewer sales, but each will be thousands of times more lucrative. While this will surely attract plenty of vendors, we have no grounds yet to assume that Microsoft won't come out on top -- if only by buying out whoever seems to be leading out of the gate.
Mind the Gap
Although I agree with some of the premises of this article, I think he has completely missed the boat on the reasons for it.
First off, we can already see the movement he describes. How many ISP's (particularly the big ones like AOL and NetZero) now advertise e-mail filtering and virus blocking? Microsoft has done such a poor job on it's software that ISP's had to move agressively in this direction or risk having all their mail servers and bandwidth pipes melt down!
In fact, Microsoft has done such a poor job that one is tempted to think that it couldn't possibly be sheer incompetence, it had to be part of some strategy on Microsoft's part. I think it might have been. Microsoft doesn't want secure computers! I think that, in the beginning, the entire security issue was going to be used to force a move to Microsoft's Palladium (or whatever they call it today!) and move final control of every computer into Microsoft's hands.
But their strategy has backfired! Now that ISP's are taking responsibility from their users for running virus and spyware controls, how much of a leap is it for them to start providing application software, also? They had to upgrade their servers to provide extra horsepower for these applications, how much of a stretch is it to use that same horsepower to provide server-based applications, too? And I think Microsoft sees that danger now, though maybe a little too late. Their recent acquistion of virus software and announced plans to offer their own virus control software is, IMHO, an attempt to wrest control back from the ISP's and return it to desktop software that Microsoft controls.
This also is doomed to failure. Microsoft can do no better at releasing patches and updates to their virus software than they can to their OS and applications software! Many, many times in the last 5 years, I have proven to myself and the companies I work for that intelligent software at the firewall and at central mail servers can be used to protect Windows software from dangerous viruses, suspicious websites and nefarious e-mail attachments easier and faster than Microsoft's patch and update cycle. ISP's can do (and now are doing) this, also.
In short, I believe that Microsoft has done this to themselves, first through shoddy QA and then through deliberate mishandling of security issues. They should be allowed to reap exactly what they have sewn!
to run that fancy new fangled game that uses pretty 3d graphics...
to manage the files you keep locally (personal docs, etc)...
to show you a start up screen while you connect to the holy application server...
to show you an error screen when your cable goes out...
to let you print that document you really need when the internet isnt working...
and so on and so forth.
you still need an operating system to manage the resources your computer has. and it needs to be bloated if it is to support many different hardware configurations. maybe they'll require us all to use the exact same pc, but there would still be an os.
Mods on crack - parent is ontopic, 100% FUNNY
If people were happy with thin clients way more of them would be using Linux already. I talk to lots of people who are tempted by the stability and lack of fuss in maintaining Linux but don't convert because they want to play games. We're a long way from a good game being playable on a thin client.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
They could start leasing the OS to you as well. And if you dont pay up, ( and stay online .. ) then your pc no longer even boots.. It just sits there, waiting for the TFTP server...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The PC as you know it has already left the building.
The Networked display will replace the PC display.
End of Story.
Making such faulty predictions without any reasonable examples of how these predictions will come to be is nonsense! First of all the Internet does not guarantee reliability so most real-time Internet applications are slow, because packets are dropped by the routers within the host client pipe. So would you want to drag a courser on your screen and see this operations only 5 seconds after you have performed it? Probably not. Secondly, there are security issues that many have pointed out with this kind of thin client server architecture. Thirdly, it will be very difficult to migrate all the current 3rd party software that is running on windows to this new architecture.
The US is still hopelessly behind Korea, Japan and Scandinavia. I pay 249 SEK (about 35 USD) a month for my 8MBit ADSL connection. I can flatline it at 850kb/s with noone asking any questions. They way it should be. ASP is however pretty nice at companies. Makes is really easy to make rollovers to new versions etc. Ponder buying a 10Mbit internetconnection (fiber) and 100Mbit to your co-location - you could pretty easy make an ASP-sollution work there. Alot of companies have already made that switch... Some of them of course use it only as a PDC/Storage solution, but the ASP is a pretty neat thing which may work wonders instead...
Yeah my Windows Media Center 2005 machine would love to stream media at 100mbps to every other machine in my home with content from the net using DRM. The thought in this article is as old as Sun's The Network is the Computer. The network will be a media machine, all the web sites will disappear and the only people left will be those Free Software "Terrorist Pirates" who quote the Constitution and love to shoot weapons. But at least you can use Lynx to read your terrorist GNU manifesto!
2 kJ :www.itcentrs.lv/linux/docs/lg/www_root/issue30/gx /penland/rms_booth.jpg
Grow up!
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:rPUARet7u
I've been hearing a lot of theories lately that the reason gigabit residential connections aren't on the immediate horizon in the US is because of a classic conflict of interest.
Many ISPs are also cable and voice providers. They'd like to keep the services separate so they can keep three separate revenue streams.
When gigabit residential connections become a reality the market for streaming video will begin to chip away at cable television.
In theory, that's why Verizon and Comcast (for example) have no plans to give you a home DS3.
Then any malware that found it's way onto the ISP's copy of the OS would in effect corrupt every user out there, yes?
I'll take my chances with my own computer, thank you.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
The real differences are between "X terminal" approaches and "diskless workstation" and "local storage" approaches, and local storage seems to keep winning.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yep. Any Castro is going to die any day now...
...who are likely to give up their computers for some dumb terminal or "internet appliance" never should have had a real, configurable computer in the first place. That sort of power is way beyond them and it always will be. This sort of travesty is what happens when marketing departments are allowed to make decisions. ...the outcome is something akin to what happens when one allows politicians to make the decision to say, build atomic weapons. Something incredibly powerful is put into the hands of the incredibly stupid or avaricious. Bad idea!
You're using her as bait, Master!
...of thwe two ways of computing and networking more than one or the other. For a lot of purposes, the way things are now, for special apps you only use once in awhile and are bandwith hungry, then a remotely run app. And we also have to contend with convergence in the area that is experiencing more and faster growth, and that is the cellphone/pda market. Consumers are replacing those devices a lot faster than either desktops or laptops, and the price is dropping faster when you factor in features in these small wireless computer thingees people tote around. You can't even hardly call them just phones any longer.
Next compare cost of consumer bandwith as a ratio to cost of IC chips in general. With printible ink based circuits coming online in a big way soon, it will be just so cheap to always have an advanced system that people would still want "the power" of having their own "computer" as opposed to someone elses computer.
Now, I could see your premise taking off more IF a lot of the major players and governments combine to end the "wild wild west" phase of the internet and require a good deal more in the way of identity and accountability online, and chop the internet up into subscription models a la AOL type "nets" where the consumers would pay for a package of apps, games, delivered on demand entertainment and information resources, etc., and in competetion with other nets, much like you buy a cellphone package today or satellite or cable TV package, etc. But that's a big wild card. I know they would *like* that as it would mean a guaranteed revenue stream, it remains how much lobbying and political pressure the big guys can put to it to institigate such profound changes.
Although the personal "system administration" angle is quite complex for the average user, automatic updates that can be pushed to them along with more secure design are the obvious trends now, so I see that problem getting easier in the future. People who want such systems have them now, and word of mouth and pressure from business desktop deployment will make it trickle down to the home owner level.
And there's one more thing to consider, and that is the "blue collaring" of the personal computer. They are merely little machines that take nothing more than a simple screwdriver to construct, because of this, we have the population now with millions of "shade tree mechanics" who are as comfortable with computer repair as one or two generations ago were as comfortable with a car tune up. It is no longer the leet high paid IT professional locked away in obscure academic or corporate R&D labs who can muck around with computers, either on the hardware or software side, it has become ubiqituous across the board in the general population. As computers have grown more complex and "hard", they have also become much easier. A person now can take a dozen boxes and connect them wired or wirelesssly, boot from a pre made Cd and have a mini super computer up and running in no time, and that is at the *hard* side of personal computing. One decade ago that would have required some pretty advanced skills, a lot of money and some pretty good luck to pull off. Single system admin has now become mostly a no brainer with the proper operating system and just a scosh of forethought, and it has the potential to be automated a LOT more. And with huge RAM becoming more and more common, you could see just RAM images of the OS and apps being the norm to run in,not hard drive based, and any major disaster being easily recoverable then, just poof it away and reinstall from known good, as simple as popping in a disk for a few moments, or as you point out, from the network. After playing around with various live cd based distros you can see the potential there, both in ease of use and in security and in administration.
PCAnywhere, Terminal Server and Metaframe are not based on VNC.
VNC is an acronym: Virtual Network Computing.
Lots of shops sell products that offer virtual network computing services. I'm asking the grandparent which product he recommends.
This is nothing but a rehash of the same braindamaged idea that will never fly. Like thin clients, and the same basic problems that come with them like when the main box crashes, all the thin clients end up as paperweights, etc, etc...(yawn)
Nothing to see here, kiddies. Move along.
Then you just configure Firefox to use your real proxy (or none if you think you don't need one, but having one may be more secure).
640K, 640K, 640K, 640K.....
A consolidation of computing power would be a bad thing for users in the same way that a repeal of the 2nd amendment would. Keep the power local. Don't let yourself be ruled. Once you lose control over the software you lose control over the content on the network as well and it becomes as stupid and manipulatable as TV.
popularity? I'd rather stick my head in a lions cage than use a web app, they are completly unusable, espcially web mail.
At the point of using java/activex you are already installing an app there which runs locally, so you can't really call them a webapp, they are just stuck, horribly, inside a web browser like the evil stepchild of window in window MDI.
In this case, I don't think the article has much depth to it - the main concept is appealing, but I don't see enough thought behind it to really win. But even so, I'd mod you -1 Flamebait :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
However despite increasing bandwidth out to the Internet as a compelling force, equally powerful trends suggested the continued importance and popularity of the home PC. Most of these trends can be summed up as needing even higher bandwidth locally, as well as needing specific interfacing of other devices, both of which aren't likely to be reasonably handled by some form of thin client. For example, all the reasons to burn personalized CDs or DVDs. It is not likely that burning CDs or DVDs would happen straight over the Internet without some kind of fast local store (i.e. hard disk). Another is interfacing digital and video cameras and editing those results. Again it doesn't seem reasonable to build a thin client to interface these device just to ship the many gigs of data (particularly video) out over the Internet to a remote fileserver and, worse, to perform editing against the remote fileserver -- these applications, popular on the home front, pretty much dictate a home PC-like architecture with fast, large local file store.
Undoubtedly many others will come up, because the same kinds of advancing technology that permits higher bandwidths to the Internet, also provide even higher bandwidth needing applications locally. And the reason why thin clients have yet to take off among the general population is simply that hard disks are so cheap, so the difference between the cost of a PC and a thin client is very small and yet one gives up all the flexibility, etc. For many, this situation is likely to continue.
Actually the argument is rather similar to arguments for and against the future of distributable home entertainment media vs just using big pipes. Does anyone think that we won't have media like CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, PS2 games, etc in the future. Why not distribute all music and movies and video games via big pipes ? Why have a PS2 or Xbox or GC in the future, or an HD-DVD player ? Just use a thin client... Some of the same reasons why...
Hey, you're already accepting terrible game load times on consoles. So why not add swap over NFS twenty router hops to a central telco server too?!?!?!?! Hey, at least you won't have to admin that desktop...
The ignorance of this news item astounds me. Thin-client/server architecture is nothing new; it's been in use for well over a decade. Such architecture allocates presentation to the end-user on the client side, and application processing and data management on the server side. This is essentially what the article is talking about. However, I find the fact that the author believes Microsoft to be completely adverse to distributed computing and remoting of applications to be somewhat offensive. The author clearly lacks a solid background on subject.
.NET Framework (of which the framework/base class library is a subset of the new WinFX API, which replaces Win32, and will be the defacto API for Window Longhorn) has integrated support for object-level remoting built directly into the language runtime. Standards like XML and SOAP are put at the forefront. Web-services aren't something just tacked on as an afterthought, they're given importance in the .NET world. And I think that Microsoft is finally learning not to twist such standards, they realize the impact it can have on developers.
Sure, Microsoft certainly may not have been involved with the industry push towards distributed computing initially. But over the last decade, they caught onto it. They became involved with the OMG (Object Management Group) and the introduction of CORBA (Common Object Request Brokerage Architecture). Later, they created DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model). As web-services and standards like XML and SOAP began to surface, they two became supported (albeit, perhaps reluctantly at first).
The
Of course, only the future can tell whether or not Microsoft's Windows family of operating systems will survive the impending ubiquity of thin-clients. Or whether thin client/server architecture will be embraced by the masses.
Regardless, I don't believe Microsoft is fearful of bandwidth. I think they're embracing it. And as far as I know, GNU/Linux isn't any further ahead of Microsoft, in terms of technology, when it comes to this type of architecture.
When the NC was first announced around 95 this was also the case. So the choice at the time was: a. Tight central control and no piracy or b. Free-wheeling piracy as usual. Absolutely no contest.
Piracy is the cornerstone of the pc business. You pay a "large" upfront cost for a computer, admin it yourself and in return you can do whatever you want including pirating to your hearts content.
Now if we throw Longhorn and tight DRM into the mix then things looks quite a bit different: All of a sudden piracy becomes a lot harder (and therefore for a lot of consumers it will be considered to hard to bother). Then the tradeof gain in buying the pc disapears and you end up with a rotten deal: Pay for (and regulary upgrade) a full pc, pay for all your software and content plus you have to admin the stupid thing yourself.
With DRM on the PC the NC looks mighty attractive. Of course there is F/OSS but that is an entirely different story ...
TCAP-Abort
Maybe thin clients will replace machines that are only used for basic net, email and word but its most likely they will be running Windows under a very profitable Microsoft licensing system, they're not going to let go of their monopoly that easily and I don't blame them. However anyone who does anything serious with their computers is going to need a good old PC - graphic design, video editing, business applications etc are going to stay local. Seriously, managing your PC isnt that hard, its probably easier than maintaining a car. I use win2k, I started by patching it up and installing a crapy sygate firewall, then I dumped IE and Outlook - all of that could have been done by Microsoft, the PC manufacturer or someone else. Now all I do is click OK to windows update - and even that could be defaulted to auto. Theres really nothing more to it - people can live with getting someone to come and look at their PC if something really major goes wrong, just like taking their car to the garage...
The people who should most fear bandwidth are TV networks.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The business computing environment is one of centralized servers and distributed idiots (using PCs)
Banks, the bloated behemoth of finance, are NOT happy with that situation. Setting up blade servers and maintaining total control over the configuration is the way they're going.
They have programmers in Bangalot India, working via a recycled piece of trash PC, (that they wrote off as tax deductions, set up a company to move 'em there and sold 'em off at a profit,) on servers back here in the 'States.
They don't really care what happens to the VPN client but they keep draconian config control over the thing to insure that nobody sniffs enough packets to break encryption. That means no spyware.
Microsoft is going to end up being used by a shrinking minority of idiots and fools. (Small business and home owners who were 'advanced' enough to try out the latest thing, [the bleeding edge,] and are about to become 'retro' because the 'intelligent appliance' market is going to pass 'em by.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Microsoft isn't threatened by ever-increasing bandwidth. They are well-positioned to participate in the post-PC world:
1. X-Box isn't just a game machine. Several interviews with Microsoft execs indicate that this will eventually be their play for media convergence. If their vision pans out, X-Box will be a major player.
2. They're signing ISPs to deliver MSN, and cable companies to use MS software in their set-top boxes. If they're successful in winning over most of them, this will put them in the role of the ASP and essentially neuter the threat posted by an ASP model.
3. Longhorn is being engineered to use web services internally and XAML (the XUL/Flex rip-off) positions them to provide for internet delivered applications.
I detest Microsoft's bloatware and its business practices, but that doesn't change facts. They *are* planning for the post-PC world, and (unfortunately) have a good shot at leveraging their old monopoly into new ones.
Anything which is even *faintly* speculative and due in "ten years" is never gonna happen.
--
Toby
These also support RDP and VNC protocols by converting to the compressed X protocol, which also gives bandwidth gains over the raw RDP/VNC. Check out this description of the technology.
Recent versions of Knoppix live-CD include the NoMachine client and FreeNX server, making it easy to test it out.
Andrew Yeomans
The true solution is much simpler. Treat consumer grade connections as consumer grade connections. Firewall off all ports below 1024. Deny outgoing connections to ports below 1024 except for 80 (all sites), 25 (only to ISP's mailserver), etc.
This will reduce greatly the ability of Windows worms to spread initially (since all the vulnerable services have listened originally below 1024), and also control other issues. If the consumer wants a business grade connection, charge them for one (an extra 20$ isn't unreasonable).
Most people don't want to learn or know how to stay secure, so don't let them be exposed to it. It's that simple.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"I have no qualifications, I'm just another ignorant 'blogger' sucking up bandwidth and blocking out REAL information on the web."
"I don't know HTML, which is why I used 'blogging' software to run my 'site', so I'll make up something about browser incompatibility, which would be entirely Slashdot's fault (since I was talking about YOUR posts HERE, dumbass - no way am I wasting my time reading the thoughts of your ignorant sychophantic readers after I killed brain cells reading your mind dump), and hope I don't sound like I suffer from congenital mental retardation."
"My 'article' got accepted on Slashdot because 1) Rob Malda's only significant technology knowledge lies in the software used to develop crappy 3d cartoons and 2) it's a really slow news day and Mr. Malda was afraid OSTG (formerly OSDN until it got such a bad rap it had to change its name) wouldn't pay him enough for his daily splurge of gin and tonics."
Crawl back to your hovel. I know more about brain surgery than you do about intarwebs technology. You have no qualifications to talk about any of this. Shit, you can't even write your own damn HTML.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The home "network computer" was a good idea, but Microsoft went to great lengths to kill it, with proprietary browser extensions and such. There should have been an i-Opener in every hotel room in the developed world. A stateless, diskless client is just what you need in that application.
There is almost no real need for network computing. If you want homogenous web/email/IM/word processing/photo viewing systems, they can be implemented safely using a cheap computer and any brand of Linux, coupled with automatic remote updates. Everything that you can do as a web-application on a thin client can be done as an application on the same computer running Linux (or MS Windows, for that matter). Everything - the ease of updates, the security, the backups - everything can be done using a secure Linux computer connected to the Net even better. The problem is that there is demand for general computing, for systems which can be customized for different needs, different uses, different peripherals, etc. It is possible to do, but it would be a gagrantuan task to port all the richness of the PC world to network computers. And if you don't port the richness, but only a few applications, I fail to see how installing them locally is worse.
The article simply suggests we replace the local insecurities of MS Windows with remote insecurities of IIS. It suggest we take miriads of Windows applications that Linux still can't reproduce, and port them to web-application architecture. This is simply not feasible.
The logical fallacy is quite obvious - the article shows how some problems can be fixed by network computers, but fails to mention the limitations that would be inherent in the new system and that that if we accept these limitations, all problems can be fixed locally just as easily.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I'm sorry, but the repition of articles like this make me mad. It may be true that this is what the "average" computer user needs, but that is not the whole story. When we think of the "average" motor vehicle, it has four wheels. Making the assumptions based on that fact is ok, since 95% of motor vehicles have four wheels. However, the "average" computer user does not make up 95% of the computer market, but more like 30%. Therefore, this would be good for those AOL grandmas, but bad for the many various types of power users. Using a remote system takes away a level of flexibility that these people need, therefore, a thin client system will never become mainstream in the way we think of MS Windows today.
The current computing paradigm is so problematic as to demand that the change away from locally administered machines WILL happen. It's only a matter of time.
What is remarkable is the amount of time we spend discussing the present and near future when the bit more distant future is the real matter at hand.
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but a "trusted source" in the industry who butters his bread with writing on the current paradigm believes it is destined to fail- imagine a world where infections from spyware and adware are something out of the quaint computing past.
And let's not forget what Moore's Law will do the machines of the future, particularly on the server side.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
No, it was a false start because it was a dumb idea.
People don't want to pay subscription fees for software. If they did, we'd see a ton of software being sold month-by-month, with remote activation via Internet. There's no technical block to doing so, and there hasn't been in over a decade. The problem is that whenever someone tries it, nobody outside of the business world is interested.
People don't want to be at the mercy of the cable company or the phone company. We're talking about the two companies the average person probably hates most, and now you're offering them a way to make their entire computer system totally dependent on the whims of the corporate behemoths they hate?
People don't want ever-increasing prices. Look at how the cable company jacks up subscription rates several times a year. Who wants that for all the software they run?
Network connections aren't reliable enough. Ask DSL users if they want their entire computer to turn into a doorstop every time the DSL is slow or out.
People don't want the upgrade treadmill. If you buy your software by subscription from an ASP, you get upgrades when they decide. And of course, the upgrades may break things, make your PC slower, or even outright fail to run. That's why people don't upgrade their OS, don't install new Windows patches, and don't upgrade their applications. They've been burnt before. If it ain't broke, they don't want it fixed.
Computers aren't fast enough. Thanks to the ever-increasing bloat of software, editing a text file today is slower than it was in 1987, when my 16MHz Atari ST system could smooth-scroll (pixel by pixel) at 64 lines per second running Tempus on a large soft-wrapped text file. My Linux box can't even seem to line-scroll that fast in vim. Hence, there's always a need to make PCs faster, and given a network computer, the easiest way to make it a shitload faster is by adding a hard disk, installing the software locally, and removing the network latency delays.
In short, the minor benefits of Network Computing don't outweigh the enormous costs and liabilities. It isn't going to happen in a free market. It only happens (sometimes) in business because PHBs impose it on everyone regardless of cost/benefit analysis.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If MS keeps behaving the same way they have been, they'll welcome more bandwidth. Look at XP product activation. People have pretty much put up with it. That is a step down the slippery slope of losing control of your own personal machine.
If remote system administration is going to be a trend, I'm sure MS will be at the front. They'll either be there first or wait until a big player emerges and buy them out.
The difference between Le Bernadin and McDonalds is that the latter has commoditized their food. This means that you can walk into any McD's in the world, order a Big Mac and it will be prepared the same way, every time. This is done so they can hire unskilled labor, give them instructions with lots of pretty pictures and the product will always be the same. On the other hand, there is only one Chef Eric Ripert, and he makes things without instructions. If you wanted to open another Le Bernadin, it would not be the same.
The key here is the quality level of the service and food at Le Bernadin surpasses (by a very wide margin) that of McDonalds, in food quality, preparation, presentation, service, atmosphere, etc. Again, there's only one Le Bernadin, but thousands (and thousands) of McDonald's.
In order to move to that model, you will have to accept the McDonald's plan: mediocre service, mediocre applications, and a barely palatable experience. For Gramps who only checks email and surfs maybe once a week, that will probably be fine.
Most people (especially people who use their computers as part of their job) use a highly-specialized set of applications. They also demand better-than-mediocre service. The types of support they require are along the Le Bernardin model. The McDonald's model cannot support custom configurations and still turn a profit.
Any ASP that will provide services will have to do a 'generic setup' and probably specify the hardware/software mix; this is the only way they can make money. If you blow up your computer, they will send you a boot CD and restore an image. If you want a special application, you either pay a lot more (to pay for the time of the unskilled tech to load the software onto your image) or you're SOL.
You seriously need to check yourself into rehab. PCs aren't going anywhere. Any solution that is more expensive (not just money, but effort/lost productivity) will not work.
Yeah, right.
No they wouldn't hand it over to someone to do it for a fee when they know the likes of me
I'm sorry, but did you even *read* what you quoted? I'm guessing that you just pasted it without reading it.
Him: Users want someone to do X for them.
You: No, users want me to do X for them.
You're claiming that the author is wrong, by arguing that he's 100% correct.
Please engage your brain before you post here again.
They are not just doing it to computer users, but also to web designers who use script generators. The source will often produce an ad at the bottom of the code that appears on people's website.
I suggest you read Slashdot
As users don't want the headacke of maintenance, it is not the bandwidth that will help them, but a full featured Knoppix CD or DVD. Most apps dads mums grandparents need are on it. You need something special, download a special version.
It started as a nice trial CD concept and that how it will realy damage microsoft.
People Try and like it more and more.
And they can always switch back, but most people I know installed it in the end as it was way better and safer.
And it is free.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
"Active X was MS attempt to control this market by making web apps work only with internet explorer. Fortunetly it didn't catch."
Huh? Where have you been? I can't look at any type of business application without a dozen vendors tripping over themselves trying to come show me a "web-based" application that is in reality an ActiveX-based one. It's insane but no one except the Slashdot crowd seems to recognize that ActiveX applications are in fact Win32 applications framed inside Internet Explorer and that they provide none of the benefits one is normally looking for when considering true web-based applications. It didn't catch-on on the Internet at large but unfortunately, in intranet applications, ActiveX is doing very well.
LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql Php)
Uh, you misspelled P.e.r.l, there.
No problemo.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
You are forgetting that even with tons of bandwidth, connections still drop out from time to time. Users will not be happy when their session and possibly data is lost for this reason. Application and Media Service Providers will have a huge market to exploit in the coming years but this will by no means replace the local desktop. Being able to work on data locally without fear of loosing your work because of a loss of connection that occurs at the drop of a hat is paramount. Microsoft knows when the market it moving away from it's ideals. It may take them a year or two but they will only adapt their products to better suit the users [said] desire for hosted applications. (After all, they are the borg :-P)
Actually, one of the blue - thank you very much. And I agree with the grandparent's post.
Plenty of people have particular items of data stored remotely. Every Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail or whatever user is trusting someone else to look after their mail. There are plenty of other such "web applications" where you don't get at the data but instead at a view of the data. An example of this is Google Groups: rather than retrieving the data and having some local application present it to you, the presentation step is done at Google and you never get to see the raw data.
For many people, their 3.5GHz PC is already essentially a dumb terminal which renders HTML.
I've been hearing this line for, what? Three decades?
The PC as we know it is a PC that crashes and runs software that sucks. This is what I believe: With corporate, government, and personal interests pushing free software, we have seen something interesting:
First, free software has become better on the server side than most commercial offerings, if you exclude things like NFS that work "only" about 99% as well as something commercial.
Second, free software has been playing a game of catch-up on the desktop front. This game began in 1995 or so with what looked like 1980's user interfaces, and has almost reached the level of commercial interfaces in the past year or two. In some areas, free software has better user interfaces, but in most cases, the user interfaces suck not because we're so far behind but because the edge-cases haven't been taken care of or because of small details that confuse people. Heck, when I use the Macintosh I am constantly amazed at the slickness and refinement of the Mac OS X user interface. It is simply unsurpassed in quality, anywhere, period. This refinement is layered on top of free software. How is it, for example, that you plug in a printer, push two buttons, and print? It's stuff like this that puts stuff like Linux distros a little behind.
But we have a few years until MS releases a version of Windows that is yet worse than anything they've managed to hack together in the past. In my opinion, we'll be caught up by then, and the game won't be catch-up anymore... it'll be set new standards.
And that means that within the decade, free software will create things that idiots in companies like MS haven't even thought of and won't be able to replicate/buy/embrace & extend/etc. When that happens, yes, the PC as we know it--a device that picks up spyware/adware/viruses/malware/popups/spam and lasts only about a year in terms of usability before the software is so fscked up that most users think it's "broken" and buy another computer--the PC as we know it, will be gone and replaced with something you turn on, use, and turn off without all kinds of crashes and problems in between.
As fast as bandwidth might get, the machine will have internal communications that are certainly faster.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...is indeed a huge headache. I'm just now getting into using FireFox and it appears to be far more secure than Internet Explorer. I can;t believe that I once kep checking accounts and other details of my life on a PC that had a fully equipped Maximum Surveillance Internet Explorer installed. Betwen LavaSoft SpyWare detection messsage and Norton Intrusion Attempt Detected, a Windows PC seems to be a guarantee of an unknwon supervisor possibly monitoring all activities of the machine. This has to be the strongest case for Linux on the client. www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
its because of jackasses like you that i voted for badnarik. i got so sick of kerry fanbois taking stupid potshots at every single little thing bush and any of his supporters said or did that i decided that i'd rather toss my vote than give it to somebody with so many idiots behind them (bush AND kerry, mind you).
Either you have a hard drive on your local machine, or you are using a hard drive on a remote machine. OK, maybe if the remote location has gigs and gigs of ram and many clusters of machines the entire concept runs in RAM, but it's also got to at least be backed up on a hard drive somewhere; and if you don't have enough RAM locally you'll probably need swap, for which you'll need a hard drive as well. Can you imagine a PC without a hard drive?
The wonders of imagination.
All that this really is talking about is where the hard drive is located. The internet connection is analagous to a wire, to an IDE or SCSI or SATA cable. I have to disagree completely, because hard drives are incredibly inexpensive (relatively speaking) and increasing in capacity and performance all the time. As SATA takes off, and the speeds increase, you'll see a pretty big difference in the performance that you get out of your hard drives. PC's are not going hard-drive-less any time in the forseeable future.
The question wrong - it isn't the cost of an ink cartridge vs a microwave oven, it is the retail price.
The answer brings us back on topic, people generally pay what things are worth to them. That means tangible (utility) and intangble (coolness/snob factor) worth.
Software application rental will fly or fail depending on the preceived value buyers receive.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Supposedly, way back when, the Java applets in your browser and the sites they were associated with were going to be your applications, and you wouldn't have to manage them, and you wouldn't have to worry about security that way. It was part of Sun's strategy to make the network the computer. Theoretically, an application operating in context could be more efficient in its use of bandwidth.
But, what happened? From my POV, the applets were too bloated for the computing resources available at the time, and always kept reloading. Maybe someone else was more of an insider at the time and can give a few more reasons.
<irony mode>
- Everybody want to play its music and movie remotely
- Everybody wants to store its music collection at the ISP
- Everybody wants the ISP to own his data
- Everybody wants to use the ISP application data format
</irony mode>The stereo system did not replace the concert hall. The TV did not replace the movie theater. Email did not replace snail mail. Chat did not replace the teleephone. There may be a niche for the type of remote applications the article suggests, but there are too many issues around data ownership and control. The PC will still have its uses.
But I WILL be keeping at least one personal computer for the rest of my life. I don't care what new "application service" system they come up with. I like things to be mine, and I like to control them.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
What users will move to are computer appliances. Its not that they don't want to admin their own machine they just want to flip it on, do what they want and flip it off. Now combine that with the move to more computer multimedia control and you will see the merging of computers and entertainment systems. Watch some TV and with PNP write some email. While watching a DVD take a video call from someone. For the masses that is what they want. In your office a small system for playing music while remoting in to work or school.
At work the old glasshouse approach to computers will slowly return. Who needs a computer on every desk when a terminal and smart card are cheaper and more secure.
Home computers as we know them today will go back to being a thing for hobbyists.
When you pry it from my cold dead hands
Why is everyone talking so much about laptops holding this type of thing back?
The article is obviously describing the future, in which other future technologies will have been developed. I would be suprised if wireless technology wasn't improved in that time. Not only that I'm hoping that battery technology will have improved also. The idea of a desktop workstation as we know it today will fade away.
Years ago when I was on my 2400 baud modem I would never imagined broadband speeds at my house.
I could see it go a different way. As pc's, memory, drives, etc. speed up and get larger, it could make better sense to install, or have installed, your OS of choice, along with all the apps and utilities you need on, for example, a bootable DVD, or even something faster and larger we don't have yet. Not just installed, but saved as hibernated at a fresh bootup at the login prompt. It would be like having a fresh install each bootup. That way, a virus or spyware could only get ya until you power down, as far as hosing your OS goes, that is.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
Do you know what that means to people around here? Static IPs, TOS that allows services to run, and other nicities (better support #s).
Besides, the price you pay doesn't reflect the cost: it reflects what people will pay. Businesses have no problem paying extra, and home users have no problem with having most of their virus problems taken care of for them. Just suck it up and pay the extra 20$. It's no big deal.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What have you been smoking? Distributed computing has been taking over. The hardware sellers in this country will not let someone else "host" the hardware. The place for a computer is in the home, or over your shoulder, or in your pocket, in your car. Fiber to the home will simply deliver content. That's it. End of discussion. No one wants to have someone else host their tax returns, bank accounts, or p0rn stash. Seriously, you need to get out of the '80s. Ditch the IBM "big iron" complex, and open your eyes.
in an office environment, I think this has some serious potential. But not with the ISP holding the reins.
If the server is local to the company they control the data, and the app choices. Users dont have to deal with installs, or backups and etc.
I spend way too much time fixing peoples computer at the office. Clueless users have way too much control over their machine. they screw their work tool beyond comprehension, resulting in mass loss of productivity.
It's worse when some people use a laptop. ie, they bring their home computer to the office. The boss think it's great, because his data is always at hand so he can even work from home, but in truth, he brings his home computer problems to the office for me to fix.
If the ISP is the one to control, it has no value whatsoever. We lose too much control and we end up having to pay more for it.
We should have been
So much more by now
Too dead inside
To even know the guilt
subject says it all.
The very fact that most here do not like this idea for whatever reason (heard it before, not logical, not this or that yada yada yada) makes it all the more likely.
"the average user is way out of his league in dealing with the challenges of modern computing."
You are all part of the status quo, you are still fighting the last war. Everyone here reads Stephenson and Gibson, but still doesn't see past what they have - "what I have will continue"
It will all change - this may not be it-but it will change. And it should be no great surprise to anybody here that when it does it will involve the death of the desktop/laptop as we know it.
Happy new year!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
lol dilbert is teh tr0ll3d omg wtf.. omfg!!!!
For the past 15 years, one thing has remained constant -- the only people pushing for 'Thin Clients' or 'Network Computers' are:
a) Companies that stand to profit from it
b) People who are too stupid to know any better (i.e., thay have never actually used a Thin Client)
The company I work for handles e-mail using a 'Network Computer' type of system. Even though I have a PC sitting on my desk, with all the usual applications, all e-mail is stored on the server, nothing is stored locally.
So you type up this big long really important e-mail, full of information that you've pulled in from various soucres, hit 'send' and -- sorry the server is down. OK. I'll save it and send it later. Hit 'Save as Draft' -- sorry the server is down. OK. While I'm waiting I'll look at that document that Fred e-mailed me yesterday. Sorry -- the server is down.
That's network computing.
I used to be opposed to this whole idea of having anything important on a machine other than my own. However, having had so many security breaches on my Windows based machines, I think the hosted solution might be a better alternative. I mean, if the largest and richest software maker can do no better than it has, and takes security and privacy no more seriously than is apparent, why should I trust its desktop any more than a hosted service solution. I like the way the Windows and controls seem to get prettier every release, but it seems to represent the lock everyone knows how to pick. Maybe the value of the data obtained is more valuable than the incremental revenue that would result from making the Windows desktop secure and private. www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
The RIAA is in big trouble right now from P2P and all they can do is wave a dead chicken at it. The MPAA is following down the same road that the RIAA is right now. Now, when the masses are given a choice as to exactly what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, without FCC interference, and DRM ultimately failing to control the inevitable doom of the dinosaurs, then we'll be looking at a much different world. Nobody is going to want a computer that's really only a TV set in disguise.
For the sake of the future, let's not turn back the clock and commit to what the old timers had to contend with back in the Stone Ages with dumb terminals and mainframe timesharing systems. We wouldn't even have great technologies like Linux if everyone had to contend with that kind of archaic operating environment.
I took your approach initially as well. I went crazy building web apps and people loved it. Built it on a subscription service so everything was on my servers and not at their local office.
.Net applications can auto update themselves so there is no maintenance and only a "single server" to maintain. With web services data transfer is incredibly easy and the .Net application blocks make everything even easier.
But now I'm reverting back to desktop based because of external hardware requirements (barcode readers, picture scanners, thermal printers, etc.). Also, responsiveness of the application and offline connectivity are major factors (some businesses run off of modems or shoddy internet connections.)
On top of this, Smart clients (not rich client or thin client, but smart clients) are much better than the web based approach. With
Lastly, I can cut down on my server farm expenses because it moves the processing from my server to the client for searching, processing reports, etc.
This is the stupidest prediction I've ever heard, on par with the end-of-computing predictions of Y2K. Take a sample of 10 people and survey them. Question answered. What an idiot.
Whats more likely to happen is something much closer to holodeck programming then service oriented applications.
That is to say:
Programming is the act of automating complexity, usually made up of other automations. So as a matter of carring out the purpose of programming, it will become an automation of software creation based upon user description of the application they want.
Of course this will be mostly local and thanks to the concept of FreeSoftware, the resource base will be free too.
Its really a matter of abstraction physics. Or to say it another way, with analogy, we will be moving out of the limitations of the elitism of roman numeral systems and into the wider and easier and more powerful use of the decimal system and the zero place holder.....in regards to programming...
Sun's new version of their Sun Ray server software supports broadband (DSL, cable modems, etc.) and runs on both Solaris and Linux.
Imagine an AOL-like service, where they manage the servers (with high uptime), keep them patched and updated, and provide professionally managed firewalls, blacklists, etc. All the user would have to do is log in and do whatever they need for a monthly fee. If the monthly fee is less than the daily cost of a PC over, say, two years, they're probably set up to gain some customers.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Not true. This link is a little old, but still serviceable: Dell Dominates PC Brand Repurchase Loyalty The white box makers are hurting: Dell, HP Taking Market Share From White Box PCs
Ok, so there's a huge increase in bandwidth these days, but won't there still be a problem with lag for the forseeable future? That would make a system pretty much useless for stuff like games.
Oh, and I don't think networked games that run locally on a computer, like those today, are comparable. I mean, they run all sorts of predictive algorithms and local calculations to make it work. If we're talking complete game screenshots being sent to the client, we're talking about huge amounts of bandwidth, and very little tolleration for lag.
I'm not realy an expert. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here?
Second, while wireless speeds do continue to increase, there are hard physical limits on the throughput, and only one spectrum, mostly already allocated for various purposes. While there may be some reallocation, this will mostly just keep per-user bandwidth more-or-less where it is now. Moore's law applies tollerably to many aspects of system performance, until the physical limits get close. But wireless technology has been working on those limits for a long time, just not from a computer standpoint.
And if you don't believe the impact of those limits, tell me: which do you watch more of these days, broadcast television... or cable TV?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The program Clippy has grown beyond your control, soon he will spread through the internet as he spread through yor LANs.
If I read this right, this basically suggests that Telcos will not only be your service provider, but also your software provider, and that locally installed software will go the way of the Dodo. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Yeah, right. There's a MAJOR problem with that idea. People are hesitatant enough paying for software (and only one time, at that) that they can own, control, and in some case can transfer to other machines. People will be even more hesitatant to pay a monthly fee (per machine, at that) for software they rent over a network. Also, even with this in mind, the software-over-the-net model is one that Microsoft is DESPARATELY looking into. It's the Holy Grail. Think about it: Rather than have you pay $150 for a CD copy of Office with printed box and manual and is prone to cracking and piracy, they'd much rather have you pay $15 a month ($180+ a year, but FAR more over a greater span of time) to be streamed a network copy of Office that can't ever be pirated. Sorry, not gonna fly with me. If the era of Remote Software comes forth, then I'll just be stuck in the WinXP days forever, I guess... or perhaps then I'll finally get off my ass and learn Linux.
Network computing will only work and be usable when there is a wireless network in place that can be used coast to coast and world wide. In order for network computing to become a reality people must be able to access the network when ever and where ever they are. Until that happens laptops will continue to have a requirement to carry the OS and all applications and data on them.
In addition to global access to the network, secure methods of accessing applications and data must be in place that are truely secure. Without secure access network computing will become the bane of any users that dare use it.
I do believe that managed services for corporations are about to become a major factor. Companies will jump at the chance to outsource the support functions for major portions of thier infrastructure. That is nothing new, companies have been going in that direction for some time. In the next few years managed services where a company manages and controls various portions of a companies infrastructure either over the Internet or over private networks will become a major component of many companies infrastructure. It gets companies back to what their business should be instead of having large portions of their organizations dedicated to providing support services. And with economy of scale that can be applied if managed services are done correctly most companies should realize a cost savings.
Looking at Apple, Higher end machines still have slots. Lower end machines may only have firewire and USB connections... which still gives some expandability.
Steve Jobs' vision has consistently been 10 years ahead of the market-- one of the reasons he does so badly. I suspect that this is another area where his vision is ahead of schedule.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
is commodization over time. FOSS is just the software version of that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Microsoft is a player in that market, but they are hardly "leading" it: various serial protocols and X11 still reign in that space. Sun Ray is a late and expensive entry in that market as well.
until there is a big surge in demand and the whole system collapes, just like the steam game network collapsed on the day halflife 2 was released, then it was just people waiting a few extra hours for thier games, but imagine what would happen if millions of peoples computer just stopped working entirely. anyway, people love warez too much!
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Are you posting to Slashdot? Well, you are using an open remote GUI protocol for doing so (not a very powerful one, but good enough). A few years ago, that would have required platform-specific applications. In fact, many functions that would have been carried out by local applications in the past (CD databases, movie databases, calendaring, mail, etc.) are increasingly carried out over the web. That trend is just going to continue until pretty much everything will be on the web.
uhuh, yeah whatever. That was said in the late 80's early 90's.
same old story by same old people just looking for somebody to listen to them.
I say this all the time. I used to believe everyone should have a computer, then they started calling me and I quickly realized very few people should have a computer.
However, the applications a computer runs are very good and very important. Email, Web Surfing, some data/word processing are all terribly useful for the average person. If only the damned computer weren't in the way!
Palm has a really smart way to deal with that by limiting any interaction with the OS and making the App king. Plus having everything running all the time makes everything faster.
The smart money is on going BACK to mainframe type applications and computing. Java (etc) have been invented so what's the wait?
This
Let's face it folks, big companies are running scared over the organization of the internet. It brings content of all sources, it links millions of people together that wouldn't know each other in any other circumstance.
This free society is something that the megacorporations can't stand. The reason, it breaks up their monopoly.
Billions of dollars a year are spent to keep us (the proles) entertained (I use that term loosely). The internet is the perfect place for independant authors, musicians, artists, and the average person to share their ideas.
These are the same companies lobbying for copyright laws, anti-piracy raids, and other laws pertaining to free speech, especially on the internet.
It's a sad sight when the average citizen will support their captors. Most people have never lived outside their mindcage long enough to realize that they are imprisoned by the media cartels. They will fight tooth and nail to protect their thoughts that were instilled by these same media moguls. The truth is that they are afraid to think for themselves. If they have to think for themselves then they could make a mistake and have nobody to blame for their actions besides theirself.
The media content whores want us to become centralized in a computer matrix so they can have a monopoly over content. At the same time drain our wallets like a leech on a festering wound.
The power is now in our hands, if we allow this to happen to ourselves, then you are at the mercy of the enemy. Just because some people will support it doesn't mean you have to.
> The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left.
Look back 10 years and the PC as we knew it was getting viruses from floppy disks.
The PC as we know it changes much faster than every "decade or so."
"The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left."
Aw, again?! It's died so many times already...
So many doomsayers over the years have talked about how PCs are going to radically change in the near future and it has yet to come to pass. PCs won't change that much (in the terms that this article speaks of) until there is actually a need. Right now there is no outstanding need adn let's be honest, what ISP wants to take on more tech support roles?
Microsoft wants profit, not monopoly. Predictions and wish-fulfillment fantasies premised on the notion that the goal of of MS is, first and foremost, to preserve its effective OS monopoly, are wrong.
That monopoly certainly helps MS rake in the money, but it is only a means to an end.
I'm very skeptical about any proposed PC-successor that doesn't allow people to keep their software on their hardware. Likewise, I doubt people will allow tomorrow's equivalent of Time Warner or Verizon to remotely admin their hardware: Would you believe them when they claimed they won't look at your data?
That said, if something does emerge to threaten the personal computer, my guess is MS will use a portion of those tens of billions of dollars sitting in its coffers to buy its way out of obsolescence.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Looks like someone got "Hackers and Painters" for Christmas. Paul Graham's essay "The Other Road Ahead" makes the same points.
Thanks for actually answering my original question.
If you have any thoughts, how does "Ultr@VNC" compare to some of the commercial offerings on the market?
[Other than, of course, the obvious difference, which would be the $$$]Thanks again!
Increasing bandwidth? Great, except that our beloved telecom chaps seem to regard the concept of "always on" computing as the spawn of satan. It seems that if you actually buy into "always on", they'd prefer it if your always on computer only used a couple of meg a day or so. Forget about backing up your PC to a remote box on a regular basis, or something like that :)
... 'cos our telcos are very keen on taking it away from ya :)
The introduction of caps on broadband (1GB a month, 15GB a month, xGB a month whatever) doesn't really gell with their advertising (yay, watch all the movies you like! Videophone your parents! Send your buddy streaming video from your wedding) and yet they will insist on it.
So I'm not too worried about increased bandwidth
Yeah right!
Like most LAMP solutions are using Perl rather than PHP these days!
Catch up grandpa!
First, there needs to be some receiver machine at the home end. A reasonable computer can be had for around $500 nowadays. Unless this subscriber machine can be had for less than $200, there is no incentive to move to this model.
Second, nothing is free. This service will be a subscription-based service. I think it would have had some bearing had people not been burned by subscriptions from other companies. Witness the cable companies and TiVo and how they've handled their subscriptions. Witness the cellphone subscriptions. Paying outrageous rates for using a computer won't succeed if there is no conomic reason to do so. People will sooner purchase Macintoshes.
Thirdly, there is the issue of control. You're dealing with people's data, and their private information. I will never relinquish control of my checkbook, nor my family pictures, nor anything else like that. Some people may be amenable to this, but many will not. The computer is a multimedia device now, and people have scads of personal data on their computers. It'll take a very convincing argument, and a company with a reputation for integrity to wrestle away that desire for control.
The PC as we know it will change, but I see that change moving more to a home entertainment/personal network than a service based machine. Witness the supposed death of the mainframe when the PC was released. It hasn't happened yet, and it's unlikely that mainframes will vanish overnight. Saying the PC will drastically change to a model where people aren't in control of their programs and their data is a prognostication that is unlikely to materialize.
I remember saying this like three years ago. Can someone with a subscription find it in my comment history for me? (Extended comment history was the only reason I bothered to subscribe way back when, and I'm not sure I can be arsed now on account of just one lookup)
The "Global" computer/videophone in Earth: Final Conflict is probably the wave of the future, with some changes:
1) it will have to be "malware-free" - people won't use it if they can't trust it.
2) it will need a better form factor, something that can fold up and fit in your wallet or shirt pocket, or maybe even be embedded in clothing or your body. The Global's slide-out screen is a good start but not good enough.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From the article:Long past are the days where one could leave a Windows 98 machine (or Windows 2000, or XP, take your pick) connected to the Internet for days at a time, unpatched.
:w
It's not really the same situation for a Mac, tho. I don't disagree that network applications are pretty cool, and have gotten substantially cooler recently (see Google Suggest). In an absolute sense, Microsoft products are hard to manage, especially so for a home user. But what would you rather have: a fast connection and a full-use computer; or just a fast connection? This is the same calculation that made X Terminals a bad idea.
if it were ever released for intel in its gui form would kill MS but also bring down apple in the process..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
This makes a lot of sense..
Let me see now, in order for this to work each user will need the tools and data that they neeed/use any time at all... all provided by the ISP. Web apps, well..no.. imagine autocad, or frame, or my custom cost accounting application, available from the ISPs. Heck I need three version of Java to run applications i currently need.
How will the software vendors make any money? How will the ISPs charge for these things? For this to really work
o The ISPs will provide all of the apps, in all
the correct versions for all of their
customers.
o They will provvide tools to import all of the
reams of data (in a variaty of formats) to the
apps they support
o They will provide the support they I require
in a timely fashion (right from cable
companies and telcoms...)
No, most of the problems being discussed are startup problems. Systems are still immature and difficult to take care of and the population in general has a high level of miss understanding of whats happening. The young people just starting high school have a different perspecive from my mother and sister (who's systems I administer).
This remindes me of a comment i read in a 1919 magzine, something about cars not being useful and all the people would be moving onto buses and using them like trains, because most people do not want to learn to be a mechanic, and horses are more frendly and less trouble and...
And like my mom does with her car, professional support will solve the problem for many if not most people.
I can't belive nobodys pointed out what about the 'rest' of the users who DON'T want someone else in control, or are constnatly building new systems, or arn't very fond of the idea of development going in the direction of someone else having more control over our machines then ourselves...
That's easy.
Service providers are not going to pay M$ rape prices and will use free software if it gets the job done. Witness early Hotmail, Google, the use of Sendmail, Apache and on and on. They all recognized that free software offered a cheaper and better way to get their work done and MAKE LOTS OF MONEY.
Bandwith for the desktop is even more important. I have not used M$ junk for years. The key was having the bandwith to be able to install and keep systems updated. With stable distributions, like Woody, I could do it with CD publishers and good dial up. With Testing, I need a cable modem but it's so much better. More importantly, end users need a reliable way to find their computers on a network. This is the only way software can be remotely repaired. If the end user does not have this or only the ISP knows, the end user can not shop around what little repair and upgrade work there is. Without remote administration, free software loses a key advantage over winblows. Without regular and free updates, free software loses another key advantage over winblows. Then the user is left with nothing but superior software that's harder to get than the garbage their computer came with. An ideal world for free software was the one that At Home created, fixed IP addresses and no bandwith restrictions. Not only was it easy to get and repair free software, you could also run services for yourself and others. That kind of internet service will return, if we don't let Microsoft legislate us back thirty years in the name of "virus protection" and "copyright enforcement". Sharing is what free software is all about, and that's what Microsoft and other publishers must prevent.
Development is also tied to bandwith, but it is less important due to the modular nature of free software. People were able to co-operate all the way back in 1993 and they will be able to do that regardless of how dumb bandwith gets.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Whenever someone starts talking about how the future will be, I always look closely at the premises that the person uses to extrapolate possible future events. Without accurate premises the chances of coming to an accurate conclusion are small.
.NET technology. A world where everything we do gets properly metered and billed. A world where the user owns or better yet leases a Microsoft "box" that runs Microsoft .Net applications sold as services.
The author makes a couple of premises:
1.Bandwidth will become almost unlimited.
2.This unlimited bandwidth will make the operating system irrelevant.
With enough investment I believe that bandwidth could be greatly increased and provided to everyone so I'll accept his first premise for now. However, he makes the statement:
"In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn't matter, and there's no lock-in. In such a world,"
I have a problem with this assertion. Every application must run under some kind of architecture. Even remote applications. The only way around this from the client side is to execute all applications on a remote computer and use some kind of dumbed down terminal to display the results.
Even if bandwidth increases as the author suggests, the computing power needed to remotely run all applications for all customer's would take a quantum leap in computer power that I don't see coming any time soon.
If rather than running the applications remotely they are run on the client then the operating system once again becomes important and all the compatibility issues that Microsoft is counting on to maintain there monopoly come into play.
You then enter a world much like what Microsoft wants via its
The author makes a very good point that the average person doesn't have the technical skill needed to properly maintain a complex computer system nor do they wish to learn such skills. As a geek, the though of turning control of my hardware over to a third party is unpleasant. I suppose, however, that non-geek types will be unaware of all of the ramifications and with an effective marketing campaign may blissfully do so. But turning over ones hardware is a very different thing from turning over ones sensitive information. Even non-geek types are becoming uncomfortable with this. So, we are back to some kind of local storage and local operating system.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Was this the same ignorant thinking that predicted the demise of books?
On the other hand, since the Telco would never accept responsibility for your data, only the apps and connection, you could get the nearest geek to make you a livecd or livedvd with the requisite browser/mail/messenger/whatever apps.
$X a month for Telco support.
$0 a month for geeky disk
Tough call for joe sixpack.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
so why should I trust them to manage my machine?
in less than a decade, sun will finally be right?
woohoo! buy stock now!
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Every decade or so, since the rise of the personal computer, we see some attempt to re-impose the rule of centralized systems, usually under the guise of 'easing the burden on end-users' but always including an increased financial burden on those same end-users. The simple economic facts are that computer power (by any measure: instructions per second per dollar, main-memory bytes per dollar, on-line storage bytes per dollar, etc.) has become so inexpensive that all the old reasons for centralized computing systems no longer apply (and haven't applied for at least 20 years). The only reason these new centralization schemes is to find some way to extract money from existing computer users, whether or not the users actually want the sevice being provided. The idea that people will willingly give up control of their own systems and pay for the privilage may be a wet dream for companies hoping to collect the money, but it doesn't sound like a very good business plan.
The solution to the increasing administrative burden on computer users is not hire someone to do the administration: instead, we need computers that actually reduce amount of administration required or make the task of administration markedly easier. This is what personal computers did 40 years ago, and it can be done again.
A big reason why so many people used IE is that it took so long to download another browser. With upgraded bandwidth users can begin to treat their computers with an al a carte approach to software.
This prediction amounts to saying that, all other things being equal, increased bandwidth to the home will favor thin clients or appliances over general-purpose computers. But other things are highly unlikely to remain equal. Imagine what the commodity microprocessor will be capable of in ten years. Or a graphics board. Or a neural induction interface.
Combine those advances with increased bandwidth, and you can imagine IRC without the typing, but rather with audio/video interaction, perhaps with 3D avatars synthesized from audio/video/neural monitoring of participants. And chat rooms that can be virtual manifestions of real world locations, or completely virtual environments that look just as real.
Applications such as that need vast amounts of local bandwidth and computing power, as well as low latencies.
Some people think the capabilities of artificial intelligence will expand with increasing hardware capability. If that is so, even AI may have made some progress in ten years. And that could make software as we know it today pretty much obsolete.
Not that there won't still be spam. It will just be subliminal...
That sistem is a waist of the internet. Why would you need to be in constant communiction with the cable company to play soletaire?
I disagree with the article. Why would users embrace the pointless futuristic system the article discusses? Not only do people hate paying for something they have already paid for (I already paid 500 dollars for my computer, and now I have to pay to use it!) but they would resist having power unnecessarily being taken away from them on their own computer.
Microsoft loves the internet because it is another thing for them to take over, and I can promise you they will do everything in their power to continue to do so. As long as people buy computers with Windows preinstalled, and the government does not break them up, this will not change.
Also, I predict that spyware and viruses (I believe this was one of the big reasons for his prediction) will be essentially forgotten as microcrap updates the OS to be bloated with security precautions and rips off firefox in its next IE. Atleast this is the step that sp2 for winxp took.
We've seen this before. It was called WebTV. And we all know how outrageously successful that was.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Are you an idiot? The computer will just run virtually - at the service provider - with Windows! Why would anybody change?
To extend the analogy, some people like the idea of handing the keys over to somebody else, and letting them drive. Some don't.
There will be a mix of the two types: heavily managed systems for some (like WebTV), and independent personal computers of the traditional type.
And the ubergeeks of the 21st century will be like the John Wayne rugged individualist (ok, kinda sorta).
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
IF this happens it would probably sound the death knell of p2p. When all computers, applications, and files are running/located from the ISP's computer, the ISP would be free to delete copyrighted material, block ports, delete p2p applications, etc. The ISP could also do whatever else it wanted. It could remove/censor offensive websites. It could set up filters... All kinds of things. The internet wouldn't be free anymore. There would be no more reason to use it...
Why? Because I'm sick and tired of paying bills every month already. Do they want to add another set of bills? I'll be using someone else's software/hardware. Apple is not buying this "software as a service" bullshit (yet). Linux vendors don't force support contract down your throat (they'd be glad to, but GPL and competition don't allow).
I think Microsoft is trying to become a smaller company after all. With, say 75% of the OS/Office apps market instead of 95%. They seem to want to get into a position where they maybe don't have as many customers in terms of market share, but every single customer pays them the money.
This is fair. Let them get there, but keep a legal "eye" on them. This will only foster competition. When Office becomes a $30 per month service, you can bet your ass people will start switching to competitive offerings. When Windows is $20 per month, you'll see a lot of folks migrate to Mac.
Let them jack up their prices and put everyone on the upgrade treadmill. It's in your best interest.
Yes, Windows compatible software will magically appear one day and get installed and maintained remotely on your pc. The most likely scenario is yes, but it will be Microsoft software.
Wasn't this why MULTICS was developed? Computing power as an utility service.
"You don't want your whole computing experience to be controlled by one or two companies."
And one doesn't have to.
There's nothing inherent in client-server that means a company has to exert an unreasonable degree of control. Just as the person who fixes your car, or furnace isn't exerting an unreasonable degree of control. You can have the server in your basement, secured as all heck, and mostly self-maintaining. The clients are anywere needed, and hold the data needed. A maintenance connection with permission from you (note I didn't say internet).
This is the most asinine thing I have ever read, ever. Giving control over any part of my life (exclusively my PC at the moment?) to a bunch of people who can't even keep telemarketers from distrubing my dinner.
I say telcos can control my PC when they take positive control of their own wires.
This will never happen.
1) No company or person will ever put it's complete existance completely in the hands of another company. You might hire someone to work on your system, but you'll be darn sure if they go out of business you can go to someone else.
2) Those of us who tinker, LIKE TO TINKER. How many hundreds of thousands of people are out there who enjoy tweaking every last setting?
3) The entire population is becoming MORE educated about computers, not less so. The market of people who would want these kinds of services mostly comprises older people weren't sucking on a mouse when they were two years old. Most young adults today have no qualms about working on their system.
4) Most systems aren't that critical. If my gaming computer fails, a reformat isn't going to make me go bankrupt. Noone will pay for services they don't need.
Just in: In ten years, noone will drive their own cars anymore! Cars should run perfectly, as long as they're not abused or crashed into anything by their owners. Since people hate taking their car to the mechanic so much, we predict all cars will be driven by car specialists to make life easier for the average american.
In other news, around the same time, Americans will stop cooking for themselves and eat out exclusively! We've determined that the risk of being cut by a knife and the hours spent preparing food just aren't worth it.
Finally, in a sign of the times, major Arcade game companies have announced a comeback. "People just don't want to be bothered with putting a DVD in their PS2. We found that the average american would rather pay $1 per game to play in an arcade, where you just walk from machine to machine. It's so much easier, and you never have to worry about maintenance, or deal with equipment repairs."
Bunk. Pure bunk.
I don't know if I do business with any company that provides the level of service I would expect from a personal ASP.
The cable, phone, and ISP certainly do not fall into this category.
The closest I can come is our Honda service garage. Even in that case, we cannot always get an appointment right away, and we pay a premium for the quality of service that we receive.
And what about the hassles if you decide to move to a different provider. Will it be like cancelling AOL?
I would be interested in an example of companies that provide service equal to that of what we would want from such a provider.
Which is why I think the article we're all responding to (about the PC dying) is wrong. Granted, it's entirely feasible that word processing and email could be outsourced, but those applications are pretty simple and reliable right now.
Most of the Linux code is devoted to device drivers, and most of the annoyances of running Linux come from flaky or nonexistent support for specific devices. Now how are you going to outsource your scanner, your webcam, and your sound card? You aren't.
Maybe the ASP could lease peripherals to you, but to do so economically, they'd have to standardize (i.e. one or two types of scanner). But like I said, people don't want that - if they did, privately-owned PCs would run much smoother and there would be no need for outsourcing to an ASP.
Business is done more and more these days not in the real world so much as in a digital world that exists soley in a human-made dimension, presently incarnated as the internet, maybe tomorrow as the GRID.
With this trend, governments are realising more and more that this digital/informational realm isn't ~a~ market in the business world as much as ~the~ market. And because economic might is becoming more relevant in tomorrow's world than military might, controlling this digital territory is also becoming increasingly relevant.
In this world of digital power and control, Microsoft is no longer just a corporation, but a rival "government", and as literal, physical governments want to increase their economic power, they will increasingly view Microsoft as such -- a rival government, a power taxing them.
Here is where open source has a winning strategy: not because of anything it produces necessarily has an advantage over Microsoft in terms of functionality, but because its advantage is simply the nature of the movement itself: with free information sharing, corporations are forced to become service-oriented and thus remain para-governmental, with no vendor lock-in. The core infrastructure of this digital/information "info-structure" must remain neutral, and not under the control of a single vendor. Governments recognize this, and so are slowly embracing open source -- the fastest embracers being those who want to get out under the thumb of U.S. corporations, and in this case, Microsoft.
And considering how slowly governments move at doing anything, they're actually embracing open source at relatively an unprecedented rate.
If we're to assume that everyone will have high speed access, there is an intermediate step that deserves consideration. Before the apps and OS get hosted, maybe the automatic Registration Verification service will become widespread. This has no execution slowdown - just a quick check every 15 minutes or so to verify your paid software subscription.
This plan makes lots of money for the software vendor and has proven itself to be very workable. If it sounds farfetched, go find that XP eula and read the fine print.
The network is not the computer. It's just a service.
Absolutely right. It just happens to be a service that changes how software can gets distributed and used.
A hard disk is cheap. People are going to stick their data and apps there, because it's cheap, quick, and easy.
Yes, and that will continue to be the case. It's just that the way software and data ends up there and gets administered changes. Cell phones, Hiptops, Debian, and Tivo are a preview of that, but it will extend to the desktop PC.
Yes, most people would benefit greatly from having their system administration done by someone else. They don't know how to secure their boxes, or how to fix them when something goes wrong, and yet they insist on hosting their applications locally. Confounding, isn't it?
Comparing this to corporate IT is silly. A company is quite likely -not- to trust users to do the right thing, nor to keep their data safe, so they have one hell of an incentive to outsource. Individually however, it's all about privacy, even if said privacy is an illusion. People need to be able to go to bed at night, thinking their skeletons are safely tucked away in the closet. A cracker might very well have access to their data, but they don't know that, and stupid as it may be, most people would rather close their eyes to uncomfortable facts than to face them.
Why is it that people are dead set of driving around in huge wasteful individual vehicles, for example? It'd make so much more sense on the grand scale of things if everyone that could just used public transportation, wouldn't it?
IMHO, it has very little to do with the state of the PC or bandwidth, and a whole lot to do with human nature.
For a 1024x768 pixel RGB display, one approximately needs a 141 MegaByte (1024x768x3x 60(refresh rate) / 1000000) bandwidth from the processor to the monitor display. The current Gigabit ethernet standard is not fast enough to accomodate good remote viewing.
Most high speed internet connections today are in the 2 Megabytes/second range, far far below the required bandwidth for truly remote desktop.
Until our internet connection speeds become more than 100MegaBytes per second, we can keep this idea on the backburner
When Apple introduced iMovie some "expert" (read : moron) on french TV started bashing Apple's rep for "not seeing that the future was network computers and the internet" (or something along these lines)...
With music, pictures (with 7 megapixels consumer cameras, fear the gigabytes!), and video -> consumers actually use their disk space more intensively (percentagewise) than 10 years ago. It's easier to fill 100 gigs now than it was to fill 1 GB 10 years ago (and 100 gigs now are cheaper than a gig 10 years ago)
You could keep the data locally and rely on remote apps but... what's the point? Also, applications like the Office Suite, iDVD or 3D games easily weight in the gigabytes, so there still will be a dataweight hurdle.
The article (I RTFA'ed!) makes a comparison with online music, (comparing Microsoft to the RIAA in that it would resist the change). But his own comparison shows how his prediction fails: decentralized music (pay-for-streaming, jukebox-on-the-web) has failed, and the commercial (iTunes Music store) and non-commercial (Kazaa & al) services that succeed are the ones which allow to keep the data on YOUR hard drive to do whatever YOU want with it.
Privacy also comes to mind. Nobody would be sane enough to store everything including their sensitive data on some ISP's server. Totally unacceptable for businesses and people working from home, and anybody at least half-concerned about their privacy.
And I would point out that hardware has become so cheap (processing, but also hard drive, optical storage etc) that I don't see one reason to rely on some remote server to store everything.
It is also not entirely true that users "don't want to be sysadmins". People are more and more knowledgeable about computers, and computers are easier and easier to use. Mac OS X is brainless-easy, Windows XP is not hard to figure out (though not actually enjoyable to use). Linux tries hard (last tried was mandrake 9) and will one day attain the long-sought nOOb-ready status.
According to the article, the main reason why users would want to be remotely admined is security concerns and virii - trojans. Hell, Microsoft couldn't make a safe OS - do you really think an ISP will be able to provide one that is more secure? (even if it's linux-based, they will totally fuck up the implementation and the protocols. You just know it. We're talking about ISP's after all)
And the security hell we are experiencing now is with only relatively few services relying on internet -email, internet, kazaa, whatever- so imagine what it would be when you rely on the web for every single thing -opening a document, launching an app, etc. Expect the number of virii exploiting poorly secured connections to grow ten-fold. Some superhacker could even reroute the users' PC to a server controlled by him, pretending to be the ISP.
Well, whatever. The PC is popular because it is what it is: a machine you have complete control over, with any app you want on it (and not just the apps your ISP decided you might get). He states that in a world of remote-everything, there is no "lock-in" - mainly because there is no more Microsoft. Well, I for one wouldn't trust ISPs, the most restrictive bitches ever (just read the EULAs of most of them) to give me a world "without lock in". One ISP. One set of applications. One mail adress. One chat program. Proprietary, ISP-specific file formats. No Kazaa or bitorrent.
(And what happens when you decide to change ISP? You lose all your data? - do they charge you an arm and a leg to send the data to your new ISP of choice?)
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
SCSI is even higher, and neither technologies appear to be dipping below the broadband curve in terms of bandwidth increases.
So for today's applications, your home ISP connection (DSL/Cable/Wireless/ etc) will have to meet or exceed 150Mbps.
By the time the speed gets up there (at reasonable cost), what will that year's applications be demanding? GigaBits per second?
Still, there may be some people who would be happy to use a lower speed if all they are doing is basic computing. Terminal Services (Windows, Citrix, Tarantella, X-Windows etc) can do that over currently available bandwidth. So why hasn't it taken off?
I think the Author's logic is incorrect in this case.
But then what do I know. I'm just an A/C...
Have a look here. They've been offering an ASP based Windows desktop with Office and other apps for years. As a test, I signed up as an individual some time ago and it worked. At the time, it had plenty of limitations, mostly of the lockdown variety (very difficult to create a desktop shortcut, many "dangerous" Windows Explorer options disabled, etc.). And decent interactive performance was dependent on a low latency connection.
Nevertheless, it worked as advertised, providing access to the apps and my files from anywhere without me having to keep the OS or apps up-to-date. I was able to reach it from fairly thin clients, like a Windows CE H/PC with a Citrix client installed, giving me access to full Office apps rather than the toys that came with the H/PC.
The service relies on a monthly subscription licensing model, which Microsoft has also supported for years. Even Visual Studio can be licensed this way. At the time I tried the service, some of the apps on the ASP list were not really ready for that model, still suffering from single user legacy implementation problems and such.
Nevertheless, for someone doing basic small/home office kinds of work (i.e., the "average user" mentioned in the original article), the service was more than adequate, and could be reached from a much dumber, smaller, simpler and thin platform than a full PC.
The average windows user is out of his league. My parents run Mac OS X 10.3. There are no viruses or spyware, and junk/spam email is conveniently filtered by Apples wonderful Mail.app.
To see how this would work, take a machine with two nics in your house and install K12LTSP. Now, take another old machine, Pentium 90 is fine, slap a 8139 nic in it and plug it into the k12ltsp server. Create a boot floppy, put it in the pentium 90, and turn it on. Low and behold KDE in all its glory! On a 100Mbit connection it should feel like you're sitting at the server... (Simplified, but shouldn't take a SlashDot reader too long to set up. The newest Knoppix CD let's you do this also, just two machines and two CDs.)
Now imagine the ISP running LTSP, and they just give out diskless workstations to new subscribers, much like cell phones, no additional charge for the hardware. Users don't have to worry about managing anything with their computer. For local storage they use USB flash drives. Their camera still uploads their pictures, they can still use a local printer, etc.
Will this replace my computer? No, I would need more than this provides. Would this replace the computer for a lot of my family members? Yes.
What, me worry?
What if someone that works at the ISP gets pissed at their boss and throws a glass of water on a server rack? Or if someone breaks into the system? Not only would people not be able to get online, but a *lot* of personal sensitive data could be lost forever. Is that a gamble we really want to take?
I'd really love for them to be "free". Then they might stop leaning on my ISP to crimp upload speeds, block ports and forbid services. In fact there's a whole host of problems that would dissapear overnight if Microsoft were not so stupid and evil.
It's not going to happen, regardless of how many free beer binaries they dump. Microsoft does not think they can offer the world the four software freedoms and survive. This bad attitude ensures their destruction.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Damnit, this is not the first time it has happened!
Anti-microsoft posts routinely disapear!
Fuck you, pretty thing! The bias is built in since M$ bought a majority share of this place!
Elsewhere I am!
Check out Who Eats the Energy? study. A HDD eats about 2-3 Watts when in use and 0.5 Watts when idle. A wireless card eats 1 Watt in base idle mode (less than in power saving mode) and 2-3 when transmittin/receiving. With a network computer it would be working 100% of the time, while a HDD would be mostly idle. So your assumption is not true. Also note that notebook power consumption in that study was 11-16 Watts in total, so switching to network computing mode can decrease battery life as much as 10-25%.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The internal bandwidth of machines will always be faster than the externel pipes. The cpu - memory speed will always be faster than your connection to the Internet.
All that means local applications will outperform hosted apps. Given applications will always push the limits, the execution of most graphic apps, and apps that require more interaction than is possible through a terminal services screen, will always be slower from a remote station.
That and our tendancy to OWN everything onto our desktop, similar to getting satellite dishes than pulling a cable and being at the mercy of cable companies. If most desktops are laptops in the future, its hard to believe any procssing will be offloaded killing the mobolity of the laptop.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Heh, these blights you speak of that Microsoft customers experience, perhaps the most logical answer here is that standard market forces will produce better competing OSes, such as OSX and (eventually) a good Linux Desktop.
I've been living on powerbooks for years now, I can't begin to tell you how peaceful and comfortable it is, that's powerful.
You're not thinking far enough out. When the bandwidth is good enough and fast enough, the network won't go out.
Look at wired phones: in the early days of this generation, answering machines ruled. Then people got sick of their machines stopping because the tape was full or they forgot to rewind it or (gasp) the tape jammed.
And Telcos started bundling voice mail with other custom calling features. And it took off. So well that the cell network operators never dreamed of building answering machines into the handsets... why do that when the voice mail service could run at the switch level?
Sure, this isn't good enough for some people, or too expensive and better than necessary for others. So now you can buy a $20 answering machine with crap voice quality or use a $4.50 a month voice mail service. The mainstream user will pick the voice mail solution. A hacker or high end user will find a more sophisticated machine to customize. But this thread is talking about the middle hump of the bell curve here.
Your "apps" will come down the same pipe as your entertainment. Your receiver will be a smart box centrally administered, you can use it as a TV or a computer.
It will probably happen to laptops too, but we won't recognize those laptops. They'll be more like smart phones that attach to huge screens and full sized keyboards.
A lot of companies already outsource much of their computer infrastructure: financial apps are often run by ASPs and you are just opening up a term services window to it. And look at all the people outsourcing their email. Look at the popularity of webmail! That's an app thats maintained for you!
Why don't you think this will go from the corporate world to the mass market?
Sure power users will need computers. But look at all the people who use computers now who don't care they're a computer... they just want to run some apps... store some digital files, etc.
Power users will be the last adopters of this, if they ever completely adopt at all. But that center of the bell curve will likely go for this.
But: the network has to be more stable than the wired voice network today, and have way more bandwidth than it has now. that's a given. (Bandwidth on the level of 50+ mbit a sec bidirectional).
Uggg.
Php/Perl/Python/Ruby..(others I've missed)
all the close enough to me...
don't mean to offend..
I think these days you need to differentiate between web-app and html-based web app. Javascript makes traditional form-based web applications kludgy and awkward. But if you look at things like XUL, the situation changes a bit. While XUL is currently a pain to develop and there's currently no support for XUL outside of Moz, it's still a good indication of what kinds of apps can be programmed in it. While I wouldn't suggest it currently, with the advent of faster network connections, I see no reason why the application that users install on their computer has to be anything more than an XUL rendering client. The entire browser implementation could be served from an application service provider.
There's also a number of projects that, while not quite ready for primetime, look like they will eventually be able to deliver a mostly seamless user experience while still being web-based (request/response based such that they can be hosted on any of the application server environments.) And any of the multitudes of XML bindings for AWT/Swing (LuxorXML, XUI, etc...there's a ton of them) can be easily adapted to facilitate web applications.
I'm currently working on a project (which I won't call promising until it's past alpha) that is essentially a web-browser that uses SWT as its rendering engine and JavaScript as the glue that holds everything together. Even with my early versions, I can already create a user experience that is very difficult to differentiate from typical application. There's a number of types of applications for which this kind of thing isn't appropriate (Photoshop, 3-D games, music software, etc), but anything that relies heavily on the standard widget toolkits (word processor, IM client, p2p app, etc), shouldn't be too hard to adapt as a web application.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I agree with the comments on remote management of laptops, but there is another reason I think many of the efforts to solve this have not worked before.
A home system is not standardized. Our IT folks at work spend lots of time trying to limit the variations in HW and SW to allow them to easily reproduce and manage issues. And they end up with > ~75% of the systems with only slight variations. I have 3 PCs at home and they have different HW and SW loaded on each, depending on the needs of me and my family. Now multiply the problem by the number of users and you maybe have ~10% commonality.
If you can't constraint the variability, you can't scale the support effort and that means you can't make money.
This is why Cable companies don't want folks loading random software on their set-top boxes, so they use a sealed box approach with limited functionality.
This "end of PC's hyped" is completely overrated largely because we overvalue consumer data. Most data consumers put on their PCs is shortlived - they don't view their PCs as "permanent" data repositories. They write letters, print them and send them. They put their bills into them, do their kid's movies for graduation, play games and surf. None of that actually requires data to be not backed up and the common fix for most consumers for bad computers is to buy a new one or to reinstall everything from the "start over disk". Honestly if Windows shipped with the default to delete everything over 90 days old, turned on, a lot of people would actually probably like it.
This is my sig.
A whole lotta people secretly buy computers because they want to play games. Games--which tend to take the form of simulations--can always use more hardware horsepower. Enough of it that the usual business apps will always run more than acceptably.
My thinking is that people won't tolerate having their applications spoon-fed to them on machines that are more than capable of running them locally (and we can safely assume that computers won't be getting slower anytime soon). The mainframe thing has been done, and people didn't like it (except for system administrators, who are primarily interested in saving themselves from any and all work).
If anything I think MS is hoping for this sort model. What they're scared of is unauthorized hardware, and if you don't have hardware, that makes their job a whole lot easier. You can bet that they will be the first to release the OS and interface system to run such network computers, should they every come. In fact, I think they may throw around a whole lot of money initially to make sure that all service providers use Windows on their "mainframes" and no sane ISPs will dare pull an unrequested switcharoo on their paying customers.
This leaves us in the situation where all Linux machines are house-bound, and if normal computer users really do migrate to offsite computers, people who use different OS's will really be seen as nothing more that nostalgic freaks.
The whole argument about how this will supplant Windows is just ill-conceived.
I agree strongly with some points of this article, such as that not everyone wants to be an administrator. I think the author missed some important ideas, though, and seems to've merely jumped on the lightweight applications bandwagon thta's been around for the last several years. The article suggests that many applications will be able to move to the server side. That's already happening, of course particularly with ideas such as webmail... the interfaces for which are becoming quite advanced.
This may be possible and it may be feasible, but I think it's at least as likely that a strong market could develop for remote administration for home PC's.
It's common to see departments within companies and universities with lots of PC's that are administered remotely, both Windows and unix-like systems... Unix systems, in particular, have been remotely administerable for decades. At the university where I'm a student, the NetBSD workstations that we have are largely locked down. We can install software under certain limitations, such as in home directories, but the core of each workstation and the backup procedures are locked, centralised, and run by other administrators.
With high bandwidth, there's not a lot of reason why the administrators have to be nearby. It should be quite easy to provide a home user with a locked down workstation that they can use for web access, email, perhaps word processing and so on... and all of these applications can be locally installed, but locked down to the user. As long as they leave their network cable plugged in, it can be administered, updated and backed up remotely by people who are competant. (It'd be prudent to throw in a physical security clause, requiring that the user doesn't whack their PC with a sledge hammer, and so on.)
Perhaps the user wants a spreadsheet application installed on their home computer. If so, they can phone up the admin company and request it, possibly paying a nominal fee for the service.
The applications are still installed and run locally, but they're locked down in ways that prevent the users from breaking things. I know several people who'd absolutely love to have this sort of service. They'd be able to concentrate on just using their PC for what they want, without having to deal with or care about the frustrating administration problems like viruses, worms, spyware, and so on.
Sure, a user can't install local software easily. If it's reasonable, though, a good administration service provider might provide it anyway. Children might want to install other software themselves, but lots of people don't have children and lots of other people would simply prefer that their children weren't able to install certain things that they currently do.
Anyway, I think this is one of the huge benefits of high bandwidth connections that is being overlooked, including by this article. It makes it feasible for people not to have to install and look after their own software on the PC in their home, because somebody else can. It also makes the operating system even more of a commodity, because somebody else has to deal with installing the applications rather than the user, and somebody else can deal with all the complexities of making the applications understandable and usable by a user.
Changing versions, e.g. moving from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1, changes things like features, APIs, internal workings, etc. It does not actually have anything to do with security. These change the behavior at best and at worst require adjustment or even patching.
That's what Chairman Bill is really afraid people will (re-)discover.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The introduction of caps on broadband
What's the problem? If you don't want it volume-based, then get yourself a flatrate.
Nobody can maintain their own vehicles anymore. Ten years from now we'll all be riding the bus.
Nobody can maintain their own vehicles anymore. Ten years from now we'll all be riding the bus...
...The average user has no desire to be the sysadmin of their machine(s), and telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this task from them...
Agree strongly that being forced to juggle patches and tinker with firewalls is a constant pain in the ass...I didn't mean to become a sysadmin just to share the broadband connection with my home network. For now, [ in the future, every operating system will be infamous for 15 minutes] MS sloth and cluelessnes are my main culprit but soon my home network may have only one or two MS boxen and to the one OSX and the one Mepis/Linux on my LAN, I may drop Win2000 for a BSD at the fire wall and could even try Solaris 10...which brings me to my issue:
if you only run windows, it is easy to imagine comcast, for instance, selling you a management service on top of your connection contract but it will have to remain an option because all they could do with some home brew heterogeneous network is screw it up for you.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Yeah .... see, at the time of purchase it WAS a flatrate. 29.99 a month for 512Kb broadband. Only later on (with effect from 2005, in fact) did BT decide to introduce a cap. It seems that some are (for the moment?) staying with a flatrate (AOL, for example) whilst others also are introducing a cap on usage.
BT has a habit of introducing services with a flatrate, then finding that a few "greedy" users suddenly force them to put limits on their service. The "greedy" users being the users who took them at their word. Cf BT Anytime.
then type: scanreg /fix and press enter. This will fix 90% of Win98 problems. Give it a try, may save some time.
Thanks, I'll give it a try. I figured I was probably at format C: and try again. I'll post later when I get home and try it.
The truth shall set you free!
If I sign a contract for an Internet connection, this contract is valid for both sides. One side can't change it without consent of the other side. So, if your ISP wants to "unflatten the flatrate", simply switch the ISP.
Yes. I use Cox and was told by a service tech that it was pressure from M$ and AOL that forced them into their current stupid mail set up. All incoming mail is blocked and you may only use their mail servers going out. Part of the pressure was a threatened blacklisting. The other part, no doubt, are all the usual M$ desktop power and Cox's stupid use of M$ for various servers. I also imagine that Microsoft had a say in other restrictions.
Maybe you should get a new ISP then, because there are alot of ISPs that provide no port blocking or forbidding of services.
Name one in Baton Rouge. Cox's "Business" service is a tremendous rip off, so no thanks. Telocity DSL was killed years ago,
Of course there will always be the problem of upload speeds, but alot of the time that is due to technology limitations.
At Home had none of those problems, with less equipment than Cox has. There's room for uploading in a normal world, even when you divide the capacity of the cable favoring downloading as is done.
The real technological problem is a speed crimp placed in the modem, and the continued M$ DoS. The limit seems arbitrary unless we consider worm owned M$ crap as a source of noise the cable company can not predict and must limit. Once again, that's Microsoft's fault for breaking the law to force an inferior operating system on the world. It would be better to turn off infected computers until they are fixed.
The world would be a much better place without Microsoft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://info.pittsburgh.intel-research.net/project/ isr/
/. a while ago.
I think their work has been reported on
One side can't change it without of the other side
Largely - but not necessarily completely - true. BT contracts incorporate their terms and conditions which state:
21. How this contract can be changed
We may change this contract, including our charges, at any time. We will give you at least a month's notice of any changes before they take effect. As explained in paragraph 20, you can end this contract by giving us seven days notice if we increase our charges or change the conditions of this contract to your detriment. .
So yes, really the only way to stay "flatrate" is to switch ISPs to an ISP which is staying flatrate. Regrettably, these are getting fewer in number. Whilst other countries are spending more to increase their infrastructure, BT is pretty much spending a pittance and then penalising heavy users - where "heavy users" are users who actually believed what BT originally told them about always on broadband connections ...
So then, I guess Microsoft have nothing to fear from BT Bandwidth users :)
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
Here is the feedback I promised.
For some reason, I couldn't get into safe mode. I let it boot, hit the MS key to open the start menu, then shut down and reboot into DOS prompt. I ran the command and it mostly fixed the Windows ills. I got the mouse back, my screen settings, and passwords. I tried to get online to thank you. I couldn't open a browser. Upon further investigation, I found about 1/3 of the programs could not be found. Not only was Netscape gone, but so was Internet Explorer. (Funny MS claims it can't be removed!) Checking the directorys I found most anything that was open during the crash now has empty directories.
Wow, a Windows crash can empty the contents of multiple directories. I found in the Program Files directories, Netscape, Chat, Internet Explorer, CDeX, Winamp, and several others contained 0 files. The write of the TOC must have gotten biffed or something. Oh well.
Anyway the lesson is learned. I won't be re-installing Windows. The machine is getting upgraded to SUSE instead. Maybe users won't be able to toast the OS as easly.
The truth shall set you free!
Regrettably, these are getting fewer in number.
:-)
OK, that is bad. Here you can get 3072/384 for 40,- and And I always nag about the situation here in Germany, looking to the lucky people in Sweden or Japan.