I would humbly suggest that the people who talk about a 1920 by 1080 anything are unlikely to misuse the term "cloud computing", either. The people who use "cloud computing" as a magic talisman without bothering to know what it means are the sort of people who start their "CPU" with the front-panel lock key and download internets from the email.
This is besides the point. It was argued that, because people use "cloud computing" without knowing what it means, then the term has no meaning. This is simply an absurd statement.
It'll be fine for people who're happy with low-grade graphics that existing hardware can do quickly enough for the latency to be the limit, or gameplay which is not in real-time. Unfortunately this is a market that probably won't see the point in signing up to the service in the first place, and could be just as easily served by a cheap local box.
Nothing for the end user that can't be accomplished through plain old offline data synchronisation, if you're patient. For the computer provider, it gives them control over your upgrade pattern and what features you have to pay for. You can hardly save money by not bothering to upgrade the CPU and RAM on the purely conceptual machine hundreds of miles away that you rent time from: if the cloud is getting its quarterly upgrade, it's happening, and you're paying for it.
By your criterion, "CPU" has no well-defined meaning. Bugger-all people who say that have a clue what it actually means. However that does not magically undefine it.
Hell, an average of less than 3 users. If those four are online for only four hours, and your system is only loaded with two users the other eight hours, then you're only getting an average of one and a third users over four computers. How do you get one and one third users to pay for four games machines?
No, your whole point was that it's meaningless. Which we've established it isn't.
Your new argument is that the distinction between cloud computing and local computing is unimportant. Well, ask anyone who's had a computer-time grant on one of the monstrous IBM research clusters how they feel about the distinction between "fucking regular old computing" that "just happens to be taking place somewhere else" and going out and just buying their own hardware.
Well, the new name is supposed to be for the specific case of moving traditionally local computing tasks off to farms. Doing a movie on a remote render-farm is hardly cloud computing, but re-encoding your holiday video is.
Latency aside, my worry is that you're buying a gaming timeshare. It's cheaper to pay for the computing time you actually use, in principle. However online game communities depend on lots of people playing at the same time, which is exactly the sort of thing that would make online gaming uneconomical. Example:
Somebody's got to pay for the shedloads of hardware.
If you have six users, and their usage is distributed over the whole day so each is on for 4 hours with no overlap, then you only have to invest in one "virtual games PC" worth of hardware for those six users. You've got six paying customers for an investment in one games PC! Charge them each a quarter of the cost of an up-to-date games machine over a year, and there's your profit margin (you get back 1.5 times the cost of the hardware), and the value for the end user (they only have to pay 0.25 the cost of the hardware).
If you have six users, and four of them are online at the same time because they're in the US and Western Europe and playing against each other, then you need four "virtual games PCs" worth of hardware to handle that peak demand. The rest of the day, you have two users, sharing the four computers. So over the day you're bringing in an average of three users over four "virtual games PCs" that you've invested in. It's hard to find a way to make that profitable, except having off-peak discounts to try to smooth out the usage patterns.
I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to gaming, computing power isn't fungible.
It's got a very well-defined meaning: performing computing and storing data on an internet-connected server from an internet-connected client. It's a new term for, arguably, a very old thing, coined because the average end-user these days isn't familiar with the idea of doing their computing from a dumb terminal.
It's not just "THE thing that made modern wireless networking possible", it is modern wireless networking. The patent abstract:
The present invention discloses a wireless LAN, a peer-to-peer wireless LAN, a wireless transceiver and a method of transmitting data, all of which are capable of operating at frequencies in excess of 10 GHz and in multipath transmission environments. This is achieved by a combination of techniques which enable adequate performance in the presence of multipath transmission paths where the reciprocal of the information bit rate of the transmission is short relative to the time delay differences between significant ones of the multipath transmission paths. In the LANs the mobile transceivers are each connected to, and powered by, a corresponding portable electronic device with computational ability.
Shit like Ask Geeves was valued at two billion dollars and people are quibbling that fourteen multi-billion-dollar companies have to spend $200m between them? Seriously?
How does a $200m settlement, for several years of use of the technology, spread over an industry which earns billions per year, stifle progress? The wireless industry's probably been hit harder by the increase in the price of ketchup for the staff canteen.
If by government you mean "research organisation" and by "tax" you mean "earn money on" and "industry" you mean "use of their inventions", then yes, absolutely.
1) A "widget" is like a "gadget", those things you can shove on your Mac dashboard or Windows desktop. It's a mini-app which runs in the background that you use often. Samsung pushed them into the mobile space with Touchwiz on their inexplicably successful Tocco and everyone's pissing themselves trying to shove widgets on their phones now. 2) That part probably doesn't work. "There's an app for that" tends to trump "there are some SDK restrictions which we don't like" 3) Yeah, having your USP visible is a big boon. Nokia is in the midst of an epic fail on Ovi services which you just don't see when you walk into the shop to discuss the phone. With Apple it's "here's apps" with its menu design and Samsung's all "this phone looks a hell of a lot like a camera, hmm?" but many manufacturers don't understand the importance that visibility.
That's not for "Android", mind you, it's for "Droid", Motorola's swanky new huge QWERTY slider handset. I have to wonder if the ad's going to be better for Android than for Motorola: lots of people are going to say "hey, I want Android", and realise they don't have a child to sell to buy it, and go for one of the older HTC models instead.
That's it. That's the whole thing. All Android devices have AGPS with a compass, and an HVGA display. On-screen or hardware keyboard input is passed to apps the same way, so it doesn't matter which a device has. Likewise, access points are passed to apps according to the SDK, so it doesn't matter what kind of network access the device actually uses. GPS and AGPS with a compass is mandatory, so any app which runs on an Android handset can expect those features.
With 1.6, they'll diversify by adding an option in the SDK for two different screen sizes, one smaller and one larger than existing HVGA devices. The store automatically filters according to what resolution the device supports: higher resolution devices can run lower-resolution apps in compatability mode, but not vice versa. With the new devices, the new rule is:
* If you don't have a QVGA device, then every app works. * If you have a QVGA device, then you can run any app you see on the store.
Now, you tell me how that's "worst than try to figure out if a given PC game can run properly on your home PC"
The differences between Android installations are about the same as differences between Windows installations, not Linux distros. HTC's game-changing reworking of Android 1.6 contains... a new skin, and some widgets. Compared to the machine-to-machine variation in pre-installed crap I see on Vista Home Basic boxes, it's nothing. Everyone else's customisations are even more minor. Essentially, Android is Android.
Both, in the sense that it's going to compete with both, and neither, in the sense that Google presumably has no interest in beating them just to adopt the approaches that it has defeated. It'd be like dethroning the king by engineering a kind of feroceous rabbit that only eats people who act in a really kingly way. When they eat the existing king, you don't declare yourself king and act in a kingly way. You'll get eaten. Declare yourself an arch-duke or something. Even if you have nothing against kings.
It's often said that the difference between addicts and other gamblers is that most gamblers treat it as an amusement, and simply throw the money away, while the addicts try to treat it as an investment or employment that will somehow make them money. The former are rational, the latter are not.
Surely the rise of web apps demonstrates that most people aren't that interested in actually reading stuff on the web, though. They want to do things on the internet, and the web happens to be a ubiquitous platform for the apps to sit on. Your average Tweet, Facebook pic, or YouTube vid doesn't exactly struggle on even a QVGA display.
As a corollary I wonder whether big-screened e-ink devices are a more natural platform than computers for consuming actual web sites these days. Add a touchscreen and you're not even losing hypertext. I mean, I read blogs and web sites the same way I read books. There's not a huge need for interactivity or multimedia there. The web has a capacity for multimedia content such as in-line videos to demonstrate a point or whatnot, but I find in practice that interesting content and multimedia are usually orthogonal.
Constructing meaningful web content requires a degree of reading capacity beyond mobile devices, and editing capacity beyond e-ink, meaning that traditional computers still have a place, but I think that content creators are rather in the minority.
I don't think that you can take a device the size of a small paperback and claim it's representative of what mobile phones can do. The hardware performance will probably trickle down to cheaper devices in five years, but phones with 2-inch screens and a mechanical keypad continue to dominate the market for good reasons. Most users don't feel the need to carry a large touchscreen slab for the amount of web browsing they do, and getting a web app to work properly on a small button-driven device without simply feeding them a completely different version is nontrivial.
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I would humbly suggest that the people who talk about a 1920 by 1080 anything are unlikely to misuse the term "cloud computing", either. The people who use "cloud computing" as a magic talisman without bothering to know what it means are the sort of people who start their "CPU" with the front-panel lock key and download internets from the email.
This is besides the point. It was argued that, because people use "cloud computing" without knowing what it means, then the term has no meaning. This is simply an absurd statement.
It has to have a meaning for people to get the meaning wrong.
...okay?
Well, now you get soaked for the upgrade whether you want/need it or not. That's the rub.
Think of it as paying for everyone else's video cards. On credit. Forever.
It'll be fine for people who're happy with low-grade graphics that existing hardware can do quickly enough for the latency to be the limit, or gameplay which is not in real-time. Unfortunately this is a market that probably won't see the point in signing up to the service in the first place, and could be just as easily served by a cheap local box.
Nothing for the end user that can't be accomplished through plain old offline data synchronisation, if you're patient. For the computer provider, it gives them control over your upgrade pattern and what features you have to pay for. You can hardly save money by not bothering to upgrade the CPU and RAM on the purely conceptual machine hundreds of miles away that you rent time from: if the cloud is getting its quarterly upgrade, it's happening, and you're paying for it.
By your criterion, "CPU" has no well-defined meaning. Bugger-all people who say that have a clue what it actually means. However that does not magically undefine it.
Hell, an average of less than 3 users. If those four are online for only four hours, and your system is only loaded with two users the other eight hours, then you're only getting an average of one and a third users over four computers. How do you get one and one third users to pay for four games machines?
No, your whole point was that it's meaningless. Which we've established it isn't.
Your new argument is that the distinction between cloud computing and local computing is unimportant. Well, ask anyone who's had a computer-time grant on one of the monstrous IBM research clusters how they feel about the distinction between "fucking regular old computing" that "just happens to be taking place somewhere else" and going out and just buying their own hardware.
Well, the new name is supposed to be for the specific case of moving traditionally local computing tasks off to farms. Doing a movie on a remote render-farm is hardly cloud computing, but re-encoding your holiday video is.
Latency aside, my worry is that you're buying a gaming timeshare. It's cheaper to pay for the computing time you actually use, in principle. However online game communities depend on lots of people playing at the same time, which is exactly the sort of thing that would make online gaming uneconomical. Example:
Somebody's got to pay for the shedloads of hardware.
If you have six users, and their usage is distributed over the whole day so each is on for 4 hours with no overlap, then you only have to invest in one "virtual games PC" worth of hardware for those six users. You've got six paying customers for an investment in one games PC! Charge them each a quarter of the cost of an up-to-date games machine over a year, and there's your profit margin (you get back 1.5 times the cost of the hardware), and the value for the end user (they only have to pay 0.25 the cost of the hardware).
If you have six users, and four of them are online at the same time because they're in the US and Western Europe and playing against each other, then you need four "virtual games PCs" worth of hardware to handle that peak demand. The rest of the day, you have two users, sharing the four computers. So over the day you're bringing in an average of three users over four "virtual games PCs" that you've invested in. It's hard to find a way to make that profitable, except having off-peak discounts to try to smooth out the usage patterns.
I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to gaming, computing power isn't fungible.
It's got a very well-defined meaning: performing computing and storing data on an internet-connected server from an internet-connected client. It's a new term for, arguably, a very old thing, coined because the average end-user these days isn't familiar with the idea of doing their computing from a dumb terminal.
A software patents wiki, and you're rambling on about a patent on radio signalling schemes on it. Bravo, sir.
It's not just "THE thing that made modern wireless networking possible", it is modern wireless networking. The patent abstract:
Shit like Ask Geeves was valued at two billion dollars and people are quibbling that fourteen multi-billion-dollar companies have to spend $200m between them? Seriously?
How does a $200m settlement, for several years of use of the technology, spread over an industry which earns billions per year, stifle progress? The wireless industry's probably been hit harder by the increase in the price of ketchup for the staff canteen.
If by government you mean "research organisation" and by "tax" you mean "earn money on" and "industry" you mean "use of their inventions", then yes, absolutely.
1) A "widget" is like a "gadget", those things you can shove on your Mac dashboard or Windows desktop. It's a mini-app which runs in the background that you use often. Samsung pushed them into the mobile space with Touchwiz on their inexplicably successful Tocco and everyone's pissing themselves trying to shove widgets on their phones now.
2) That part probably doesn't work. "There's an app for that" tends to trump "there are some SDK restrictions which we don't like"
3) Yeah, having your USP visible is a big boon. Nokia is in the midst of an epic fail on Ovi services which you just don't see when you walk into the shop to discuss the phone. With Apple it's "here's apps" with its menu design and Samsung's all "this phone looks a hell of a lot like a camera, hmm?" but many manufacturers don't understand the importance that visibility.
That's not for "Android", mind you, it's for "Droid", Motorola's swanky new huge QWERTY slider handset. I have to wonder if the ad's going to be better for Android than for Motorola: lots of people are going to say "hey, I want Android", and realise they don't have a child to sell to buy it, and go for one of the older HTC models instead.
Right now there is one rule for Android software:
* Every app works on every handset.
That's it. That's the whole thing. All Android devices have AGPS with a compass, and an HVGA display. On-screen or hardware keyboard input is passed to apps the same way, so it doesn't matter which a device has. Likewise, access points are passed to apps according to the SDK, so it doesn't matter what kind of network access the device actually uses. GPS and AGPS with a compass is mandatory, so any app which runs on an Android handset can expect those features.
With 1.6, they'll diversify by adding an option in the SDK for two different screen sizes, one smaller and one larger than existing HVGA devices. The store automatically filters according to what resolution the device supports: higher resolution devices can run lower-resolution apps in compatability mode, but not vice versa. With the new devices, the new rule is:
* If you don't have a QVGA device, then every app works.
* If you have a QVGA device, then you can run any app you see on the store.
Now, you tell me how that's "worst than try to figure out if a given PC game can run properly on your home PC"
The differences between Android installations are about the same as differences between Windows installations, not Linux distros. HTC's game-changing reworking of Android 1.6 contains... a new skin, and some widgets. Compared to the machine-to-machine variation in pre-installed crap I see on Vista Home Basic boxes, it's nothing. Everyone else's customisations are even more minor. Essentially, Android is Android.
Both, in the sense that it's going to compete with both, and neither, in the sense that Google presumably has no interest in beating them just to adopt the approaches that it has defeated. It'd be like dethroning the king by engineering a kind of feroceous rabbit that only eats people who act in a really kingly way. When they eat the existing king, you don't declare yourself king and act in a kingly way. You'll get eaten. Declare yourself an arch-duke or something. Even if you have nothing against kings.
It's often said that the difference between addicts and other gamblers is that most gamblers treat it as an amusement, and simply throw the money away, while the addicts try to treat it as an investment or employment that will somehow make them money. The former are rational, the latter are not.
So your solution to people's complaints about the iPhone's web browsing is for them to buy an iPhone? What?
Surely the rise of web apps demonstrates that most people aren't that interested in actually reading stuff on the web, though. They want to do things on the internet, and the web happens to be a ubiquitous platform for the apps to sit on. Your average Tweet, Facebook pic, or YouTube vid doesn't exactly struggle on even a QVGA display.
As a corollary I wonder whether big-screened e-ink devices are a more natural platform than computers for consuming actual web sites these days. Add a touchscreen and you're not even losing hypertext. I mean, I read blogs and web sites the same way I read books. There's not a huge need for interactivity or multimedia there. The web has a capacity for multimedia content such as in-line videos to demonstrate a point or whatnot, but I find in practice that interesting content and multimedia are usually orthogonal.
Constructing meaningful web content requires a degree of reading capacity beyond mobile devices, and editing capacity beyond e-ink, meaning that traditional computers still have a place, but I think that content creators are rather in the minority.
I don't think that you can take a device the size of a small paperback and claim it's representative of what mobile phones can do. The hardware performance will probably trickle down to cheaper devices in five years, but phones with 2-inch screens and a mechanical keypad continue to dominate the market for good reasons. Most users don't feel the need to carry a large touchscreen slab for the amount of web browsing they do, and getting a web app to work properly on a small button-driven device without simply feeding them a completely different version is nontrivial.