Cloud computing on netbooks — Why?
July 10, 2009
All this talk about Google's Chrome OS has made me think a bit.
While in general I agree with both Dion Moult and Christian Weilbach and am in general mistrusting to cloud computing (at least in its currently most popular form), there is something else that bothers me with this hype.
As of late a lot of talk and effort about cloud computing was being done in the direction of making it work on netbooks and similar mobile devices. To me this makes no sense! Having your documents and data online is a great idea if you have no computer of your own or you have to migrate a lot, but only have a stationary system.
But if you can take all your data with yourself on a ultra-portable device with hours of autonomy time (e.g. netbook, smartphone), why would you rather have it online out of your direct reach? It is neither practical, because you need a network connection all the time, nor does it spare you much diskspace (if we completely ignore IP and privacy complications). Yes, SSD's are still small, but frankly, all that music and movies take up a lot more space then your calendars, inbox and documents put together!
There are cases when clouds make sense. But it always depends on what they are used for and how they are implemented. For example, I am very happy with SpiderOak's encrypted and clouded backups and am looking forward to SocialDesktop if its done right (and it seems like it might be). I even have some insane ideas about binding together NEPOMUK with P2P and F2F technology. But I will write about all this some other time.
yeah
yeah.. I don't get it...
long island
Cloud computing
I agree with you here. my other concern is accessability. There were a couple of fires in the last few weeks at datacentres where the servers went off line for more than 24 hours. Companies time and money wasted, business lost. Why have your info, data etc in a place where you cant get at it? Doesn't make sense to me. You can buy 16gig pen drives, that should be enough for most people's information and data, isn't it?
Depends on implementation
The stability of the cloud depends heavily on its design. Putting all the datacenters in the same place is completely bonkers!
A stable cloud would IMHO need to be spread all over the world (think P2P, F2F technology) in order to have backups if anything goes wrong and also because waiting for a connection from another continent is not as efficient as having a connection on the same backbone (or even same LAN).
When it comes to backups, I think I'll stay in the cloud for now. The guys from SpiderOak seem to have found a *very* secure way to store backups that no-one else but you (not even themselves) can access. And every backup you have there has a few dozen backups of its own. Now that's what I find a smart way to use cloud computing.
P.S. Moult wrote another post explaining Chrome OS's potential impact more in depth
In the cloud
You make valid points. Another concern is the cost and availibilty of connection. If everyone went over to cloud, then everyone would be at the mercy of the internet providers and connections, and the way the governments around the would are trying to interfer with the running and freedom of the interent makes for concern. The saying "using technology for the sake of technology" is a dangerous way to go, where I prefer "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Is there exsisting technology that can do the job? And do you NEED to do this? are 2 questions I ask before I change anything. Sometimes there is the idea of improvement and doing thing better and more efficiently, but at what cost and risk? and are the costs and ricks worth it?
Please don't get me wrong, it not that I don't like new things, I do like and imbrace new technology and new ideas, but I like to make sure it is for the right reasons?
Chrome OS in cybercafés
The only place where I think something like Chrome OS would make sense is on thin clients in cybercafés. This way the visitor could just log in with his account in any cybercafé and have his desktop open up.
But then we have the problem again with centralisation of information, data retention, privacy and IP law that is not uncommon with Google :P
Bottom line: cloud computing as well as P2P/F2F and DRM is one of the technologies that could be great if used right and terribly terribly awful if not.
A more pragmatic concern
Another good question: Why would I want to access programs and documents at the painfully-slow speed of 4 kilobytes per second when I enter an area of bad 3G reception? I live within a 3 "broadband zone", but more than half the time the modem drops back to dialup-like speeds. And don't get me started on the ability for 3G networks to lose packets and cause a large download to fail (or force you to click the Reload button in the web browser).
3G is good for accessing the internet when you're on the run, but it's freaking terrible for running your whole computer from it.
Not for accessing
But isn't the main purpose of the backup being it's there if you need it? Having to access it all the time at 3g and slow speeds shouldn't be a factor unless you need to use it often. I use "virtual" backups incase my hardrive crashes only.