General Category > Comic Related Discussion
ipad for reading (not just golden-age) comics
JVJ (RIP):
Everybody with a Terabyte or more hanging in or off of their systems say "I do".
I DO.
It's not Word docs that people are storing, Gene, it's movies, digital photos, songs and comic scans. Personally I've got about two TBytes and expect to get more in the next year or so.
Do you want to store your life on the "cloud"?
(|:{>
GeneYas:
--- Quote from: JVJ on June 25, 2010, 08:43:25 PM ---Everybody with a Terabyte or more hanging in or off of their systems say "I do".
I DO.
It's not Word docs that people are storing, Gene, it's movies, digital photos, songs and comic scans. Personally I've got about two TBytes and expect to get more in the next year or so.
Do you want to store your life on the "cloud"?
(|:{>
--- End quote ---
I said you don't need a terabyte of data for a Word document... and you don't. Gaming and entertainment does. Business software doesn't need a desktop computer for serious number crunching. That was my point.
Gene
JVJ (RIP):
More clearly made and understood this time, Gene. I agree with you that businesses don't need large local hard drives on their desktops. Does that mean you envision businesses going back to the dumb terminal model? We've come a long way in 30 years to end up where we started. Only difference is the mainframe gets replaced by the net. Hmmm... Seems like a precarious position to me. ALL of the arguments in the 80s for desktop PCs revolved around "what if the mainframe goes down?" To avoid production (i.e. all work) just stopping, they gave us PCs. I have the same question for the net. So much inter-connectivity demands a robust network. If everything depends on the Internet and the data in the cloud, we're back in the same scenario as the mainframe and its hard drive. Might happen, but it's fraught with weaknesses.
Been there, got out of that.
Peace, Jim (|:{>
John C:
That's pretty much what I was going to say, too, Jim. As I said before (and I really don't want to waste anybody's time arguing over something like this), we've been here before, more than once. As I recall, IBM wanted RMX (a real-time, multitasking operating system) on the IBM PC, but the owners believed the mainframe model was the only way the computer industry lived. Windows 95 integrated Internet Explorer not to kill Netscape, but because "the desktop is the web" (or somesuch nonsense). DEC studiosly avoided the PC revolution. Sun wanted their Java processors creating their own cloud.
When I look at how this has progressed, I don't see a smooth motion "forward," I see a pendulum that swings every fifteen years or so, and we've proably reached the limit this time through. Microsoft's Kin, for example, looks like it's trying to push you OFF the cloud, not on. A lot of people are interested in Diaspora, and want to run their own "node" in a social network. And nobody has developed a "killer app" that makes "the cloud" something that real people care about--it's just storage and communications, and you can carry that in your pocket.
To clarify what I meant about "the desktop will go on," I'm looking at hardware like those "wall wart" computers (Marvell), the netbooks (Asus, et al--I've been using one as my main machine for over a year, now), and the "net top" machines. They're dirt cheap, plug into your television, and have more than enough power (and, with a USB stick, storage space) to run Linux, Chromium, or a ReactOS-like Windows clone, plus office software and desktop publishing, audio, image, and video processing, various communications software (web browsers, VoIP phones, etc.), and so forth, all for free. And that hardware isn't going to vanish or skyrocket in price. In fact, with all the money going into so-called SoC ("System on a Chip") research, it looks like we'll have more opportunities, not less.
(And Jim, I'm with you on storage. A 1.5TB drive just appeared on my doorstep this afternoon, by coincidence, like magic. Well under a hundred bucks, too, though I need to scavenge for a cable to make it go.)
Drusilla lives!:
I was thinking of going into a detailed rundown of all my thoughts and feelings regarding the current state of technology and the IT industry, but I'm just too tired to do it! :P
Besides, it would only end in me ranting away. The only thing I will say on the matter is that it's an industry that reinvents... nay, perhaps that's not strong enough... it's an industry that NEEDS to reinvent its wheels every few years. So if things seem to come full circle, well that shouldn't surprise anyone IMO. :)
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