Totally. I've mused about that many times. The thing is, a "local" net connection can be extremely lean. Not all systems implemented this, but I know SGI did. X apps running on a local network address ran very lean. A remote address invoked the full overhead of networking, but then again, networking was happening. Not a huge deal with the speeds we've got these days, but it was in the 90's
Browsers are becoming quite interesting in that way. Lots of it isn't getting serious use yet, but I am seeing some in "web-client" enterprise applications. They are cranky, but when sorted out, surprisingly useful. IMHO, a good trend, because it kind of sort of brings back multi-user computing and the application server model, which I always preferred over client-server, just because administration and data isolation / management can be so damn lean when it's done that way.
We would be a good chunk farther down the road on this, if it were not for a specific company in Redmond WA, who is STILL trying to knife the baby on this stuff. Constant spats over OpenGL, and if it were not for Apple seriously adopting it, OGL would have fallen into niche use for academic, life sciences, geo-exploration, etc... Anyway, Netscape formulated that vision way back when, and even produced some intriguing demos. The stuff we take for granted now, and that still seems a bit sparkly and new was actually on the table then, but the whole IE / Netscape fight slogged it for years. Microsoft saw it, and rightfully so, as a serious threat to their OS + Office revenue stream, realizing that applications written to a browser with native graphics capability could run cross platform, and would run application server style, not client server, impacting them on both fronts! So they went at it, shipping IE for free, starving Netscape, who then had to focus on just existing instead of advancing the browser tech. They have since then, linked the browser to the OS in very ugly ways, mixing that with dubious standards compliance, and the pain of Active X, which does the right sorts of things, but only does it on their browser, and only when that browser is in a good mood.. Ugh. That actually diminishes the attractiveness and utility of "web applications" to the point where some will avoid them entirely, having seen the horror. That had to be by design. Just had to. I can't see it botched that badly otherwise, but who knows? Maybe they really didn't get it then. They sort of do now, but...
Yeah, I've done the windows X program too. Works great! It's just odd. For a time, a CAD program I used to deal with on the application engineering level was a UNIX to Windows port, and it shipped with an X window manager. I seriously disturbed one IT department by demonstrating X on windows, running that app all over the place. They choked on it, but only for a while. The next version was GDI / native, and so it all went away...
For a long time, I had a nice setup in my house. A few SGI machines and a couple of Linux machines were always at the ready. I would ssh in and do all manner of admin from that setup from just about anywhere, to just about anywhere.
Fun stuff. In any case, X is really a great tool to learn about. There isn't anything else like it, from what I can tell.
Absolutely! That's my take. I don't see any of it as mutually exclusive. Just options. PC's are becoming closed and "trusted" now, with the Windows 8 capable machines locked down such that free software producers / packagers have to pay for boot rights. Sucks really, and it's not necessary at all. The idea is it's dangerous out there, but really the goal isn't producing something the user can trust, it's producing something that other people trust to insure the user does what they are told, not what they want. The drums have been pounding on that for well over 10 years, and it's here now.
Funny thing is it took long enough for this stuff to make a lot more sense! Prop II will make a nice little machine. These efforts make nice little machines, and a whole lot can be done --more importantly, the basics can get done however people want to do them. So it's a good news / bad news deal. Good news is it's an exciting time to be inclined as we are, having seen what most of us have seen. Bad news is a lot of great hardware is going to get crippled and locked down, rendered useless in the future for business reasons, not that it actually is useless. Not sure what I think about that.
But, moving a lot of gear like this, be it the Pi, our own prop, this Android PC, etc... will spark off another generation of people like us, who will see some of the stuff we've seen, and who will build, do, play, like we have too. This is a perfectly fine thing, because the expectations around open hardware are set with us now. People like us tend to keep the other players somewhat honest.
With so much moving onto cloud type arrangements, hardware tied to services and contracts and such, the ideas that sparked all of it might get lost or marginalized. Best grow the newbies right now, because I suspect we will need them to keep the players in the future honest, and the skills and ethic relevant.
And again, go and visit the phone "hacking" forums. Much of it really is "cracking" in the older-school sense of the word, but that's just the options they have with things being so closed up. Never did trust cell manufacturers and their networks. The core open ethic was never a part of that, with only Google stepping in to buck the trend. Hope people recognize what a gift that is. Maybe they will. In any case, peeling that technology off into open land to play with is only a good thing, because a few of them will play. We know from history that it only takes a few too. Sometimes only one to really move the state of things forward.
Hate to sound so anti. I am though. If you can't open it, you don't own it. Rentals are OK in my book, but a sleight of hand is being done here, and it's always annoyed me. If we are going to actually sell things to people, they need to actually own them; otherwise, just call it the rental it is and we all deal from there. And that's the rub! They want the money from the sale, but they also want the control and limited use value that comes with a rental, double dipping without being called on it, if you ask me.
Suppose I better bend this back on topic somehow.
I like Android because it's user interaction model is dead simple. Seems to me, that has a lot of advantages over something like X + Linux. X + Linux is bad *** powerful, if somebody wants it to be. One could run 1000 CPU's in a single OS image, NUMA style thanks to SGI, or some clunky 200 Mhz box from years ago. It all works, but it's thick and convoluted.
Android is a UNIX at the core, but way stripped down. People can build things that other people interact with easily and with some built in familiarity. Know how to run your phone? Well, here's this toy and it does X, and you know how to use it too. Very interested to see where that all goes.
Just consider a few bits.
My Toshiba NB250 came with W7 Starter on a 250GB hard disk. I opted for a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux as there are some function keys that I can only get to in W7. In seems Toshiba, unlike Asus, will only provide full BIOS information to MS - nothing to Linux.
So I partitioned the hard disk for the addition of Linux. But low and behold, MS has managed to set up their file system that no matter how little I use it, it takes 50% of the hard disk space. Fortunately, I need about 5Gbytes for the whole Linux OS and have about 120Gbytes of personal storage on the Linux side.
And on another front, I purchased a Seagate USB2.0 hard disk of 300Gbytes for backups and such. I was gobsmaked when I opened the box and discovered a huge pile of legalese on the hard disk explaining that Seagate was NOT selling me the device, they were just licensing me to use it. And that I had to use all their loaded software for MS. This was NOT mentioned at all on the outside of the package. If it were I would not have 'bought' it.
My response was to reformat the whole disk in EXT3 file system for Linux.
Does anybody really believe the 'cloud computing' is really going to be more convenient and better? The whole computer revolution was about empowering the individual with a personal computer rather than having computational power in the hands of big companies.
The name of the game is to build a Pay Wall and money-tize anything you can. Buyer beware. Still, anything originating out of Unix has far less bloat and more versatility than MS OSes. I suspect Unix and Linux tied up the most functional computational scheme and Windows has to work around a lot of it.
Does anybody really believe the 'cloud computing' is really going to be more convenient and better? The whole computer revolution was about empowering the individual with a personal computer rather than having computational power in the hands of big companies.
Personally I think the "cloud" is to be loathed and feared. In my opinion it is the polar opposite of both open source software and hardware.
It is the perfect way to kill off open source applications. This is because there is little cost in distributing an open source application to run on a users hardware, but a major cost in supplying the networking and computational power to host it as a cloud based service.
The availability of serious computing horsepower at your own disposal will become very expensive and limited. We aren't far from being to the point where the only mass marketed and therefore reasonable priced hardware will be basically a glorified dumb terminal for the consumption of cloud services.
What happens with custom software development, once the users machine becomes a dumb terminal, custom software will need to be hosted as well, looks like a great way to kill off small dev shops.
Everyone have their heads in the clouds, unfortunately.
'It's available everywhere'...
sure...
but so is the space I rent on a server at a webhosting site.
'your data is synchronised to all your computers'...
Maybe I don't NEED all my pictures to show up on all my computers?
Or maybe it doesn't work because the 'Cloud system' in question doesn't have dedicated SW for my OS of choice?
(I have a couple of the original ASUS netBooks, still with the original Linux, whatever flavour that is, and I also run stuff like eCS - that's the latest OS/2 with all kinds of updates and goodies - or my PDA which runs EPOC, later rebranded Symbian. Yes, they're all in regular use)
As for running apps directly in the Cloud?
I understand that crackers and other sleazebags are very fond of Clouds. Maybe there's something to it after all?
And what if you can't connect to the net?
Or the service goes out of business?
(Remeber MegaUpload? lots of people used it as their only storage of important files... Then the FBI got serious... )
I'm not giving up local processing power, and I'm bl**dy h! not giving up locally stored files!
This whole "cloud thing" is part of the normal cyclical nature of computing and its bottlenecks. Maybe you don't, but I remember time-sharing systems which were not very different if you replace teletypes with an essentially smart/dumb terminal with a GUI built-in now. The data is stored on someone's server and the meat of the application runs on the same or another server. The idea is the same and depends on various economies of scale and other factors. Some timesharing systems had excellent backup policies and some were pretty much non-existant. Some businesses moved to timesharing accounts with responsible vendors and some did not and got ruined when the data wasn't backed up well enough or the vendor didn't have enough redundancy for essentially 100% uptime.
You get what you pay for ... sometimes if you're lucky and if you do proper due-diligence and understand what you're asking for. Most people / companies aren't so lucky. On the other hand, you can have your own systems and take lousy care of them. You can scrimp on backup and redundancy in servers and communications and hope for the best.
Comments
Browsers are becoming quite interesting in that way. Lots of it isn't getting serious use yet, but I am seeing some in "web-client" enterprise applications. They are cranky, but when sorted out, surprisingly useful. IMHO, a good trend, because it kind of sort of brings back multi-user computing and the application server model, which I always preferred over client-server, just because administration and data isolation / management can be so damn lean when it's done that way.
We would be a good chunk farther down the road on this, if it were not for a specific company in Redmond WA, who is STILL trying to knife the baby on this stuff. Constant spats over OpenGL, and if it were not for Apple seriously adopting it, OGL would have fallen into niche use for academic, life sciences, geo-exploration, etc... Anyway, Netscape formulated that vision way back when, and even produced some intriguing demos. The stuff we take for granted now, and that still seems a bit sparkly and new was actually on the table then, but the whole IE / Netscape fight slogged it for years. Microsoft saw it, and rightfully so, as a serious threat to their OS + Office revenue stream, realizing that applications written to a browser with native graphics capability could run cross platform, and would run application server style, not client server, impacting them on both fronts! So they went at it, shipping IE for free, starving Netscape, who then had to focus on just existing instead of advancing the browser tech. They have since then, linked the browser to the OS in very ugly ways, mixing that with dubious standards compliance, and the pain of Active X, which does the right sorts of things, but only does it on their browser, and only when that browser is in a good mood.. Ugh. That actually diminishes the attractiveness and utility of "web applications" to the point where some will avoid them entirely, having seen the horror. That had to be by design. Just had to. I can't see it botched that badly otherwise, but who knows? Maybe they really didn't get it then. They sort of do now, but...
Yeah, I've done the windows X program too. Works great! It's just odd. For a time, a CAD program I used to deal with on the application engineering level was a UNIX to Windows port, and it shipped with an X window manager. I seriously disturbed one IT department by demonstrating X on windows, running that app all over the place. They choked on it, but only for a while. The next version was GDI / native, and so it all went away...
For a long time, I had a nice setup in my house. A few SGI machines and a couple of Linux machines were always at the ready. I would ssh in and do all manner of admin from that setup from just about anywhere, to just about anywhere.
Fun stuff. In any case, X is really a great tool to learn about. There isn't anything else like it, from what I can tell.
Absolutely! That's my take. I don't see any of it as mutually exclusive. Just options. PC's are becoming closed and "trusted" now, with the Windows 8 capable machines locked down such that free software producers / packagers have to pay for boot rights. Sucks really, and it's not necessary at all. The idea is it's dangerous out there, but really the goal isn't producing something the user can trust, it's producing something that other people trust to insure the user does what they are told, not what they want. The drums have been pounding on that for well over 10 years, and it's here now.
Funny thing is it took long enough for this stuff to make a lot more sense! Prop II will make a nice little machine. These efforts make nice little machines, and a whole lot can be done --more importantly, the basics can get done however people want to do them. So it's a good news / bad news deal. Good news is it's an exciting time to be inclined as we are, having seen what most of us have seen. Bad news is a lot of great hardware is going to get crippled and locked down, rendered useless in the future for business reasons, not that it actually is useless. Not sure what I think about that.
But, moving a lot of gear like this, be it the Pi, our own prop, this Android PC, etc... will spark off another generation of people like us, who will see some of the stuff we've seen, and who will build, do, play, like we have too. This is a perfectly fine thing, because the expectations around open hardware are set with us now. People like us tend to keep the other players somewhat honest.
With so much moving onto cloud type arrangements, hardware tied to services and contracts and such, the ideas that sparked all of it might get lost or marginalized. Best grow the newbies right now, because I suspect we will need them to keep the players in the future honest, and the skills and ethic relevant.
And again, go and visit the phone "hacking" forums. Much of it really is "cracking" in the older-school sense of the word, but that's just the options they have with things being so closed up. Never did trust cell manufacturers and their networks. The core open ethic was never a part of that, with only Google stepping in to buck the trend. Hope people recognize what a gift that is. Maybe they will. In any case, peeling that technology off into open land to play with is only a good thing, because a few of them will play. We know from history that it only takes a few too. Sometimes only one to really move the state of things forward.
Hate to sound so anti. I am though. If you can't open it, you don't own it. Rentals are OK in my book, but a sleight of hand is being done here, and it's always annoyed me. If we are going to actually sell things to people, they need to actually own them; otherwise, just call it the rental it is and we all deal from there. And that's the rub! They want the money from the sale, but they also want the control and limited use value that comes with a rental, double dipping without being called on it, if you ask me.
Suppose I better bend this back on topic somehow.
I like Android because it's user interaction model is dead simple. Seems to me, that has a lot of advantages over something like X + Linux. X + Linux is bad *** powerful, if somebody wants it to be. One could run 1000 CPU's in a single OS image, NUMA style thanks to SGI, or some clunky 200 Mhz box from years ago. It all works, but it's thick and convoluted.
Android is a UNIX at the core, but way stripped down. People can build things that other people interact with easily and with some built in familiarity. Know how to run your phone? Well, here's this toy and it does X, and you know how to use it too. Very interested to see where that all goes.
My Toshiba NB250 came with W7 Starter on a 250GB hard disk. I opted for a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux as there are some function keys that I can only get to in W7. In seems Toshiba, unlike Asus, will only provide full BIOS information to MS - nothing to Linux.
So I partitioned the hard disk for the addition of Linux. But low and behold, MS has managed to set up their file system that no matter how little I use it, it takes 50% of the hard disk space. Fortunately, I need about 5Gbytes for the whole Linux OS and have about 120Gbytes of personal storage on the Linux side.
And on another front, I purchased a Seagate USB2.0 hard disk of 300Gbytes for backups and such. I was gobsmaked when I opened the box and discovered a huge pile of legalese on the hard disk explaining that Seagate was NOT selling me the device, they were just licensing me to use it. And that I had to use all their loaded software for MS. This was NOT mentioned at all on the outside of the package. If it were I would not have 'bought' it.
My response was to reformat the whole disk in EXT3 file system for Linux.
Does anybody really believe the 'cloud computing' is really going to be more convenient and better? The whole computer revolution was about empowering the individual with a personal computer rather than having computational power in the hands of big companies.
The name of the game is to build a Pay Wall and money-tize anything you can. Buyer beware. Still, anything originating out of Unix has far less bloat and more versatility than MS OSes. I suspect Unix and Linux tied up the most functional computational scheme and Windows has to work around a lot of it.
Personally I think the "cloud" is to be loathed and feared. In my opinion it is the polar opposite of both open source software and hardware.
It is the perfect way to kill off open source applications. This is because there is little cost in distributing an open source application to run on a users hardware, but a major cost in supplying the networking and computational power to host it as a cloud based service.
The availability of serious computing horsepower at your own disposal will become very expensive and limited. We aren't far from being to the point where the only mass marketed and therefore reasonable priced hardware will be basically a glorified dumb terminal for the consumption of cloud services.
What happens with custom software development, once the users machine becomes a dumb terminal, custom software will need to be hosted as well, looks like a great way to kill off small dev shops.
C.W.
'It's available everywhere'...
sure...
but so is the space I rent on a server at a webhosting site.
'your data is synchronised to all your computers'...
Maybe I don't NEED all my pictures to show up on all my computers?
Or maybe it doesn't work because the 'Cloud system' in question doesn't have dedicated SW for my OS of choice?
(I have a couple of the original ASUS netBooks, still with the original Linux, whatever flavour that is, and I also run stuff like eCS - that's the latest OS/2 with all kinds of updates and goodies - or my PDA which runs EPOC, later rebranded Symbian. Yes, they're all in regular use)
As for running apps directly in the Cloud?
I understand that crackers and other sleazebags are very fond of Clouds. Maybe there's something to it after all?
And what if you can't connect to the net?
Or the service goes out of business?
(Remeber MegaUpload? lots of people used it as their only storage of important files... Then the FBI got serious... )
I'm not giving up local processing power, and I'm bl**dy h! not giving up locally stored files!
You get what you pay for ... sometimes if you're lucky and if you do proper due-diligence and understand what you're asking for. Most people / companies aren't so lucky. On the other hand, you can have your own systems and take lousy care of them. You can scrimp on backup and redundancy in servers and communications and hope for the best.