Amazon's Jeff Bezos once revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options. Will DRAM prices make it come true?
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
what a bunch of bullshit. Act like the individuals are responsible and ignore the massive data centers that would be required using water and power.
And most people just use their phone for most stuff like scrolling ticktok YouTube and Reddit.
Modern desktop streaming is quite impressive. 100ms, 5% loss is no problem for most tasks. You don’t even notice it, and as a result your experience can sometimes be better.
Additionally you can offload some tasks to the local machine where appropriate.
You dont need to fit every users needs into a thin client setup, but you could fit probably 50% of all users onto one and they wouldn’t know any different. Think of the energy savings. Think of all that plastic that goes into a desktop or laptop that isn’t needed in a virtualized blade chassis. Think of the rolling performance upgrades. Think of never having your hardware go End of Support. Think of the old equipment that ends up properly e-wasted instead of shoved into a dump. Think of the batteries that no longer need to get produced.
I might play around with this idea and host my own non-profit Desktop as a Service.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
How do you do, my fellow progressives? Did you know that renting everything instead of ownership is good for the planet? You should rent an apartment NOW! Oh, and throw out that rusty old PS2. You get a lot more value if you buy our monthly Amazon Gaming Plus subscription (you also get 30 second ads instead of a full minute ones! What a crazy value!)
I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
I just don’t trust bezos to not be greedy.
what a bunch of bullshit. Act like the individuals are responsible and ignore the massive data centers that would be required using water and power. And most people just use their phone for most stuff like scrolling ticktok YouTube and Reddit.
I will happily pay more for freedom from the corporation.
Modern desktop streaming is quite impressive. 100ms, 5% loss is no problem for most tasks. You don’t even notice it, and as a result your experience can sometimes be better.
Additionally you can offload some tasks to the local machine where appropriate.
You dont need to fit every users needs into a thin client setup, but you could fit probably 50% of all users onto one and they wouldn’t know any different. Think of the energy savings. Think of all that plastic that goes into a desktop or laptop that isn’t needed in a virtualized blade chassis. Think of the rolling performance upgrades. Think of never having your hardware go End of Support. Think of the old equipment that ends up properly e-wasted instead of shoved into a dump. Think of the batteries that no longer need to get produced.
I might play around with this idea and host my own non-profit Desktop as a Service.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
Desktop streaming isn’t the same as web apps.
Its the same idea of putting compute in datacenters
Amazing how we’re come full circle
Right! I had no idea Bezos used Lemmy either!
How do you do, my fellow progressives? Did you know that renting everything instead of ownership is good for the planet? You should rent an apartment NOW! Oh, and throw out that rusty old PS2. You get a lot more value if you buy our monthly Amazon Gaming Plus subscription (you also get 30 second ads instead of a full minute ones! What a crazy value!)
If only “greedy” was his only problem!