I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
It will get close to happening for nearly all computing, then it will swing back the other way to local storage and compute, then after 15-20 years it will swing back toward centralized compute and storage. This has already happened 3 times.
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Original computing was mainframes. “Dumb terminals” that had zero local storage and only the most rudimentary compute power to handing the incoming data and display it, and take keystrokes, encode them, and send them on.
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Then “personal computers” became a thing with the advent of cheap CPUs. Dumb Terminals/mainframes were largely discarded and everyone had their own computer on their desk with their won compute and storage. Then the Netware/Banyan era began and those desktop computers were networked to have some remote shared storage. (there’s a slightly different branching with Sun/HPUX/DigitalUnix and Workstation grade hardware)
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Then Citrix WinFrame and Sun Ray stateless thin clients showed up once again swinging the compute and storage almost entirely remotely to centralized heavy powered servers with (mostly) dumb terminals, but these were graphic interfaces like MS Windows or Xwindow.
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Once again, powerful desktop CPUs showed up with the Pentium II etc compute was back under users desks.
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Now phones and tablets with cloud has show up, and you’re asking the question.
So what I think will swing primary compute and storage back to the user side (handheld now) is again, cheap compute and storage on the device. Right now so many services are cloud based because the massive compute and storage requirements only exist in volume in the cloud. However, bandwidth is still limited. Imagine when the next (next?) generation of mobile CPUs arrive, and with a tiny bit of power you could do today’s bitcoin mining on your phone or process AI datasets with ease in the palm of your hand. And why would you send the entire dataset to the cloud when you can process it locally and then send the result?
So the pendulum keeps swinging; centralized and distributed, back and forth.
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Almost definitely not at all. There’s just too much latency, due to the speed of light. Local storage will always be faster than cloud, by a huge margin, unless you’re using an incredibly slow medium.
Yep, SSD latency is measured in tens of microseconds. To achieve that kind of latency with a cloud service, you’d need it to be just a few kilometers away or the light propagation delay alone becomes too great.
You can take my 100TB storage array from my cold, dead, hands.
Oh don’t worry, they’ll cite “national security concerns” and claim that you are storing stolen classified information in order to plan for “terrorist activity”.
There will be a no knock warrant, they’ll kick open the door, shoot anything that moves. And they will take it away from your cold, dead, hands.
Or more likely, desktop OSes will be locked down and will simply not be able to use it, while bank websites and other stuff will only work with locked down OSes.
For your security of course.
have you tried moving to Linux?
Cant move to linux when in 2030 they make every BIOS/UEFI locked, just like some android manufacturers have already been locking bootloaders.
Then don’t buy those products. I only buy phones I can unlock and install my own version of Android on. Same with computers and iot. If I can’t install my own software then I didn’t own it.
If megacorps have their way, you won’t be able to use banking, government, social media, etc. if you aren’t running their proprietary slop.
See Google’s Attestation API attempt. Computers can become like smsrtphones are right now.
Can I really? I won’t murder you for it, I am willing to wait.
“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.
And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.
