Comment 97 Re: Mainframe / thin client model?

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Corporate World excited about desktops in the cloud

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Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 5, Insightful)

by epitaxial@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 01:13 (#8T)

Did someone who was born in 1990 come up with this idea? Every so often somebody discovers this "new" idea.

Re: Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 5, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 05:34 (#8V)

Here is a cool article (from 1968!) describing this what-is-old-is-new-again phenomenon and how it relates to display processors.

It's more relevant for the current X Window / Wayland efforts than full desktop virtualization, but it always gives me a chuckle how such things never seem to change.

Re: Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 1)

by link@pipedot.org on 2014-03-04 06:49 (#97)

Regarding the cycle, modern smartphones are already more powerful than mainframes of ancient times, and they don't look like they will be getting less powerful so it's more a matter of how we use them.

As long as we are constrained by the speed of light, latency can be an issue, connectivity is also a problem so people are going to want a computer+data with them.

Until brain-computer interfaces become much better I think there'll be a market for PCs (whether laptops or desktops) - since they can be a lot more powerful and capable. Smartphones on the other hand might lose significant share to wearables once the latter start augmenting people in many ways a phone can't. Telekinesis/telepathy/eidetic memory/video-audio recognition would be more seamless with a wearable than a phone- it's the difference between someone seemingly doing autistic savant/magical stuff and someone using a phone to do them.

But central servers still aren't going to go away either - search, etc. Maybe the Tor chat thing will start mass adoption of "P2P" messaging and other stuff. Given the slow adoption of IPv6 I doubt Tor will scale to billions of users and remain "decentralized"- the NSA may run the mega/giganodes ;).

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