I previously blogged about Google Chrome. There are both advantages that users will enjoy and drawbacks of using the Cloud based OS. The most pressing advantage can be the ability to prevent software piracy. A user can be made to pay for logging in to the OS and using any of the services that reside in the cloud. Updates to cloud based systems, upgrades to the data formats used to store files on Google Docs can all happen transparently. Not to miss the ability to access documents from anywhere.
At the same time we are seeing the advent of high performance desktop/mobile processors and fast graphics cards - so how to utilize the most of that performance on laptops and netbooks when everything is moving to the cloud. The browser sure will consume an awesome amount of memory and CPU cycles specially for people like me who have a 100 tabs open in Chrome most of the time.
As an aside I hate to see my browser crashing ... i feel the industry as a whole (both software and microprocessor) should seriously consider the browser performance bottleneck.
It makes sense to run computationally intensive tasks using the graphics card on my PC while move the tasks involving "data" to the cloud. It does not matter if FastKat2 runs on my PC or on the cloud as long as it runs fast. But it does matter if I use online document managers (Google Docs) or process/store them on my PC. Here data is involved.
While the earliest computers involved a dumb terminal accessing a mainframe the new generation of PCs is going to see a hybrid of those and the desktops of today. A first design decision for any major application would be what part runs on the cloud and what runs on my browser?
It should not be surprising if programming models come up which make allow easy engineering of code that separates the cloud portion from the browser portion. Well there are many such models in the parallel programming world ... guess what they could be adapted to suit segregation of code for cloud and browser.
Have a nice weekend!
I think cost of the computation is also an important factor here. It will be much cheaper if most of the processing, including the graphics takes place on the server. The server farms housing huge number of these hardware units can optimize their use and easily share them among the users. They can also be bought and maintained at lower prices due to the large. quantities involved. This will affect the cost of computing to the end user indirectly. Moreover, the users won't have to worry that much about updating their hardware every few years and the developers don't have to worry about supporting all types of clients.
ReplyDeleteYeah ... a kind of trade off is involved ... a percentage of users will in any case upgrade their netbooks every three years ... so some code will still need to run on the browser.
ReplyDeleteWhat about privacy issues in the cloud based data storage and applications. I can very easily envision a scenario where big private players collude with clouds and use of increasingly sophisticated Machine learning techniques can make you buy what they want you to buy and recommend their product. Current research shows that the human psychology and taste about the products is very malleable and can be jockeyed to amazing precision given enough data and intelligent processing. This sure is scary : every step u gonna take is watched and monitored and controlled by the "cloud"
ReplyDelete"big private players collude with clouds and use of increasingly sophisticated Machine learning techniques" This is when people should start reading the privacy and data usage agreements carefully.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day privacy is gonna be a big issue
Well, all the companies are there for a purpose and that is "making money". I respect Google for that, but even Google collects click-through data and stores the geographical location of the search. Now, they say that they use the geographical location because they want to cater to the query in the best possible way, i.e. "A pretty girl" from Japan and India should give different results. So, in the process they store the click-through data with geographical location and use this info to advertise. Now, this is Google (possibly the most ethical company). Once we get to Facebook, Microsoft,
DeleteAmazon etc.. and others, the game becomes increasingly dirty. So, the bottom line is they are not giving you the cloud for free, they are taking a heavy price and that is "they can peak and tweak your thinking". Regarding, data usage agreement, we surf sites all day long, join new things almost everyday. So, keeping track of data usage agreement is kind of tedious (of course we can have some software which uses NLP to go through the jargon and raises a flag but how many people will have access to that and how many are aware of these things ???). Lastly (this one is a bit philosophical and over-stretched, yet possible), absolute power corrupts absolutely, so the best way to prevent corruption is to avoid a concept such as absolute power and having a central repository of data of so many people, no matter how useful it is for everyone, is inviting catastrophic consequences.