Smart Phones and PCs
Eric S. Raymond: How smartphones will disrupt PCs.
One box to do it all. I think either that will be the case or we will, essentially, move toward a new terminal type structure. That is, all of our stuff is kept on the internet somewhere and we just have various boxes (PCs, phones, etc.) to access all our stuff. Interesting times.
February 26th, 2010 at 10:30 am
I actually just finished a paper on cloud computing, and if the trend continues, this is indeed the future. Do I think we’ll ever get completely back to terminals? No, people like to store their porn locally (it’s harder to hide that stuff from the FBI on Google Docs – especially with them turning over stuff without a struggle). And we all know porn drives the computer industry (well, that and video games).
Mind you, the above was pretty much a synopsis of my paper. Surprisingly, I received an “A”.
February 26th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
You should hope that is NOT the future.
The government already has too much influence on the Internet.
February 26th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I don’t think we’ll see cloud storage really take off until bandwidth becomes significantly more available. Example – I happen to be installing a game on my laptop from an online vendor (Stardock’s Impulse service, who I will happily plug; insert FTC disclaimer). It’s 7 gb and change; which took a noticable time to install on 20 mbps FiOS. But once installed, it’s accessible at SATA speeds. there’s an iron triangle of performance, to wit: CPU bandwidth, GPU bandwidth, and storage bandwidth. For online gaming, add network latency, making a square
As long as there are gamers, the iron square will dominate that segment. And non-gamers fell off the upgrade treadmill around the time XP SP2 came out.
That having been said; I’ve been agreeing with ESR’s take on this since I was first exposed to Shadowrun (in, um, 1990?) and specifically the pocket secretary. The limitation on this happening today is not mouse or KB – I own a BT mouse that will hook up with my smartphone, and could get a KB to do same – it’s the screen. And my HTC smartphone has available a Composite-out cable, and my FiOS decoder box will now allow me to export pictures to the big screen via WiFi. didn’t have a timeframe until recently; but the tech necessary is converging. MyVu glasses are overpriced and underperforming at the current time; but Moore’s law should catch them up in the next generation or two. There’s an upper cap on the resolution necessary for something that is being (essentially) displayed on your retina; that being the density of rods & cones, likewise frame rate. There is no such upper limit on storage or CPU/GPU bandwidth, but storage is about to fall under Moore’s Law, and CPU/GPU is already there.
Battery life is the killer – we just don’t have good battery power density yet; and we need new chemistry/physics to get it.
But there’s no reason that the “guts” of your computer be a smartphone form factor, with docking stations for enhancement. It could be done today with the usual caveats for early-adopting.
But don’t expect to carry only one. I bet my “eccentricity” of carrying two (currently identical) smartphones will become commonplace.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:16 am
You wouldn’t happen to be either JonB or David McCabe would you? 🙂
We’re presently (2/27PM – 2/28 early AM) going gently back and forth at the bottom of the comments screen. All contributions sought, as they say.
March 1st, 2010 at 9:38 am
Nope – I yam who I yam; as they say.
I did read ESR’s comment tread a couple days back; but didn’t feel I had anything to contribute there at the time