Will cloud computing make desktop PCs obsolete?

[VinDSL]

No Fn'g way! F* that new world order bs! All they want to do is burglarize your info/data, and slap you down, if you get too cocky.[...]

It won't happen in my house in my lifetime. The cloud is frought with security risk - e.g., Wikileaks. I value my privacy too much to trust Microsoft or Google or ??? It also leaves you at the mercy of government.

Bwahahahaha!

Check this out: Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges

 

[rasczak]

I wouldn't want to rely on a the internet for my mission critical apps or even just my regular apps, let alone let some other company hold my data

 

[Nothinman]

Bwahahahaha!

Check this out: Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges

The TOS was probably written by a non-technical person or internal procedures changed. I guess I don't care much because I have no personal, vested interest in Dropbox and I never assumed any encryption was used at all and don't upload unencrypted sensitive information. That said, I am taking a look at Wuala and Spideroak now.

 

[Jeff7181]

I wouldn't want to rely on a the internet for my mission critical apps or even just my regular apps, let alone let some other company hold my data

Good thing everyone doesn't think that way or I'd be out of a job. The company I work for is strictly SaaS, with 250+ customers whose data sits in our data center.

 

[VinDSL]

The TOS was probably written by a non-technical person or internal procedures changed. I guess I don't care much because I have no personal, vested interest in Dropbox and I never assumed any encryption was used at all and don't upload unencrypted sensitive information. That said, I am taking a look at Wuala and Spideroak now.

The solution is to do client-side encryption, before sending your files off, across the web, to somebody else's servers. If you do this, you can keep possession of the keys (hopefully stored outside your web path, duh). That way, nobody (except yourself) can read your stored data, including the provider, but...

How many ppl are smart enough to do that?!?!?!?

I remember hearing an interview once, about intellectual property theft (pirated music, movies, proggies, et cetera).

One of the ways 'they' nab ppl is by sitting on busy routers, on the 'internet highway' and watching everything that goes through it. Supposedly, there's nothng illegal about this snooping. If data goes across your network, it's yours. There are no user agreements in place.

Sending unencrypted anything across the web is just stupid, even if it isn't "sensitive information".

The point of the article is... that's exactly what happens, when you use Dropbox (and probably its clones). You're giving them access to your unencypted data, before sending it, and they hold the keys to the encrypted data, after you send it. Hello?!?!?

 

[rasczak]

Good thing everyone doesn't think that way or I'd be out of a job. The company I work for is strictly SaaS, with 250+ customers whose data sits in our data center.

 

[Nothinman]

The solution is to do client-side encryption, before sending your files off, across the web, to somebody else's servers. If you do this, you can keep possession of the keys (hopefully stored outside your web path, duh). That way, nobody can read your stored data, including the provider, but...

How many ppl are smart enough to do that?!?!?!?

I remember hearing an interview once, about intellectual property theft (pirated music, movies, proggies, et cetera).

One of the ways 'they' nab ppl is watching by sitting on busy routers, on the 'internet highway' and watching everything that goes through it. Supposedly, there's noting illegal about this snooping. If data goes across your router, it's yours. There are no user agreements in place.

Sending unencrypted anything across the web is just stupid, even if it isn't "sensitive information".

The point of the article is... that's exactly what happens, when you use Dropbox (and probably its clones). You're giving them access to your unencypted data, before sending it, and they hold the keys to the encrypted data, after you send it. Hello?!?!?

I'm not saying most people are, but one of the selling points of the alternatives that I mentioned are that they don't have the key to your data. Whether that is true or not is hard to say without having the authorities subpoena data from them and seeing if they get it.

 

[VinDSL]

[...] one of the selling points of the alternatives that I mentioned are that they don't have the key to your data. Whether that is true or not is hard to say without having the authorities subpoena data from them and seeing if they get it.

I don't trust anybody!

I don't even trust myself.

Everyone is a liar in this village...

 

[Nothinman]

I don't trust anybody!

I don't even trust myself.

Everyone is a liar in this village...

I'm not telling you to trust anyone, I'm just telling you what their FAQ says. Essentially, if you put your data on someone else's server you should assume they can read the contents regardless of what they say.

 

[wwswimming]

of course, that was how people started out, in the era of mainframes ... you trusted a computer "somewhere else" ... you didn't have your own box.

after the advent of the PC, they began talking about cloud-type computing again ... maybe 15 years ago.

Sun used to think they could have monitors attached to a network attached to a server ... i forget their term ... but it was a deal where people gave up their "boxes".

because of what providers charge for bandwidth - they give people the incentive to use bandwidth selectively, for important stuff (pron & funny cat videos). and so, to have their own PC's - which are WAAAY faster than early-era mainframes.


if Google or whoever gave us all free coax-speed Internet access - with a tolerable amount of ads - it might be more popular.

i'm surprised people pay as much as they do for data services - cell-phone, cable, etc.

a variation of Moore's law applies to phone & networking equipment. but i don't notice the phone company lowering prices for DSL, and i don't notice the cable company lowering the price for coax Internet access.

they are doing the same type of monopoly bullsh!t that AT&T did, that caused it to be broken up.

so the market is complex - phone companies re-built their monopolies & are not passing cost decreases on to customers. there may be another AT&T style monopoly lawsuit, for the same reasons as the first one.

meanwhile, Google wants to build their brand and offers free wireless in some areas. other companies want to sell cloud computing. Facebook possibly wants to get in on the act.

i wouldn't be surprised to see cloud computing catch on in some countries, in some regions ... but i don't think computer techs are going to stop being needed. people will always keep trying to do overly complex things on their computers, and will still call up the tech complaining, "my Dreamweaver version isn't getting along with the cloud, help !" or "why can't i have 100 tabs open in my browser ?"

 

[Reliant]

I'm a system admin for my company. We are in the middle of this debate internally with our CIO and the higher ups like VPs and budget. In our case, the "cloud" would be housed in our central data center. The people with the money see saving money on desktops on their 3 year refresh, and fall in love with VDI. They don't take in to account the costs it take on the back end.

We have 3 sites. One central with 2000 users, and then 2 remote with about 1000 users each. We have a Gig connection between us and them. While we rarely break 50 megs of use on either connection, the latency is what is killer for a desktop solution. Often the protocol can't handle latency that many of us deem ok. 15ms of latency is unacceptable for these protocols right now. PCOIP in particular is having issues. Citrix handles this better in my experience. But you know the common theme between users on remote sites during our proof on concept? Multimedia experience, they're never as happy as with a dedicated desktop.

Also, while this situation alone may not be what you are talking about, do reliaze that in order to provide an "acceptable" solution to 5000 users we will end up spending millions. Network, server horsepower, disk requirements, thin/zero clients, etc. Disk in particular is a big one. Terabytes are cheap, but the spindles required to get the I/O are not.

I am missing plenty and glossing over plenty, it is early. If people want to hear more I'll be back after coffee.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I'm a system admin for my company. We are in the middle of this debate internally with our CIO and the higher ups like VPs and budget. In our case, the "cloud" would be housed in our central data center. The people with the money see saving money on desktops on their 3 year refresh, and fall in love with VDI. They don't take in to account the costs it take on the back end.

We have 3 sites. One central with 2000 users, and then 2 remote with about 1000 users each. We have a Gig connection between us and them. While we rarely break 50 megs of use on either connection, the latency is what is killer for a desktop solution. Often the protocol can't handle latency that many of us deem ok. 15ms of latency is unacceptable for these protocols right now. PCOIP in particular is having issues. Citrix handles this better in my experience. But you know the common theme between users on remote sites during our proof on concept? Multimedia experience, they're never as happy as with a dedicated desktop.

Also, while this situation alone may not be what you are talking about, do reliaze that in order to provide an "acceptable" solution to 5000 users we will end up spending millions. Network, server horsepower, disk requirements, thin/zero clients, etc. Disk in particular is a big one. Terabytes are cheap, but the spindles required to get the I/O are not.

I am missing plenty and glossing over plenty, it is early. If people want to hear more I'll be back after coffee.

This thread is really more about desktop virtualization than "cloud computing". Cloud computing is a buzzword created by the larger companies to say, "outsource your crap to us". In disk methodologies, they are using the cloud concept to do data replication rather than traditional RAID. (in other words, stripe data in RAID0 arrays 3 or more times rather than mirroring or parity bits within the arrays)

For desktop virtualization, it's a rocky road right now. Citrix and VMware are competing for marketshare. Citrix has the smaller network footprint (ICA is about 28 kbit/connection where RDP streams from VMware are MUCH higher over 100 kbit), but is based on Xenserver and is lacking vital features as of XenDesktop 4...XenDesktop 5 is probably better, but I've not tested it yet. Check out Wyse for thin clients....the Windows Xen clients are hit or miss...Linux is much most stable than the Windows web clients unless you're going native with the Citrix Receiver. (I deployed it in a lab environment, so my experiences weren't favorable for the web client...which allowed the usernames to be disconnected from the workstations/local user session)

Ohh yeah...one more thing. XenDesktop requires that you have the amount of memory you allocate installed in the system. You spin up 30 systems on a server with 2GB provisioned, you'll need at least 60GB of RAM for those systems, not counting what your hypervisor uses. VMware allows you to overcommit.

 

[wantedSpidy]

Not only bandwidth, but network in general. It needs to get to the point where there's ALWAYS a network connection, and it works without input from the user. You need to be able and pull out your device knowing it's connected, no matter where you are. Until that happens, network applications are a niche product, and not ready for the general population.

If this happens, average life expectancy will drop to <50 for sure

 

[Barfo]

Quote: "Will cloud computing make desktop PCs obsolete"?

It will replace a the PCs in the same manner that the Pet Rock is currently the preferred pet.

For those who are too young to know what Pet Rock is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock

I'll convert when a cloud based log is available!

 

[anikhtos]

what a sily idea
if for any reason you do not have internet connection then you will be without a pc to use?!?!?! and if your work depend on using a pc what will you do sue the internet provider???
even now with data stored locally all that trojan and the policies of microsoft our files more or less are sent to 3rd parties. microsoft for sure. every win based computer connects to their server exhange what info?!?!
well ask microsoft.
i will take my chances with the pc than the cloud
the silly idea with the cloud is that to access cloud you will need a box or terminal as used to be called decates ago. so more or less the familiar picture of today. screen keyborad and a box. so why have a nothing box and not have a pc box?!?!?!? flash drives external drives are getting bigger and cheaper so it is easier than ever to moove files with you.
with 2 terabyte disk you can have 500 dvd on them. so who of us actually own 500dvd or more??? with a drive you have them with you.
one idea to scr*w us big time again forget privacy for good

 

[Nothinman]

if for any reason you do not have internet connection then you will be without a pc to use?!?!?!

You really think they didn't consider that? That's why HTML5 apps support being cached and run locally

and if your work depend on using a pc what will you do sue the internet provider???

If you have a business account and the outage is outside of the agreement or SLA and you can prove damages from the outage, yes. If you're using a personal account for business, that's all your fault.

even now with data stored locally all that trojan and the policies of microsoft our files more or less are sent to 3rd parties. microsoft for sure. every win based computer connects to their server exhange what info?!?!
well ask microsoft.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but if it's even close to what I think then you're extremely wrong. The only MS services that Windows connects to by default are time sync and Windows Update, neither of which send MS any of your documents.

the silly idea with the cloud is that to access cloud you will need a box or terminal as used to be called decates ago. so more or less the familiar picture of today. screen keyborad and a box. so why have a nothing box and not have a pc box?!?!?!? flash drives external drives are getting bigger and cheaper so it is easier than ever to moove files with you.
with 2 terabyte disk you can have 500 dvd on them. so who of us actually own 500dvd or more??? with a drive you have them with you.

Because I want a certain subset of my data available to all of my devices all the time. I don't want to lug around a 2TB drive when I can just sync some of that data to something like Dropbox and it's magically sync'd to all of my devices.

 

[anikhtos]

by the way over here internet providers really suck
so national average spead is the amazign 2mbs
get refund from provider lol and lol
not in this country

 

[Nothinman]

by the way over here internet providers really suck
so national average spead is the amazign 2mbs
get refund from provider lol and lol
not in this country

Well you can't completely shun the idea of "the cloud" just because you live in a shitty country.

 

[anikhtos]

Well you can't completely shun the idea of "the cloud" just because you live in a shitty country.

leaving in a shitty country still does not change the way i feel about cloud
it sucks and it sucks
as amd site when you try to download a drive

 

[GrumpyMan]

We like many other companies we use Intuit Quicken and Quickbase for payroll and also to bill and pay vendors, which is on the cloud. When their server farm crashed, which happened 3 times last year, none of the companies who use them were able to pay their employees or their vendors. Server farm was down for 3 days at a time and of course usually on a Wednesday. Can't believe they didn't have a back up plan for a company as big as Intuit. Google for email instead of Lotus Notes now. We also use Citrix for other apps, don't like the cloud very much anymore.

 

[Modelworks]

There is another angle I think people are missing. Laws and penalties against piracy are on the rise. The benefit of the cloud is piracy is very difficult. If someone like MS could host the OS entirely on their servers along with all the applications leaving users with just a thin client they effectively get 100&#37; of users paying for the product.

If laws were to increase to the point that piracy were along the lines of terrorism then cloud computing could fall under the 'do it to protect the country' lines. It may seem very 1984'ish but I could see a day where a law is passed forbidding running an OS that isn't part of the cloud, keeping data at home is private and the government needs your help to protect you .

Before you laugh consider that the government already pulled sites for copyright infringement and guess what reason they gave for doing it "economic terrorism" under the homeland security act, those sites hurt US manufacturer and thus were endangering the American way of life and classified as terrorist acts.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

if cloud computing technically worked it would be the way to go. how many times do you wish you could access a file on a different device when your out? but for now it is impractical because connections arent stable enough and wireless carriers want to much money

 

[corkyg]

I often do that with LOGMEIN. But, for that purpose, the cloud may be better. But, costs are going up there as well.

 

[yinan]

XenDesktop 4 and 5 both allow the VMware suite to be used as the backend. VMware View sucks right now for large environments, due to how you have to handle updates. With View you basically have to redeploy all of your desktops with an update. With XD and PVS you update the master VHD reboot all of the desktops and you are good to go. Easy as pie.

 

[rchiu]

All these cloud computing crap is for those people with no IT background. Anyone been in the business for a while should have heard of the term "ASP" or Application Service Provider. It was a big thing back in the early 2000s, now there are only handful of companies survived the hype from that time (Saleforce.com for example).

All these cloud computing crap is just ASP in another fancy lingo. It is doing better this time around because business are trying to outsource everything they can, and this cloud computing is just another avenue to outsource applications. So it becomes this must know lingo for all the business exec.

For personal usage, I would not rely on things like Google Doc, drop box as the main tool. They are just my backup solution at best. They definitely have some benefit, but nope they will not make desk top pc obsolete. I mean Steam is kinda cloud, but you still need to have a powerful pc to play the game even though the game is from steam. (actually the gb worth of file are still installed on your local drive, steam just make it easy for you to download again if you reinstall pc)