ergophobe - 8:35 pm on Nov 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

zett -

I basically agree with everything you say in both posts. I think we both agree that it is too soon for this sort of thing (last line of my post) but when I hear people say never I have to laugh.

>>%% [SYSOP] System will shut down in 5 minutes

My original post was much longer, but I didn't think anyone would read it. But yes, I remember waiting 2 seconds for a character to get echoed back to the terminal. It was terrible sitting in the "computer room" (really the terminal room) at midnight during the last week of the semester when everyone was bogging down the system recompiling our buggy programs.

When I got my own machine and could control loads myself (close an app) and know how long a recompile would take and work from my own home and eat out of the kitchen instead of the vending machine at the computer center, it was fantastic.

But I also remember that the first standalone micro PCs were essentially toys and we thought "that's fine for hobbyists, but you can't do serious work on a desktop computer" and I honestly thought a desktop computer of the power of the one I own now was a sci-fi thing that I wouldn't see until, I don't know, the 21st century, and that seemed impossibly far away!

Now it's sort of the reverse. Networked "smart terminals" (as IBM used to call them) are sort for those who don't plan to do serious work. I'm just saying I wouldn't bet my savings on that remaining so.

However, as I said before

with storage and processing prices continuing to fall, I see local storage and processing, with online data backup, as the dominant model for the foreseeable future.

But the foreseeable future is remarkably brief.

I completely agree with the Flight Simulator point and that's ultimately where I was headed (saying that we were a long ways from connections that could offload processing and expected data storage to come first).

Some want to use a Flight Simulator. Some want to write confidential letters.

One is a throughput problem, the other a security problem. Neither has been solved, but I could certainly see that in many households, a combo of internet enabled game consoles and cloud-based computers would become common. Most gamers I know have at least two game consoles and one computer already.

But in any case, that sort of speaks to my main point. I think data storage is the easier nut to crack. The network has to be 100% reliable, but not super fast. If you want to do both storage and processing, you need it to be both 100% reliable and super fast. We are quite far from that in the US. Maybe it would work in South Korea, but I don't see it happening most places for the foreseeable future.

-----------------------

J_RAD

Yes, the analogy isn't perfect. I'm only addressing the issue that the home is not the safest place to keep things of value. Most people would feel safer with not just money, but valuable documents (deeds, wills, and so on) in a safe deposit box and distributed in multiple copies (yours in the safe deposit box at the bank, one with your lawyer). I don't do that personally, but I would feel safer if I did.

Because the data problem is more complex than the money problem, we aren't there yet. Most people feel safer controlling their own data. But I'm guessing that in the long run people will want ways to store data other than a hard drive in their homes.

Before that changes will need a rock solid connection, reliable encryption and data redundancy and geographical distribution. We're not there yet, but I expect we will be before I die.

As I say, my original post was longer. I originally mentioned that modern banking was invented in late-medieval Italy in the thirteenth century. I would say that it was sometime in the mid-twentieth century, post-FDIC, that common people generally felt that it was safer to keep their money in the bank than somewhere else. I don't expect it will take seven centuries from the development of computer networks to the adoption of remote storage as a common model, but I don't expect it tomorrow either. I do, however, expect it be a common model in my lifetime.

It's a guess. I could be wrong. I didn't think digital cameras would become popular until they passed 10MP. Obviously, I was wrong about that.

Of course, a few paradigm-changing advances and there go all those theories.

And yeah, I remember all the hype about "internet appliances" which seemed absurd to me at the time and it's why I don't think remote processing is coming in the foreseeable future either. People don't want to buy six machines for six tasks (although they seem perfectly happy to by 28 machines for six tasks in the kitchen, so perhaps it's just cultural).

And since you've said that statment i suppose you think home servers and home NAS systems are a waste of time too?

Why would anything I've said make you think that? I think they are a total pain the butt, but I would never be able to keep my laptop and desktop in synch without a home network and I wouldn't have a decent backup plan.

I don't see what my guesses about the future of computing have to do with how I'm actually using the computer today.

But since you raised the point - where do you store your backup physically? Do you have an off-site storage location? One friend has a set of terabyte drives and every couple of weeks he trades out the one at his house with one of the backups at his mother's house. I don't know anyone else that systematic.

What good is a backup on your home network if the house burns down?

data on the other hand tells everything about you, good or bad.

My bank knows everything. Money is money, but where my checks went and what I bought with my credit card is probably the most valuable data one can get about me. If I trust that data to the bank, frankly, I would trust them with any other data about me that exists. Granted, if I were involved in something criminal, I would likely be paying cash. But I'm not and so if I'm doing it and it costs money, the bank knows.

And if I had a super secret diary with all my deepest thoughts, I would be more comfortable with it disappearing in the morass of some documents held by some company other than Google (i.e. an online apps company that doesn't already have the best search engine) than I would be secreting it away in a wall cavity in my home in hopes that nobody would find it.

But yes, you're right - I have a third choice: leaving it on my computer with strong encryption and for the time being, that would be the option that would likely make me feel safest about avoiding discovery. Though I would be nervous about my off-site backup scheme.