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That's basically what Chromebooks already are. I think it's the future too. The only problem is that it moves away from the "upgrade your device every X years"

That's basically what Chromebooks already are. I think it's the future too. The only problem is that it moves away from the "upgrade your device every X years" paradigm that makes consumer electronics manufacturers money. They'll have to switch to a subscription model and people may not like that (and personally I'm terrified of the alternative situation where a company would rather I give them my personal information than pay them $1000 every 4 years) One way to approach the latency problem is with more aggressive colocation. For example, an apartment complex could have its own AWS or Google servers for local computation or video streaming.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> One way to approach the latency problem is with more aggressive colocation. For example, an apartment complex could have its own AWS or Google servers for local computation or video streaming. That would be great, if only we could make it not belong to Amazon or Google. Consider the same idea phrased like this: apartment complex have servers in their basement offering compute, and services you use work on those servers. The model of today is that companies own services, control where the compute happens, and ship your data to them, taking ownership over it in the process. The alternative model I dream of is your data under your control, your choice where the compute happens, and third-party code being shipped to that place.
- alexchamberlain 9y ago
  Let's imagine we could solve the easy problem of writing the software that is fully distributed to each complex and interacts with the software in any other complex. How do we solve the operations problem of running the machines in the complex?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    VMs, containers, and whatever stuff Amazon is doing with that Lambda thing all sound like a good start.
  - justincormack 9y ago
    One model is to overprovision hardware a bit, and just not repair until it is significantly degraded (at which point you just swap it out and refurbish). Maintaining a software platform is getting easier.
discreditable 9y ago
> it moves away from the "upgrade your device every X years" paradigm Don't Chromebooks have ~4yr end-of-support lifecycles where they stop receiving upgrades?
- tskaiser 9y ago
  6.5 years for most devices, 5 years for some legacy cases, and it is a soft limit ie. they don't automatically enter EOL, they just stop guaranteeing the updates. Source: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366
  - discreditable 9y ago
    6.5 is pretty respectable. Not quite like Windows or general purpose Linux which can be upgraded almost indefinitely. I have Vista laptops released mid-2009 (>8yrs old) that run Windows 10 rather well considering their age. Of course, no one would have guaranteed 8yrs on those devices. I'd wonder what experiences people with EOL Chrome devices out there are having with upgrades.
    - tskaiser 9y ago
      I imagine you could still update with some wench-work. An EOL date of 6.5 sounds to me like a way to say that "beyond this point we will stop testing and ensuring compliance, and to avoid fucking over your relic (in PC terms), with an update that is untested on your specific hardware, we simply disable the automatic updates. Good luck."

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> One way to approach the latency problem is with more aggressive colocation. For example, an apartment complex could have its own AWS or Google servers for local computation or video streaming. That would be great, if only we could make it not belong to Amazon or Google. Consider the same idea phrased like this: apartment complex have servers in their basement offering compute, and services you use work on those servers. The model of today is that companies own services, control where the compute happens, and ship your data to them, taking ownership over it in the process. The alternative model I dream of is your data under your control, your choice where the compute happens, and third-party code being shipped to that place.

alexchamberlain 9y ago
Let's imagine we could solve the easy problem of writing the software that is fully distributed to each complex and interacts with the software in any other complex. How do we solve the operations problem of running the machines in the complex?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  VMs, containers, and whatever stuff Amazon is doing with that Lambda thing all sound like a good start.
- justincormack 9y ago
  One model is to overprovision hardware a bit, and just not repair until it is significantly degraded (at which point you just swap it out and refurbish). Maintaining a software platform is getting easier.

discreditable 9y ago

> it moves away from the "upgrade your device every X years" paradigm Don't Chromebooks have ~4yr end-of-support lifecycles where they stop receiving upgrades?

tskaiser 9y ago
6.5 years for most devices, 5 years for some legacy cases, and it is a soft limit ie. they don't automatically enter EOL, they just stop guaranteeing the updates. Source: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366
- discreditable 9y ago
  6.5 is pretty respectable. Not quite like Windows or general purpose Linux which can be upgraded almost indefinitely. I have Vista laptops released mid-2009 (>8yrs old) that run Windows 10 rather well considering their age. Of course, no one would have guaranteed 8yrs on those devices. I'd wonder what experiences people with EOL Chrome devices out there are having with upgrades.
  - tskaiser 9y ago
    I imagine you could still update with some wench-work. An EOL date of 6.5 sounds to me like a way to say that "beyond this point we will stop testing and ensuring compliance, and to avoid fucking over your relic (in PC terms), with an update that is untested on your specific hardware, we simply disable the automatic updates. Good luck."