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You work on it locally, with your Fat Cache copy and your offline app. You sync up when the 'net comes back online. Should I ask you how you get your coding don

by cryptoz 15y ago

You work on it locally, with your Fat Cache copy and your offline app. You sync up when the 'net comes back online. Should I ask you how you get your coding done when the power goes out? Either you don't get it done at all, or you write down ideas on paper. There's not much else you can do, and that's the way it is. Frankly, I've only had about 10 minutes of total, unexpected and unavoidable network downtime in the last few years of my life. With a home internet connection and a smartphone in my pocket, if my power goes out I can work away online for hours and hours. Power outages and network outages happen so infrequently that if we have reasonably good offline apps and Fat Caches, we're good to go. And not only that, but we're approaching a place where can continue working almost uninterrupted if both the main power and the network go down.

brudgers 15y ago
[From this post's great grandparent]"The apps should also live in the cloud and just appear on all the user's devices. In fact, the user's application "seesion" should be in the cloud too." If my session and my app are in the cloud and the cloud is unavailable, my session and app are not available. And what happens to my apps if I stop subscribing to the cloud for a few months? I still run Quickbooks 2004, ADT 2004, and VW 2008 for my business - will there be that kind of application persistence? [PS: I also use Sketchup 6 because of .dwg support and the ability to import into VW 2008] In other words, my business processes work, and moving crap to the cloud is an unnecessary expense. I don't need some jackass MBA deciding how I should work based on a survey of iPad users.
- joenathan 15y ago
  You are missing the whole part about the "Fat Cache" - "A Fat Cache would retain all of its functionality and the user's most used data"
  - untog 15y ago
    It's extremely difficult to make that transparent, though. At some point, old data is going to have to be pushed out of that cache, and if you don't make it clear to users they're never going to know what they can and can't run.
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      It's extremely difficult to make that transparent, though. Actually, that transparency is exactly what will make or break this scheme. If know you can't make it transparent, then you shouldn't try. But the companies that succeed (probably Apple and Google) would make billions. At some point, old data is going to have to be pushed out of that cache, and if you don't make it clear to users they're never going to know what they can and can't run. That's why it's a >fat< cache, as opposed to a thin client. If you have a big enough cache, then it won't happen too often. It doesn't work absolutely all the time, but if it works almost all of the time, customers will be happy. And if it doesn't work, and your company also makes the hardware, then when the customer comes to the store, you tell them they need to buy a machine with more memory. Cha-ching.
      - brudgers 15y ago
        >"It doesn't work absolutely all the time, but if it works almost all of the time, customers will be happy." Bullshit. When stuff doesn't work people are often unhappy as hell. And a computer that just deletes old stuff, it will really piss them off.
        stcredzero 15y ago
        And a computer that just deletes old stuff You've just demonstrated you don't understand what's being discusses here.
        brudgers 15y ago
        A link might enlighten me. Until then, my understanding of caches is that they get flushed and my understanding of the cloud will be that its storage services are often not very long lived and that the rates for storage are subject to change.
        stcredzero 15y ago
        A link might enlighten me. I don't think so. You seem pretty attached to the idea of the behavior of CPU caches, while steadfastly refusing to extend your own metaphor to persistent storage. Odd.
  - brudgers 15y ago
    So it would be kind of like my laptop, only subject to change without my knowing it whenever something was pushed out of the cloud.
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      whenever something was pushed out of the cloud Of course, if someone offered a service where the ultimate storage backup lost data, it would be idiotic. However, this as certainly not my suggestion. Rather, you selectively applied the functionality of hardware caches to the "Fat Cache" idea, while fabricating ridiculous semantics that go against your own hardware analogy. (Where the cloud would be the hard drive.)
      - brudgers 15y ago
        "Pushed out of the cloud" to my fat cache (and thus in many cases pushing something out of my fat cache). Furthermore, it was proposed that changes to the cache would be synced across devices. This, as the comment to which I responded proposes, creates an issue because the state of the device is unknown to the user and any particular piece of data or particular program may or may not be available at any time. Perhaps I am just dense, but I do not see how this is advantageous compared to local storage. In other words, just because you feed it a case of Krispy Creames, a thin client is still a thin client. For a given amount of storage, a Fat Cache may beat a thin client. But it's turtles all the way down, if the amount digital information people store keeps increasing, i.e. the first box of ten 720k floppies lasted me the better part of a year.
        stcredzero 15y ago
        This, as the comment to which I responded proposes, creates an issue because the state of the device is unknown to the user Reorient your thinking. The central thing is no longer the "device" it's the user's account and sessions in the cloud. The user's data never goes away, it's just that access to it is sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Mostly, it's good. Nowadays, if a user's mobile broadband is broken, they just think of going somewhere with better reception. In a few years, when a seldom used piece of data has fallen out of the cache, they'll just think, oh well, I'll get back to it in a bit. (Or, if it's really important, they can select "Keep Available" so it'll be there next time.) However, if you go back to a time before mobile broadband was commonplace, and you tried to introduce someone to it in a bad reception zone, they would've been very "meh." That seems to be where you are.
nakor 15y ago
How fat is "fat"? Are you assuming the cache will be able to fit whatever data you need to work with?
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Yes, I'm envisioning a "fat cache" for the current day would need about 240GB of flash. Basically a little below average sized hard drive's amount of storage would do.

by cryptoz 15y ago

brudgers 15y ago

[From this post's great grandparent]"The apps should also live in the cloud and just appear on all the user's devices. In fact, the user's application "seesion" should be in the cloud too." If my session and my app are in the cloud and the cloud is unavailable, my session and app are not available. And what happens to my apps if I stop subscribing to the cloud for a few months? I still run Quickbooks 2004, ADT 2004, and VW 2008 for my business - will there be that kind of application persistence? [PS: I also use Sketchup 6 because of .dwg support and the ability to import into VW 2008] In other words, my business processes work, and moving crap to the cloud is an unnecessary expense. I don't need some jackass MBA deciding how I should work based on a survey of iPad users.

joenathan 15y ago
You are missing the whole part about the "Fat Cache" - "A Fat Cache would retain all of its functionality and the user's most used data"
- untog 15y ago
  It's extremely difficult to make that transparent, though. At some point, old data is going to have to be pushed out of that cache, and if you don't make it clear to users they're never going to know what they can and can't run.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    It's extremely difficult to make that transparent, though. Actually, that transparency is exactly what will make or break this scheme. If know you can't make it transparent, then you shouldn't try. But the companies that succeed (probably Apple and Google) would make billions. At some point, old data is going to have to be pushed out of that cache, and if you don't make it clear to users they're never going to know what they can and can't run. That's why it's a >fat< cache, as opposed to a thin client. If you have a big enough cache, then it won't happen too often. It doesn't work absolutely all the time, but if it works almost all of the time, customers will be happy. And if it doesn't work, and your company also makes the hardware, then when the customer comes to the store, you tell them they need to buy a machine with more memory. Cha-ching.
    - brudgers 15y ago
      >"It doesn't work absolutely all the time, but if it works almost all of the time, customers will be happy." Bullshit. When stuff doesn't work people are often unhappy as hell. And a computer that just deletes old stuff, it will really piss them off.
      - stcredzero 15y ago
        And a computer that just deletes old stuff You've just demonstrated you don't understand what's being discusses here.
        brudgers 15y ago
        A link might enlighten me. Until then, my understanding of caches is that they get flushed and my understanding of the cloud will be that its storage services are often not very long lived and that the rates for storage are subject to change.
        stcredzero 15y ago
        A link might enlighten me. I don't think so. You seem pretty attached to the idea of the behavior of CPU caches, while steadfastly refusing to extend your own metaphor to persistent storage. Odd.
- brudgers 15y ago
  So it would be kind of like my laptop, only subject to change without my knowing it whenever something was pushed out of the cloud.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    whenever something was pushed out of the cloud Of course, if someone offered a service where the ultimate storage backup lost data, it would be idiotic. However, this as certainly not my suggestion. Rather, you selectively applied the functionality of hardware caches to the "Fat Cache" idea, while fabricating ridiculous semantics that go against your own hardware analogy. (Where the cloud would be the hard drive.)
    - brudgers 15y ago
      "Pushed out of the cloud" to my fat cache (and thus in many cases pushing something out of my fat cache). Furthermore, it was proposed that changes to the cache would be synced across devices. This, as the comment to which I responded proposes, creates an issue because the state of the device is unknown to the user and any particular piece of data or particular program may or may not be available at any time. Perhaps I am just dense, but I do not see how this is advantageous compared to local storage. In other words, just because you feed it a case of Krispy Creames, a thin client is still a thin client. For a given amount of storage, a Fat Cache may beat a thin client. But it's turtles all the way down, if the amount digital information people store keeps increasing, i.e. the first box of ten 720k floppies lasted me the better part of a year.
      - stcredzero 15y ago
        This, as the comment to which I responded proposes, creates an issue because the state of the device is unknown to the user Reorient your thinking. The central thing is no longer the "device" it's the user's account and sessions in the cloud. The user's data never goes away, it's just that access to it is sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Mostly, it's good. Nowadays, if a user's mobile broadband is broken, they just think of going somewhere with better reception. In a few years, when a seldom used piece of data has fallen out of the cache, they'll just think, oh well, I'll get back to it in a bit. (Or, if it's really important, they can select "Keep Available" so it'll be there next time.) However, if you go back to a time before mobile broadband was commonplace, and you tried to introduce someone to it in a bad reception zone, they would've been very "meh." That seems to be where you are.

nakor 15y ago

How fat is "fat"? Are you assuming the cache will be able to fit whatever data you need to work with?

stcredzero 15y ago
Yes, I'm envisioning a "fat cache" for the current day would need about 240GB of flash. Basically a little below average sized hard drive's amount of storage would do.