4 ms·

"Very, very small PCs – the kind you could fit in your pocket – are starting to have the same amount of computing grunt as a high end desktop PC of, say, 5 year

"Very, very small PCs – the kind you could fit in your pocket – are starting to have the same amount of computing grunt as a high end desktop PC of, say, 5 years ago. And that was plenty, even back then, for a relatively inefficient general purpose operating system." I would argue that it's more than they need, that a service like OnLive is before its time but not more than a few years from hitting prime. I would say get ready for the Post Hardware Era.

jiggy2011 15y ago
That's going to need some serious network infrastructure to back it up. You will essentially have every computer user in the world constantly streaming very high resolution video for 8 hours+ a day. The 1GB/month limit most carriers provide is going to be nowhere near enough, you will need more like 1/2 TB per month and it needs to be provided reliably.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I think that's completely possible if we change the model of our current infrastructure. Here in Portugal, our main (wired) ISP has been putting Foneras[1] in every subscribers' home for a couple of years or so, which means that every subscriber they have can connect for free anywhere there's a home with their service. A couple of months ago they launched an iPhone app which can use their network of Wifi routers to make calls through them - they essentially became a mobile provider using Wifi. I can see this approach taking place on a larger scale; not only related to connectivity, but to actual computing: imagine that each router was also a beefy server, particularly in terms of CPU and GPU capabilities; these would provide the computing needs for wireless devices connected to them. Using existing ways of moving the "state" of an application between machines, you could have your wireless devices hopping from server to server as you moved around, without having a great impact on the rest of the network. This would still mean hardware in each home, of course, but it'd be a black box hidden from sight and chosen, bought and managed by some company. [1]: http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsfon http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsfon
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    The crux of the problem is that bandwidth is currently oversold since it is largely unused most of the time. Let's compare my session here on HN with how it would be if I was streaming my web browser from somewhere else. Currently I pull down a few KB of ascii every i load up a comment thread and then spend maybe 20-30 minutes reading it during which time no bandwidth is used. If I was streaming this from a browser in the cloud, I would be pulling down an order of magnitude more data since scrolling down the page could easily be a few MB vs no data at all. You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand. You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?
    - icebraining 15y ago
      You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand. Rural would probably fallback to mobile networks and real datacenters, possibly with degraded service. Urban would just be adjusted based on trends - places with higher demand would get more powerful boxes; the same as scaling any other servers, really. You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+? Assuming a decent infrastructure, you'd only need to have enough wireless bandwidth; computing resources wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to local devices. So a party would just mean that more machines from the neighborhood would help via wired connections (I'm assuming basestations in the same neighborhood could speak to each other using local routers, without having to do a round trip to the ISP datacenter). Of course, this still means that machines shouldn't be running at 100% capacity, but that's just common sense.
tesseractive 15y ago
> I would say get ready for the Post Hardware Era. That's what they said in the mid-90s as the web was catching on (remember the "network computer"?). And then came Flash and Java applets and Javascript and various other things and it turned out that a dumb web client had to be pretty smart to keep up with the web. I try never to say that something is impossible, because I don't really know what the future will bring, and convincing myself that I do would be foolish. But I will have to be shown a lot more than what we've seen so far with OnLive before I'm convinced that the future of mobile devices is as dumb terminals.
- bicknergseng 15y ago
  In the mid 90s this also happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI. We've come a long way since then and still have a ways to go before the dumb terminal model comes back... but I think it will happen. I think the problem for that model has been that the only people who have found a use for the power of a full size computer on a mobile device have been gamers, but I think this is probably because developers have never had the ability to build applications that use more than the mobile device's native hardware. OnLive needs to make a development platform on their service.

jiggy2011 15y ago

That's going to need some serious network infrastructure to back it up. You will essentially have every computer user in the world constantly streaming very high resolution video for 8 hours+ a day. The 1GB/month limit most carriers provide is going to be nowhere near enough, you will need more like 1/2 TB per month and it needs to be provided reliably.

icebraining 15y ago
I think that's completely possible if we change the model of our current infrastructure. Here in Portugal, our main (wired) ISP has been putting Foneras[1] in every subscribers' home for a couple of years or so, which means that every subscriber they have can connect for free anywhere there's a home with their service. A couple of months ago they launched an iPhone app which can use their network of Wifi routers to make calls through them - they essentially became a mobile provider using Wifi. I can see this approach taking place on a larger scale; not only related to connectivity, but to actual computing: imagine that each router was also a beefy server, particularly in terms of CPU and GPU capabilities; these would provide the computing needs for wireless devices connected to them. Using existing ways of moving the "state" of an application between machines, you could have your wireless devices hopping from server to server as you moved around, without having a great impact on the rest of the network. This would still mean hardware in each home, of course, but it'd be a black box hidden from sight and chosen, bought and managed by some company. [1]: http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsfon http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsfon
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  The crux of the problem is that bandwidth is currently oversold since it is largely unused most of the time. Let's compare my session here on HN with how it would be if I was streaming my web browser from somewhere else. Currently I pull down a few KB of ascii every i load up a comment thread and then spend maybe 20-30 minutes reading it during which time no bandwidth is used. If I was streaming this from a browser in the cloud, I would be pulling down an order of magnitude more data since scrolling down the page could easily be a few MB vs no data at all. You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand. You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?
  - icebraining 15y ago
    You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand. Rural would probably fallback to mobile networks and real datacenters, possibly with degraded service. Urban would just be adjusted based on trends - places with higher demand would get more powerful boxes; the same as scaling any other servers, really. You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+? Assuming a decent infrastructure, you'd only need to have enough wireless bandwidth; computing resources wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to local devices. So a party would just mean that more machines from the neighborhood would help via wired connections (I'm assuming basestations in the same neighborhood could speak to each other using local routers, without having to do a round trip to the ISP datacenter). Of course, this still means that machines shouldn't be running at 100% capacity, but that's just common sense.

tesseractive 15y ago

> I would say get ready for the Post Hardware Era. That's what they said in the mid-90s as the web was catching on (remember the "network computer"?). And then came Flash and Java applets and Javascript and various other things and it turned out that a dumb web client had to be pretty smart to keep up with the web. I try never to say that something is impossible, because I don't really know what the future will bring, and convincing myself that I do would be foolish. But I will have to be shown a lot more than what we've seen so far with OnLive before I'm convinced that the future of mobile devices is as dumb terminals.

bicknergseng 15y ago
In the mid 90s this also happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI. We've come a long way since then and still have a ways to go before the dumb terminal model comes back... but I think it will happen. I think the problem for that model has been that the only people who have found a use for the power of a full size computer on a mobile device have been gamers, but I think this is probably because developers have never had the ability to build applications that use more than the mobile device's native hardware. OnLive needs to make a development platform on their service.