5 ms·

ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. There was an app exectly like this back in 2001 or so. Back then, it did not work because the connections were too sl

ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. There was an app exectly like this back in 2001 or so. Back then, it did not work because the connections were too slow and space was not cheap enough - at the moment, it will not work for those same reasons. There is no doubt that there are a lot of people who will use this - but it's not yet ready for mainstream. It's much easier to store you stuff on an external hard drive than on Zumo, and till it becomes easier, this will not really hit. The startup will be profitable very quickly, they will gain hundreds of thousands of users, but ZumoDrive does not represent any big change in computing... for now.

fauigerzigerk 18y ago
It seems to me the fundamental question is whether the amount of data or reliably available bandwidth grows faster.
- jerf 18y ago
  Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures, music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video, too, for her it could be even more. Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say. Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger, but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to predict. That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five nanometers has a huge performance impact. If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a fool of epic proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!) Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is hard, and easily consumed. (And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent (as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)
  - fauigerzigerk 18y ago
    I'm not so sure about the cloud. That huge amount of data comes with a lot of complexity as well and much of the data is only really valuable if you can share it (video) or combine it with data from others (data mining). If data needs to be close to the CPU, it could mean that both live locally or both live in the cloud. Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically sustainable in the long run. On the other hand you're always going to need idle resources to cope with peak demand. It's never going to balance out completely, even in the cloud. I don't think data growth is going to level off. There are so many untapped sources; sensor data, 3D models, biometric data, etc. But I'm not sure people will process all that data locally. I'm not even sure where locally is. People move around, so the latency issue does not just arise when they're at home, next to their game console super computer thingy. I worked on location based systems in the past. Latency was a big problem then (and probably still is), but having a PC at home with 16GB of RAM and a TB hard disk doesn't help. The scarcest resource in mobile devices is not memory or bandwidth or the CPU, it's the battery. So for the time being, serious number crunching is not going to happen locally on mobile devices. There are so many factors and I know so little of potential technological breakthroughs or even plain physics. Technology doesn't advance linearly. Batteries could suddenly sustain 24 hours of biometric number crunching. There could be Gigabit WiSuperMax in the air in 5 years time. I don't know. But I feel people don't want super computers at home. I even block flash simply because it keeps my laptop fan busy. I tried that world community grid software a while back, but I just couldn't stand all the noise and heat. I doubt that people will keep buying high powered general purpose computers. My guess is that we'll have our game consoles, and our mobiles and various sensors and the data is going to be streamed straight into to google's or Microsoft's data centers. It makes me feel a little uneasy though.
    - anamax 18y ago
      > Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically sustainable in the long run. Economic sustainability is a function of cost and benefits, not utilization.
      - 18y ago
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

fauigerzigerk 18y ago

It seems to me the fundamental question is whether the amount of data or reliably available bandwidth grows faster.

jerf 18y ago
Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures, music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video, too, for her it could be even more. Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say. Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger, but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to predict. That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five nanometers has a huge performance impact. If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a fool of epic proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!) Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is hard, and easily consumed. (And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent (as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)
- fauigerzigerk 18y ago
  I'm not so sure about the cloud. That huge amount of data comes with a lot of complexity as well and much of the data is only really valuable if you can share it (video) or combine it with data from others (data mining). If data needs to be close to the CPU, it could mean that both live locally or both live in the cloud. Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically sustainable in the long run. On the other hand you're always going to need idle resources to cope with peak demand. It's never going to balance out completely, even in the cloud. I don't think data growth is going to level off. There are so many untapped sources; sensor data, 3D models, biometric data, etc. But I'm not sure people will process all that data locally. I'm not even sure where locally is. People move around, so the latency issue does not just arise when they're at home, next to their game console super computer thingy. I worked on location based systems in the past. Latency was a big problem then (and probably still is), but having a PC at home with 16GB of RAM and a TB hard disk doesn't help. The scarcest resource in mobile devices is not memory or bandwidth or the CPU, it's the battery. So for the time being, serious number crunching is not going to happen locally on mobile devices. There are so many factors and I know so little of potential technological breakthroughs or even plain physics. Technology doesn't advance linearly. Batteries could suddenly sustain 24 hours of biometric number crunching. There could be Gigabit WiSuperMax in the air in 5 years time. I don't know. But I feel people don't want super computers at home. I even block flash simply because it keeps my laptop fan busy. I tried that world community grid software a while back, but I just couldn't stand all the noise and heat. I doubt that people will keep buying high powered general purpose computers. My guess is that we'll have our game consoles, and our mobiles and various sensors and the data is going to be streamed straight into to google's or Microsoft's data centers. It makes me feel a little uneasy though.
  - anamax 18y ago
    > Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically sustainable in the long run. Economic sustainability is a function of cost and benefits, not utilization.
    - 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

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