A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
What a fucking joke that would be on US American networks.
We are ranked like 30th in the world for bandwidth. No fiber dropped to the curb but the billionaires. And shit slow 20th century wireless speeds with technical acumen that we see today in Verizon’s ongoing 8 hour outage.
Bezos is so out of touch it is clown-like and stupid.
They want a data center heavy world but have no fucking pipeline to get data in and out for the rest of us.
What a human dildo.
Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.
Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.
The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.
As someone who remotes home frequently, no, the experience is not quite right. Packet drop and latency cause lots of input errors and misclicks. Sometimes the local internet decides not to carry your packets, and sometimes even connecting over vpn doesn’t.
You do not want a cloud desktop. You want a physical desktop and supplement with cloud services you can’t run locally.
Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.
Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft
People will surrender all ownership if you can provide more content more cheaper and conveniently, ownership is much lower on most people’s priority than convenience
And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.
Then people still flock up on centralised systems.
Don’t even dare to do P2P 😅!
Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.
Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.
The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.
And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.
I had to sign up for DSL this week in Frankfurt, DE as my neighborhood didn’t have cable or fiber internet. Don’t think that we’re gonna be cloud-ready any time in the next 50 years. DSL. Frankfurt. Major city.
Satellite TV was much more popular compared to cable generally in European countries, so phone lines make up the bulk of wired networking in a lot of places, making DSL a pretty practical option without having to lay a whole network. I get the feeling in countries where cable is much more common, DSL is reserved for the last resort level of service, whereas in Europe many of the telecoms make sure to deploy the latest standards.
I finally swapped to 1gbps fibre a year or two ago, but before that I was on about 250mbps with G.Fast DSL that honestly wasn’t bad at all. I believe the theoretical limits go much higher than that too
I got the first DSL in france, a fucking VCR sized box that fried after a couple of months too… The deal wasn’t the incredible 128Kb/s but that it was online all the time…
It quickly doubled up to .5Mb and then slowly up to 20Mb before I went with fiber some maybe 8-9 years ago. But I rarely felt hampered.
Yeah but Germany is well known in Europe for being technologically in the stone age.
I remember a time when Skype already existed and we would still pay for long distance phone minutes to call our German relatives because they hadn’t updated their internet since the Kaiser was in charge. :-P In the last few years, their speeds are much more comparable to ours.
Frankfurt Oder or Frankfurt Main?
Frankfurt am Main, Nied
I feel like desktop as a service might work pretty well in a world where municipal fiber was commonplace but it’s the damnedest thing, the billionaire aligned politicians banned it in a bunch of places
Like with all tech, we will build the infrastructure with our tax’s, and Jeff will sell it back to us.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!!!
…being a human dildo sounds quite fun!
They build the pipeline for themselves, we won’t know about it or have access
Add to it that we all carry pocket computers nowadays with more than enough processing power to do basically any sane thing.
What a completely 1980 idea.
To be clear, fiber is missing in many places, but it’s not just for billionaires. I have it and I live in a very small, very insignificant town.
I used to live in San Diego, in the middle of a very dense section of the city, though… And zero fiber options were there. I was paying $80 a month for 400 down and 15 up. So embarrassing…
I get 1gbit up and down now for $40 a month.
So, it’s bullshit, and I agree with you. But fiber does exist. I don’t have any idea why some areas get it, and others don’t, but in San Diego the issue was non-compete agreements between ISP’s.