However, most businesses have larger applications like payroll and benefits, financials, marketing, and others that they definitely want control over. Try convincing the average business owner to put customer data and marketing plans or product designs "out there" in the cloud and see how far you get.

It's easy to imagine ordinary work being done in a browser based application format, but instead of spreadsheets think automated check handling, and instead of a word processor imagine a writing marketing copy with images suitable for transmission to a print house.

I think most of the people saying "everything can run in the cloud" or similar don't have much experience doing anything but the basics on a computer, like filing taxes, playing games, or writing e-mails.

Erik

You missed one major point, specifically why the browser as a universal replacement for local apps will fail, and why more generally the idea of "everything in the cloud" will fail, despite it being quite a major fad among the management types currently.

Interactivity and control.

Until technology takes a giant leap and remote or network data access becomes exactly as fast as local bus data access, locally stored data will always be faster to access than remote data, so any program that requires access to more data than can be locally cached will run better on a local PC. Sure, all processing and the actual program can be located on a remote server and a window presented remotely, but in the case of some programs such as non linear video editors, this isn't a significant bandwidth savings.

Control is the big issue. With governments and other authorities becoming more and more intrusive on the net, and with no solid laws governing privacy of data held by a third party, right to privacy on the network itself, the relative reliability and security of network held data compared to local data, and simple paranoia, maintaining control of your computing resources will always be a must for a large portion of the computing population. So no cloud storage for some things, keep it on your local PC.

Computing resources have always followed a cycle of centralization and de-centralization. Corporations have always capitalized on this as the "coming thing". Managers have always believed them. Cloud computing and the apparent "trend" toward a generalized markup language that can empower every type of application in the world is just another tech trend that will eventually find a niche, but not completely replace other types of computing.

For an interesting comparison, look up and check out industry articles on Java when it was first gaining momentum... at one time we were all going to have local Java machines and all data and programs would be universal and stored online. That idea was actually closer than HTML5 to a generalized non local computing environment.

When I hear someone today say something like "We don't need to build out our data center, the cloud is coming" I have to avoid laughing.

HTML 5 is an improved markup language, but it's still just a markup language. The underlying concept of GET/PUT across the network limits its utility.

Erik

A central fixture of his sci-fi books was a race of aliens which had existed for millions of years and had gotten to the point of drowning in their own waste heat. The problem existed because cooling technologies all move heat around to cool a volume rather than actually absorb heat and transition it to another energy form. As their population grew and energy use with it, all the extra heat built up.

The aliens solved the problem by moving their planet away from their sun, and eventually out into space on its own, balancing the generated heat with radiative cooling, or transferring the heat to the universe at large.

This article is an interesting mental exercise, but as noted it projects the technology of today into a future world with greater needs, which is about as valid as a renaissance thinker from the 1500s deciding the world would end when today's population existed, because there would be not enough food for us all, and wars over food would extinct the human race.

Niven knew he was assuming that no technology would be developed that would actually absorb heat, and he wrote around that.

If we happen to discover a way that a device can produce negative heat numbers (assuming power generation, transmission, manufacturing heat, etc are accounted for) the heat death of the earth will never happen. The devil is in the details...

Erik

From my original post: "B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other"

That's all those are. All you can do is configure them statically, using tables. So as I said, you won't automatically get the best path to any given site, which is what you would have with BGP or a similar routing protocol that would work on home sized connections.

Don't get me wrong, mapping traffic to interfaces statically is handy, but it's a hack compared to a real multi-homing system.

Erik

PS: Slashdot, for the love of God step into the last decade and install a post editor with formatting. Manual HTML sucks.

If what you're looking for is A) Fail-over, so if one ISP or line is down you use the other or B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other, a dual WAN setup will work for you using one of the dual WAN setups people have mentioned. They're basically hacks that masquerade your desktop behind a public IP address from whichever provider you happen to be using at any moment. They don't allow asymmetric traffic (can't send packets out one ISP and receive via the other ISP) and they'll possibly screw up any security protocol or site that expects to see packets coming from a single IP and port address. This is handy, but only slightly more convenient than moving the cable yourself and re-issuing a DHCP request. Forget about aggregating bandwidth, you won't get that.

If you're thinking that hooking up both ISPs to a router will let you use whichever one is faster for any site when you click on it, you can't do that without a ton of work (and for the most part without being an ISP). The problem is that although a routing protocol exists on the global internet that would let your router figure out which path is best to each network prefix, to use it you have to have your own routing block (an aggregate of multiple network addresses) to announce to the world (which you can't get) and you have to have a router capable of holding and processing the global BGP table in real time... you don't have this.

If only all our home routers could speak a multi path routing protocol with low overhead, every single packet we sent would take the best path to its destination, all our computers would automatically fail over to other connections, we could add bandwidth by plugging in another wire, we could add and remove bandwidth in real time as needed, and we could migrate between internet providers without re-numbering our IP addresses. Things like mobile apps would be much easier to write.. no need to use a central server to pass data to a mobile, just send the packets to its IP and the routing protocol would send them on to wherever it's connected in the net.

I look forward to the day when the Internets evolve to permit multiple pathing for data in real time. Too bad technological development of Internet protocols seems to have slowed and become heavily political.

Erik

How do you know the SIZEOF() my float?

Are you saying *your* computer doesn't have arbitrary precision floats? Step into the 25th century!

That entirely depends on the precision of the IQ number, doesn't it?

What if your IQ number is a float number with a non terminating non repeating decimal component? I suppose then people would have an infinite number of digits in their IQ. Maybe we could draw a correlation between the number of digits people mention when reporting their IQ and how anal they are?