this feature matters for those that need to store data efficiently ( a good ratio between payload and overhead ).
columns (in cassandra specificly) are the most efficient form to store data, because a column has the lowest overhead.
the overhead for a row is much higher.

On terms of responsiveness i can only tell: it depends on your computer.
if your computer is well configured - yes it will beat the hell out of a cloud app with html.

But cloud computing enables you do a lot of shit behind the sense that improves responsiveness.
For example:
usually it is faster for me to start chrome type gmail and check my e-mail, than it is start thunderbird / apple mail and check my e-mail.
so for my crappy computer: cloud computing is faster !
e-mail search is also better. I actually disabled e-mail indexing for my e-mail desktop app, because it slows down my computer big time.
Gmail indexes don't eat any performance on my end. Cloud computing is again faster.
And if I switch my computer, it will take me at least an hour to setup all my e-mail accounts. With gmail i can just start.
And i can check my e-mail on my mom computer.
And that is just the e-mail use case for me as single e-mail user. And I'm actually not a computer noob .
Now, think about a systems administrator. With cloud computing he can safe himself a lot of headaches.
Of course, cloud computing will not come free of problems, but any problem you solve you solve for the entire user base of your business.

That's why cloud computing is so important for a lot of people. It is hardly new. For example, mainframes are similar to cloud computing.
So this general concept of moving stuff to the big fat ass server is not new. However, the implementation and several other details make it useful for this generation of computer users.

afterall it's mission is:
to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

So do you think this is actually effective ? Even with millions of users new companies don't take this approach. Look at Facebook, they got one of the biggest audiences ever. You know what Mark Zuckerberg says? "move fast and break things".

Ok, you are working at the wrong company. The whole point of workers is that they use their brains. Drones aren't good for anything. Learning, out-of-the-box-thinking are very very important. In my company drones get kicked out immediately.

Cheers!

Where is the problem?
Let's allocate 10.000 years of research to develop a faster than light engine -
then it takes you another 20 years to get there.
Time to travel = 10.020 years.
Not possible?
May be.
But i think in 10.000 years of research - you can "bent" a lot of laws of physics.

One major improvement of SC2 over SC1 is that Noobs (like 90% of the people playing SC2) will get a better introduction to MP. (Challenge Mode)
Furthermore, the game matching is way better than the one in War3.
The Win/Loss ratio that I saw on most players was usually between 40% and 60% which is pretty good.

that's why nobody wants to own porn.com...
it is so easy to filter.

1. The Win32 API ?
2. .NET Forms API ?
3. or actually the .NET WPF API ?
4. No, wait, the .NET Silverlight API !
5. Nobody has Silverlight yet, MFC is way better !
6. Desktop APIs suck, let's use Flash 9. It rocks every where... that's the way to go.
7. Flash 10 is newer . Let's use that.
8. Nah, Flash crashes too often on Mac. Let's use Carbon.
10. Oh wait Carbon is old school. Let's use Cocoa !
11. mmh iPhone version ? or the Mac OS X version.
12. Even better let's use java awt.
13. oh wait. that was the initial api. Swing ! Yeah , that's modern.
->
tightly controlled is still crap.
->
open is also crap. but at least it is open.

Did you see their talk a few weeks ago ? They will deploy datacenters in several locations in the US. Almost everyone (except a few place up in the north) will be able to play.

The article itself states that the writer got warnings that the latency is not good. The slashdot bottom line: " The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not." is therefore complete utter nonsense. Lots of Lag -> of course UT3 does not work. Duh ! It would have been another story if there weren't any warnings... It also would have been another story if this wasn't a beta and 50% of the users get this warning. ... but like this you can't conclude anything. Thinking before writing helps.