- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law - Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg
MIT, Quanta work on computer with no hardware
A REPORT claimed the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and giant notebook manufacturer Quanta are working on a "virtual computer " that doesn't need hardware.
Eh?
According to the Taiwan Economic News, Quanta chairman Benny Lam reckons a virtual computer only needs a keyboard and a TV.
The report has Lam saying that everyone will be wirelessly connected to servers somewhere else using their home system.
How this can possibly be good news for Quanta, which makes its money building notebooks for multinational companies which then stick their own brand name on them totally escapes us.
Oracle's Larry Ellison, at a press conference in Amsterdam 10 years ago, nearly bit the head off of a British hack when he suggested that the idea of keeping data on a remote server was dangerous.
Ellison said then, and we paraphrase, that data on his servers was going to be a whole lot more secure than on a dodgy PC maintained by an even dodgier hack.
The jury is still out on that one. In fact it's been out so long that all m'learned fiends, the judge and the clerk of the court are all six foot under. And the courthouse has been bulldozed and turned into a Tesco Express. ยต
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If the server goes down (like the Inq server does from time to time, apparently, for example) at least we will all be stuffed at the same time. That way you can be sure noone is taking advantage of personal hardware failure.

Is it just me or is there a sexual metaphor lurking in the bushes there somewhere.

But if backup is done professionally it shouldnt be any less secure than a RAID 1 PC.

Call me shallow but IMHO the question is, whether it will run (& present) Crysis better than a PC?
And reality has a tendency of intruding rudely, like when a backhoe cuts the line to the precious servers, or a storm blacks out the entire block and the backup generators fail to hold the load (or even start).
And even if the server room is redundantly furnished with everything, my line to my ISP is not. If my PC works, the server works, but my ISP is offline, how do I work ?
Given that the laptop is garnering an increasingly large share of the workplace market, storing data on remote servers looks even more ridiculous.
Ellison, drop it already. We have enough trouble with company servers on a local LAN. It is absolutely out of the question that every dimwit with an Internet connection goes and hosts his tax returns on your storage space.
Besides, why pay for storage online when we get 80GB discs standard in a PC today ?
If you don't do gaming, filesharing or video composition, it'll take a while before you fill that up.
And Windows will need reinstalling long before your disk is full anyway.
HAHA, invest now in webtv, it's going to be GREAT.
Now if you say online storage has a future - In another 100 years if someone can create some real competition amongst providers in the US to make the required bandwidth available - then ok, but a 'virtual' computer? forget it.

This idea dates back to the 1950's. The idea is that you have your computer in the air conditioned computer center and the users sit at their desks and use a terminal.

For those who are unfamilar with the old mainframe/mini-computer systems, a terminal is a keyboard+video display that is connected to a remote multi-user computer via data cable. This wonderful new idea is deja vu all over again :P