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by boomlinde 2592 days ago
> For other types of problems you need to look at data wholistically at a large scale in order to see patterns and you need a cloud service.

What types of problems do you have in mind?

> But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while. If such services run on entirely on your personal device then the complexity of your device goes up exponentially.

The idea is that a lot of problems aren't so complex once delegated to participants of the network.

> We learned in the 90’s that a better model is to centralize complexity, and make end devices as simple as possible. (Look up Larry Ellison’s 90’s speeches about Network Computing.) So, no, moving the center of computing to personal devices is not a good idea!

By "we learned in the 90s" you mean that a company with an obvious commercial interest in the idea tried to push it and largely failed because it was based on assumptions that were practically Jurassic within a few years ("you don't need a powerful machine to support the use of common network services" and "thin clients can be much cheaper than general purpose computers"). We have our multi-core gigs-of-RAM phones and multi-core gigs-of-RAM Chromebooks now that may superficially qualify for implementing the idea of a "network computer" or even "thin clients" by dubious standards, but are actually just powerful devices that are locked down to proprietary third party services for reasons that have no real advantage to the consumer; "fat" clients.

Other things we learned in the 90s: JNCO jeans are cool.

1 comments

>What types of problems do you have in mind?

Search comes to mind. Traffic information systems are going to become more important. Also, everything related to fighting fraud, spam, etc.