Now, coupled with the rise of Google-style Web-based computing and the near-ubiquity of wireless broadband the time seems ripe for a new kind of computing.
Dozens of start-ups are creating an increasingly rich set of Web-based applications and more than a dozen efforts are under way to move the computer “operating system” itself onto the Web and away from the desktop.
For all the activity, however, one thing seems to be inexplicably missing.

There have been almost no credible efforts to design stripped down mobile computer hardware to match the wealth of Web software.
That said, nobody seems to be ready to really gamble on computing on the Web.
There is no privacy. Period.
I, for one, like the idea that my most important applications reside at a distance from the communal well…
I think there is a greater transition occurring to online computing than you’ve recognized. On-line computing for everything from basic word processing to file downloading and web publishing has been quietly taking off for years. Google’s free services alone let users save and edit text and spreadsheet documents, design and publish websites, maintain online photo albums, maintain calendars–all of which were, until somewhat recently, done offline. There are even utilities that turn GMail into a virtual hard drive. Instant messaging no longer requires the downloading and installation of software thanks to AIM Express and Google Talk. Securities trading can be done entirely without locally installed software through all major online brokers (this has been the case for some time). The only things the internet lacks which come to mind are the more computation intensive applications like media editing.
If there is a third-party intermediary, how can one be certain that the user’s information stays not only confidential and protected from prying eyes, but also that it remains privileged?
Additionally, when software gets centralized, it gets dumbed-down.
PS - I’m against this paradigm - if you depend on a central site then you have a single point of failure. If you have stuff distributed, you are safer.

— Posted by Ted KOppel
A central computing station can be located very near the source of power allowing greatly reduced electical transmission losses and/or free power for operation, as well as greatly extending the effective lifespan of equipment due to the reduced power costs.
Computing in the cloud means a TOTAL lack of privacy and a major blow to security. Not only will your data be stored in the cloud but even the process of synthesis of your raw data will be done elsewhere.
I think cloud computing advocates routine forget about the limitations imposed by the network - specifically with regard to latency. Applications that work very well in low latency environments will crash and burn in mid to high latency networks. This limits the appropiate applications to ones where the majority of the interactivity happens locally (like a webmail program) or where there is limited interactivity in the first place (streaming video). It doesn’t work for things where response times matter - games, command shells, and other interactive applications. The necessary delay imposed by the speed of light might seem small - whats a tenth of second between friends after all - but they can add up in ways that might not be obvious until the application is almost useless.
You can overcome these problems by pushing more and more of the program down onto the client *but* the more you have the client perform the further you move away from the thin client ideal. Eventually you end up with a situation where a ‘cloud computing’ device has as much processing power as a traditional system in order to handle all of the demands placed on it by the users.
When you couple this with increased network demands, the introduction of more failure points (the network goes down and your computer is now useless), the need to trust corporations with your private and confidential data (what happens when the next dot bomb hits and all of your data is on a server that gets reposessed?), and the lack of choice it entails I believe cloud computing will never replace tradtional computing. It may end up working within existing paradigms and compute infrastructure but it will never replace it.
all technical reasons aside they simply want the ownership.
Putting all data and increased functionality on the web is limited by: (1) the desire and need to work when the network is either unavailable or is functioning poorly; (2) the desire and need to maintain possession and control of one’s data and applications; (3) the loss of power and bargaining leverage to a third party that controls your data and your applications; (4) concerns about the security of your information on someone else’s servers; (5) the costs of renting or subscribing to services, which in many case will greatly exceed the costs of shrink wrapped software and the costs of owning and operating a computer; (6) Scaling servers and networks to run applications in addition to the current tasks of sharing files is going to be expensive, and that costs will be reflected in subscriptions for web services; and (7) for the foreseeable future, local applications on a PC are and will be much more capable and flexible than cloud computing for many applications
Cloud Computing shall compliment, not replace, local computing on the PC. The winner, whether Apple or Microsoft or someone else, will be he who best understands the constantly evolving principles of the relationship among cloud computing and local computing
Nothing discussed here is the real “cloud” - this just centralized computing circa 1970. The real cloud will occur when each of our personal computers is a low power networked machine/data storage, and the processing happens across massively multiple clouds of these low powered machines … the SETI distributed processing model as basic computing paradigm.

— Posted by Robert
For the discussion about thin client computing I strongly believe that centralized services and the personal computer will merge together in the future. That means that you can use centralized applications with local data and vice versa, and you do not need to know where the Application or data resides, you can simply use it from different systems and places.

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Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft - New York Times

Tags: cloud-computing, corporations, eric-schmidt, google, microsoft, nyt, tech-industry on 2007-12-21 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Where's my CloudBook?

Tags: cloud-book, cloud-computing, nicholas-carr on 2007-12-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Wired 14.10: The Information Factories

Tags: cloud-computing, george-gilder, google, petabyte-age, technology on 2007-12-10 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.
For it's here that Google has chosen to build its new 30‑acre campus, the base for a server farm of unprecedented proportion.
One is a fiber-optic hub linked to Harbour Pointe, Washington, the coastal landing base of PC-1, a fiber-optic artery built to handle 640 Gbps that connects Asia to the US.
Indeed, Google and other Silicon Valley titans are looking to the Columbia River to supply ceaseless cycles of electricity at about a fifth of what they would cost in the San Francisco Bay Area. Why? To feed the ravenous appetite of a new breed of computer.
According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?
One characteristic of this new machine is clear. It arises from a world measured in the prefix giga, but its operating environment is the petascale. We're all petaphiles now, plugged into a world of petabytes, petaops, petaflops. Mouthing the prefix peta (signifying numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion) and the Latin verb petere (to search)
Yawn. Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes of Gmails, MySpace pages, and dancing-doggy videos – a relentless march of daily deltas, each larger than the whole Web of a decade ago. To make sense of it all, Page and Brin – with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Barry "QVC" Diller's Ask.com hot on their heels – are frantically taking the computer-on-a-chip and multiplying it, in massively parallel arrays, into a computer-on-a-planet.
Eric Schmidt envisioned the future: "When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network." His then-employer publicized this notion in a compact phrase: The network is the computer.
In a 2005 technical article, operations chief Urs Hölzle explained why. The price of high-end processors "goes up nonlinearly with performance," he observed. Connecting innumerable cheap processors in parallel offered at least a theoretical chance for a scalable system, in which bang for the buck didn't erode as the system grew.
The extended Googleplex comprises an estimated 200 petabytes of hard disk storage – enough to copy the Net's entire sprawling cornucopia dozens of times – and four petabytes of RAM. To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.
Cloud computing, he confirmed, has indeed succeeded the old high-performance staples: mainframes and client-server, both of which require local-area networks. This is very much last year's news. "In this architecture, the data is mostly resident on servers 'somewhere on the Internet' and the application runs on both the 'cloud servers' and the user's browser. When you use Google Gmail, Maps, Yahoo's services, many of eBay's services, you are using this architecture." He added: "The consequence of this 'architectural shift' is the return of massive data centers."
Google appears to have attained one of the holy grails of computer science: a
scalable massively parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software.
In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant – as signalled by precipitously declining prices – in order to save what is scarce. Google has been profligate with the surfeits of data storage and backbone bandwidth. Conversely, it has been parsimonious with that most precious of resources, users' patience.
The recent explosion of hard disk storage capacity makes Moore's law look like a cockroach race. In 1991, a 100-megabyte drive cost $500, and a 50-megahertz Intel 486 processor cost about the same. In 2006, $500 buys a 750-gigabyte drive or a 3-gigahertz processor. Over 15 years, that's an advance of 7,500 times for the hard drive and 60 times for the processor. By this crude metric, the cost-effectiveness of hard drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors.
But the miraculous advance of disk storage concealed a problem: The larger and denser the individual disks, the longer it takes to scan them for information.
The solution is to deploy huge amounts of random access memory. By the byte, RAM is some 100 times more costly than disk storage. Engineers normally conserve it obsessively, using all kinds of tricks to fool processors into treating disk drives as though they were RAM. But Google understands that the most precious resource is not money but time.
THE FASTEST-GROWING search engine – besides Google – isn't Microsoft or Yahoo or AOL. It's Ask.com, which has seen its total searches grow 20 percent this year.
If it's necessary to waste memory and bandwidth to dominate the petascale era, gorging on energy is an inescapable cost of doing business. Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson estimates that the five leading search companies together have some 2 million servers, each shedding 300 watts of heat annually, a total of 600 megawatts. These are linked to hard drives that dissipate perhaps another gigawatt. Fifty percent again as much power is required to cool this searing heat, for a total of 2.4 gigawatts. With a third of the incoming power already lost to the grid's inefficiencies, and half of what's left lost to power supplies, transformers, and converters, the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.
As energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills projected in 1999, the planetary machine is on track to be consuming half of all the world's output of electricity by the end of this decade.
The struggle to find an adequate supply of electricity explains the curious emptiness that afflicts some 30 percent of Ask.com's square footage. Why is the second-fastest-growing search engine one-third empty? "We ran out of power before we ran out of space," says search operations manager James Snow,
As Microsoft Live operations chief Debra Chrapaty tells me, her company "added a Google" last year in search capability.
China is moving forward with plans to build as many as 30 new nuclear plants; perhaps the next wave of data centers will be sited in Shenzhen.
FOR THE MOMENT, at least, the power of massive parallelism has far outstripped the promise of alternative computing architectures. But reliance on massively parallel computing may come to define the limits of what can be accomplished by a computer-on-a-planet. Two decades ago, Carver Mead, the former head of computer science at Caltech and key contributor to several generations of chip technology, pointed out that a collection of chips arrayed in parallel can't do everything a computer might be called upon to do. "Parallel architectures," he noted, "are inherently special-purpose."
The problem has an acronym – NUMA, for nonuniform memory access – and it has never been solved.
Google's magical ability to distribute a search query among untold numbers of processors and integrate the results for delivery to a specific user demands the utmost central control. This triumph of centralization is a strange, belated vindication of Grosch's law, the claim by IBM's Herbert Grosch in 1953 that computer power rises by the square of the price. That is, the more costly the computer, the better its price-performance ratio. Low-cost computers could not compete. In the end, a few huge machines would serve all the world's computing needs. Such thinking supposedly prompted Grosch's colleague Thomas Watson to predict a total global computing market of five mainframes.

The advent of personal computers dealt Grosch's law a decisive defeat. Suddenly, inexpensive commodity desktop PCs were thousands of times more cost-effective than mainframes.
The next wave of innovation will compress today's parallel solutions in an evolutionary convergence of electronics and optics: 3-D and even holographic memory cells; lasers inscribed on the tops of chips, replacing copper pins with streams of photons; and all-optical networks in which thousands of colors of light travel along a single fiber. As these advances find their way into an increasing variety of devices, the petascale computer will shrink from a dinosaur to a teleputer – the successor to today's handhelds – in your ear or in your signal path. It will access a variety of searchers and servers, enabling participation in metaverses beyond the ken of even Ray Kurzweil's prophetic imagination. Moreover, it will link to trillions of sensors around the globe, giving it a constant knowledge of the physical state of the world, from traffic conditions to the workings of your own biomachine.
Andy Kessler tells me, "It's sure to happen. It always has. Because all the creativity, customer whims, long tails, and money are at the network's edge.
The test of the new global ganglia of computers and cables, worldwide webs of glass and light and air, is how readily they take advantage of unexpected contributions from free human minds, in all their creativity and diversity. Search and you shall find.

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Text of Wired's Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Tags: advertising, apple, cloud-computing, eric-schmidt, google, industry-news, interview, privacy, web-os on 2007-12-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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All these features don't exist yet, though.

True. Google docs and spreadsheets don't work if you're on an airplane. But it's a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.
And if you think about it as an Internet operating system, the Internet operating system will have to have all of the normal features of the older versions of operating systems. It will have to have security, it will have to have caching, it will have to have replication, and it will have to have performance.
When you joined Google it was just a search engine. It has grown into much more. How should we think about Google today?

One is as an advertising system. Another one is as this end-user system (the search, email, and other applications Google delivers to users through an Internet browser). A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And then a fourth way is to think of Google as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values - all that kind of stuff.
You just recently joined the board of Apple and have talked about potential partnerships between Google and Apple. Explain.

Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don't have this supercomputer I'm talking about, which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that's doing quite well. And the obvious example is the iPhone, which they announced has in it Google Maps.
But YouTube itself can pay back - and this is where the critics get it wrong - YouTube itself can pay back in simple searches. Because, remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we're working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google...
Which generates more pageviews, which generates more advertising revenue.

You got it.

The other interesting thing about pageviews is that we make our money by improving the quality, not the quantity, of ads showed on a page. This is very confusing to people. In a normal media business, you make money by showing more ads.
What does it take to improve the quality of ads on Google?

More computers, basically, and better algorithms. And more information about you. The more personal information you're willing to give us - and you have to choose to give it to us - the more we can target.
Now, let's look at television. Every one of the next generation of cable set-top boxes is going to get upgraded to an IP-addressable set-top box. So all of a sudden, that set-top box is a computer that we can talk to. We can't tell whether it's the daughter or the son or the husband or the wife in a household. All we know is we're just talking to the television. But that's pretty targetable because family buying patterns are pretty predictable, and you can see what programs they're watching.
Don't you guys do that?

Well, we certainly don't make the ads, and we're certainly not the creative people. All we are is a targeting mechanism. We're just a distribution channel.
Are advertisers going to start actually producing video ads to run on YouTube?
So the Internet, for them, represents a new creative medium. So we will see the emergence of new categories of ads and ways of making money.
Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model remains small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. The attempt to provide order drives out the creativity. And so it's a balance.
You mean you eat your own dog food?
What about "20 percent time" - the time everyone is supposed to allocate in their week to personal projects?

It's still essential. Virtually all of the innovation at the company is still coming out of 20 percent time.
Google gets its revenue from online advertising. One could make the argument that it is not diversified enough. Is that something that you think about? If so, what are some of the things you are doing about it?

The criticism is correct. We do get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, and it's a business that a lot of other people would like to be in. So the first thing is, let's understand that we're in a great business. Also, there are some emergent models for revenue that are very interesting. The one that is probably most interesting is Google Apps. We're now beginning to get some significant enterprise deals. Basically, companies are tired of dealing with the complexity of the old model, and our products are now strong enough that they really can reliably serve a corporation.
Why do you place such a premium on hiring the smartest people and developing and releasing software so quickly?

Fast learners win. We're in new, uncharted space. So the traditional assumptions that you and I might have about the future might actually just be wrong. There might be a new answer. And the only way to discover that is to put out your idea and then test it. And we track the results of that very, very, very rigorously, and this is not something we talk a lot about, but it's critical for us. How are these new ideas doing? What's their growth rate? What are the issues around them? And we push. What can we do to accelerate the development of this feature? What's the new problem? What's the new opportunity?
WIRED: When you joined Google it was just a search engine. Now it's redefining the way the world thinks about computing. Explain.

ERIC SCHMIDT: It's pretty clear that there's an architectural shift going on. These occur every 10 or 20 years. The previous architecture was a proprietary network with PC clients called client-server computing. With this new architecture you're always online; every device can see every application; and the applications are stored in the cloud.

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Google, Apple and the future of personal computing

Tags: apple, cloud-book, cloud-computing, computing, google, network-computer, nicholas-carr, trends on 2007-12-09 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Here's how the partnership works. Apple is taking responsibility for "the user interface and people." It's designing the devices themselves, which will be typically elegant machines that run versions of OS X. While Apple puts together the front end of the integrated network-computing system, Google provides "the perfect back end" - the supercomputer that provides the bulk of the data-processing might and storage capacity for the devices. While the devices will come with big flash drives to ensure seamless computing despite the vagaries of network traffic, all data will be automatically backed up into Google's data centers, and those centers will also serve up most of the applications that the devices run.
Let's look at a few of the advantages that a Google-Apple Cloud Computer offers:
1. It will be cheap. The introductory machine, a small, general-purpose Apple-branded computer, will go on sale for $199 and in short order the price will fall to $99.
2. It will be highly energy-efficient
3. It will be low-maintenance.
4. It will be flexible. Because your data and applications are stored centrally, you will automatically have full access to them whenever you buy a new Google-Apple device
What's at stake is control over personal computing itself - and Microsoft knows that, confronting the combined front-end and back-end skills of Google and Apple, it's at a big disadvantage. It will likely lose this war.
I think there will be three sources of apps: (1) the basics that you mention, which will be supplied and served up by Google-Apple; various consumer apps, including games and web 2.0 stuff, that will be served up over the net as they are today (ad-supported or for fee); and specialized, pro apps that will be designed by developers to run on the Google-Apple platform (incorporating app-cacheing techniques to ensure the necessary speed and responsiveness) and that you'll either license for a fee, as you do today, or subscribe to for a monthly fee (with consolidated billing from Google-Apple).

Nick
So.. analogously, what happens when you can fit the computing and storage capacity of a Google data center into an iPhone? You know it will happen someday. The cloud seems like a way to fake it until this happens.

Posted by: Charles
If they start to mass-produce those $100 laptops for every child on the planet, a lot of them will still find their way back into the hands of people who live in the economically developed countries.
the centrally controlled system will be able to make use of local computing power and storage capacity to optimize the user experience (without shifting maintenance and other crap onto the user). It's all one system.

Nick
Yes, I'm talking about personal computing, and the Google-Apple Cloud Computer will certainly be designed and marketed as a consumer product. But there's no reason that it couldn't expand into certain segments of the business market fairly quickly - and into other segments more slowly. If it can accommodate a virtual desktop - and I'm sure it could - then it would fit nicely with the trend I describe here.

Posted by: Nick Carr at October 17, 2007 04:55 PM
"It will be cheap."

When's the last time Apple shipped anything cheap (in the low price sense of the word)? Its entire line is overpriced and a modest iPod Nano is $149-199. Even if the purchase price is subsidized by advertising or a monthly fee -- and don't forget that iPods and iPhones are subsidized by iTunes and phone bills -- a $99 price point is hard to believe.
"It will be flexible."

How flexible or universal will it be if Apple stays true to form: the software and content only run on Apple devices; Apple limits or prevents third-party application development while selling many apps itself; and there are platform lock-in problems?
two of the sexiest companies in the world gain a lot of attention by working together, but it doesn't mean the collaboration will necessarily go well.

A Cloudbook for the Cloud - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Tags: cloud-book, cloud-computing, internet, kevin-kelly, network-computer on 2007-12-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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