Ballmer: The Slates Are Coming

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Tue Jul 13 10:25:56 BST 2010


On 13 July 2010 08:45, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:

> I see something more like the Private Cloud than using something out
> on the Internet.  My vision of the future is far more attainable right
> now.  Users would connect to a powerful central computer in the home
> that is connected to the Internet.  This computer can run
> sophisticated games, play movies, play music,browse the web and grab
> emails simultaneously for multiple users.  There's only one central
> computer in the house to manage and update.  The family connects using
> whatever they want, be it a graphical terminal that gives them a
> desktop and provides ports for connecting devices like a webcam, a
> digital camera, game controllers and etc, a tablet for web browsing,
> or anything else you might imagine.  These connections can be wired or
> wireless.  For wired connections we're talking FAST optical fiber
> networks, and for wireless we're talking about something beyond the
> 802.11n standard we have now.
> I see this possibly happening in about 10 years, but its somewhat
> achievable right now to a limited degree.  The technology isn't quite
> there yet to make this work as I described it above.


To get gratuitously on-topic, this is close something Canonical pushes
right now for Ubuntu on servers - lots of KVM virtual instances of
Ubuntu running on your private "cloud", but should you have a sudden
upswing in load then the *same* instances can be run on Amazon's cloud
rather than your own. So instead of being beholden to your computation
provider, you rent their services as and when you need them rather
than ceding control.

Speaking as someone who's priced VMware ESX - the only enterprise
virtual machine solution that does Windows *and* isn't rubbish [*] -
this is something I'm really really keen on!


- d.

[*] no, VirtualBox is rubbish. OK for desktop if you're running
Windows, Linux or Solaris, hopelessly amateurish and shoddy for
anything else. Kudos to Sun for buying and open-sourcing it, but I
really think they bought a pup.



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