I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
Check out Autonomi
looks like crypto bullshit
Its been in development since before bitcoin tbh
Unlikely, as cloud storage providers can’t be trusted completely. They be like “but it’s encrypted. trust me bro”, but every time they get the chance, like when a weakness is detected in the cipher, they will peek or let some government peek. This is how magically your competitor ends up with your business secrets.
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The average euser does not trust them, they just don’t care…until they should have cared.
Yes, but there will always be an important crowd that does care and that’s why cloud storage can’t completely replace local storage or home NAS. It can maybe replace it to like 50% max or so, but never completely.
I still consider a microSD card a must for my portable devices so I can hoard media locally.
But I pay for a cloud backup of anything I produce.
I don’t see that as likely until 10gbps connections are the norm
Network latency is like seek time on a HDD.
True, but we don’t use HDD for much anymore.
You misunderstood.
You can take my 100TB storage array from my cold, dead, hands.
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Or more likely, desktop OSes will be locked down and will simply not be able to use it, while bank websites and other stuff will only work with locked down OSes.
For your security of course.
have you tried moving to Linux?
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Then don’t buy those products. I only buy phones I can unlock and install my own version of Android on. Same with computers and iot. If I can’t install my own software then I didn’t own it.
If megacorps have their way, you won’t be able to use banking, government, social media, etc. if you aren’t running their proprietary slop.
See Google’s Attestation API attempt. Computers can become like smsrtphones are right now.
You can always have a burner “secure” device for official business, and a privacy-respecting device for everything else.
Aren’t there enough real problems in the world to focus on without the need to go inventing more? This is just imaginative rage bait. Focus on real shit that’s actually happening.
“Sergeant, deploy the cryo ray.”
Can I really? I won’t murder you for it, I am willing to wait.
In some ways, it already has.
Lots of orgs that used to have file servers and data centres have been moving to things like OneDrive.
On-board storage space used to be a selling point for laptops, phones, and pre-built computers…but now some of them are coming bundled with a few months’ subscription to cloud storage. It’s been easy to find desktops with 0.5 or 1TB of storage space for years, yet the price of HDDs has been decreasing for years.
Plenty of people seem to use things like Google Drive as a way to move files or even to “save space on their devices” the way that we used to use thumbdrives or external drives (and yes, those are still viable methods of moving and backing up files, but it used to be the only way).
I think if your computer has only 0.5TB of storage, then the machine might as well be primarily a cloud storage-backed device. (Unless you’ve got your files elsewhere, etcetcetc). We’ll always need local storage for things like the OS and for more easily running whatever apps or files that were just downloaded off the cloud…so I don’t think it’ll ever go to 0. But 0.5TB is pretty darn close these days! Lol
And if you think that you’re not guilty of using cloud storage…tell me what percentage of your Steam library you have downloaded locally… Lol
(Steam isn’t cloud storage, but the principle is similar – “I don’t need to store my files because they’re available for me to download at any time from someone else’s computer!”)
There has been a ping pong between emphasis on the server or emphasis on the client since the beginning.
In the near future, there will likely be a trend to private / self-hosted clouds (instead of vendor clouds) for enterprise and enthusiasts that want data access in multiple locations. But at some point, all data could be local but synced to all your devices. That may be the ultimate client/server balance.
Almost definitely not at all. There’s just too much latency, due to the speed of light. Local storage will always be faster than cloud, by a huge margin, unless you’re using an incredibly slow medium.
Yep, SSD latency is measured in tens of microseconds. To achieve that kind of latency with a cloud service, you’d need it to be just a few kilometers away or the light propagation delay alone becomes too great.
Idea: In the future where wireless network speeds are high, the OS image just gets loaded into RAMdisk each time.
Marketing: You get the newest OS image on every boot, with all current security patches and no (3rd party) malware, as that would be wiped with each reboot. This will also allow for even higher performance than any SSD.It better keep a local backup so it can boot in low coverage areas. Of course that would mildly compromise the security aspect
For me, never.
Likely, never due to the three storage backup rule: save on local device, save on external, and save one copy on cloud. So you don’t lose your work or media.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
I’m fed up with that bullshit phrase. Please, stop parroting it. And, even if it became true… You’ll be happy, which is more than 90% of humanity could hope for.
I would say it is unlikely - storage is so cheap that some form of local storage is likely to stay.
A terminal device still needs some form of storage to run the software to access the cloud. That might end up being some small storage on a chip but the difference is not between none and something, but some and more.
I also think there are enough people who want storage they own and control that it’ll persist as a concept. Also having devices that work when networks are down is a benefit in itself - attempts to make devices dumb terminals get exposed as a productivity nightmare when networks do go out.
I think big business will certainly try hard to lock people in to their ecosystems. Remote storage, remote computing/graphics processing are all ways they will try. But conversely there are vibrant communities pushing independent & private alternatives that I don’t see dying - whether thats Linux on PCs, or Graphene OS to take control of your android device etc.
Yeah the mass of goo will probably embrace it for the convenience, and the resistant few will be demonized as likely terrorists and go underground. I can see a Republican US Congress passing an Online Freedom Act that bans private storage over the amount needed to run Windows or MacOS and blaming viruses on Linux and Mexicans.
Local storage will always be needed in business environments, either for security reasons (sensitive files that can’t go online), or technical (speed requirements or offline access).
Good point, I didn’t even consider business.
It’s why SD cards are still relevant. A professional photographer takes thousands of photos during a wedding and needs to process them in a computer. Cloud is not feasible or economical.
It’s pretty funny how I’ve seen posts exactly like this one 10-15 years ago, and nothing has really changed that much from a consumer perspective.
It’s just simply cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient to have local storage.
If you dug into history - with computers in the 70s-80s, we used to remotely dial into another computer. The terminal at your school (as home computers were pretty expensive) would dial into a stronger computer and you’d use up their resources.
Every few years, I see that mentality coming back. Cloud computing. Chromebooks. Remote desktops. Stadia and gaming on-demand.
Its fascinating.
Wait, we had networking like that in the 70s? I’ve never heard that, do you have any other specific information I can look up? A computer at a school talking to another school remotely to use its processing power in the 70s sounds like alternate reality. That’s literally just the internet. What were they pushing the data over? Surely not phone lines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
Terminals sent keystrokes to the mainframe, and the mainframe sent text back to the terminal. They used modems and serial connections
Cooooollllllll! It’s like computer morse code
Yup, it’s why ASCII has weird characters like “carriage return” and “bell”
Etymology of ascii characters is something I never even considered. New hobby unlocked
People also know what cloud gaming means now.
If that device loses service, it’s just a fancy paper weight until some nerd on GitHub spends a month rooting it and writing homebrew.
But people are also fucking stupid, so… They’ll buy anything, just sell it.
“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.
And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.
