Posted on 01/26/2009 5:32:48 AM PST by Red in Blue PA
Google's rumored "GDrive," a service that would enable users to access their PCs from any Internet connection, could kill off the desktop computer, The Guardian has reported.
The GDrive, unconfirmed by Google, is reported to launch this year, with tech news sites calling it the "most anticipated Google product so far."
The Google drive would shift away from Microsoft Window's operating system, in favor of "cloud computing," where storage and processing is done in data centers. Users would no longer have to rely on their computers' powerful hard drives.
Home and businesses have been turning toward web-based services, such as e-mail — including popular services Hotmail and Gmail — and photo storage, such as Flickr and Picasa. Users would no longer have to worry about their hard drives crashing, since data would be saved on the Web, and can be accessed from any machine.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Thank you for the detailed response.
This is for people who would also agree to storing their guns at the police station and their money in a national bank.
My point was merely that a full fledged laptop with increased processing power, memory and storage (15X more) was 50 bucks more!
I could see if they were half-price, but for a difference of 50 bucks? I just don’t get it.
C’mon, it’s obvious: They’re just trying to get you to upload your porn collection to their servers, the pervs.
“The only thing I like about thin clients is having the ability to protect users from themselves.”
That is very... er... Obama-esc :)
What you want to do is no problem at all. Download the installer EXE at the location with good bandwidth, save it on the thumb drive, take it home and copy it to your hard drive and install. The installer EXE doesn't care where it gets shuttled around to before installation.
What bankwalker wants to do is different. Install a program, then haul it around on a hard drive already installed and still have it work anywhere.
Well, don't forget that there actually are voters who deserve the guy.
Oh, there is one scenario where my recommendation wouldn’t work. Occasionally I’ve seen a small “installer” download, like say less than a meg, but when you run it, it get the rest of the install files from the internet. I’m not sure why they do this, but it wouldn’t work for you. While you’re in town downloading try to make sure you get a full install EXE, that’s big enough to install the entire program without internet access, or at least internet access for a large amount of install data.
Actually now that I think about it, you could get around the scenario I just mentioned (the “partial download installer”), by just taking your box to town, and use the other guy’s monitor, keyboard, and internet connection if they have that kind of installer.
“I used a Yahoo online storage a few years ago. They closed it without notice and I lost the data I had stored there.”
Bingo. Why bother with a ‘service’ like this that exposes private data to possible loss or misuse, when you can get 500GB for $100 and backups are easy.
Drive letters are just so 20th century. Me, I like to mount other (internal, external, remote) drives into my directory tree where they make sense.
No, and no thanks, either. Peddle this over at the school yard Central Office. Tell them they have to buy one to get broadband to all the "chill'run" or get their Department of Education funding cut off.
Whether Apple or PC or whatever, the stand-alone storage capacity available to consumers is more than sufficient for most people. Do you really want to become a nucleon in the Cloud Computer phenomena?
Google's is just getting tired of building Server Farms and they want access to 10 percent of the consumer Cloud. Imagine the size of that Virtual Memory...
Gives me a p*ss shiver...
Once upon a time that was doable, but with the windows registry, and library dependencies, that really isn't practical these days.
ASP, cloud, thin client. They keep trying to go back to the dumb terminal, and forgetting why it went away in the first place.
Different strokes for different folks.
Probably still work on a MAC. I believe that they don't maintain a central registry or shared libraries. Even so, I gave them like three options that would work with Windows.
Well, yeah, but, since I’m the guy who gets stuck cleaning up after someone clicks on the wrong thing, I tend to be a bit cynical about end users. Although, lately, the quality of end users has gone up.
what’s the carbon footprint of giant servers running all the time, vs millions of small harddrives running only when needed? and all that additional data transmission? that’s not very green!!!
Thin clients suck though... I mean really... deep freeze everyting and you get better results.
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