Posted on 12/09/2010 6:22:50 PM PST by Red in Blue PA
Stop worrying about when the hard drive in your computer will die. Google wants to kill it permanently anyway.
The new Google Chrome operating system, which was unveiled Tuesday, as well as hints and suggestions from Apple and Microsoft, offers us a preview of the PC of the future. And it will come without that familiar whirring disk that has been the data heart of the PC for the past 25 years.
The Chrome OS will at first be available on all-black laptops from Samsung and Acer. And because the new platform stores everything -- files, applications, data bits and bytes, literally everything -- on online servers rather than on your home or office PC, those new PCs running it won't require gobs of storage. In fact, they won't require any storage at all.
The new Google laptops come without hard drives, in other words.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
That’s absolutely right. I know because I control the data.
Yet? Try ever.
Yet? Try ever.
Makes me long for the days when we kept everything in a file cabinet which we locked at night. Having witnessed and worked through 50 years of technological development, I am not convinced that people or business are significantly better off. Individuals had to think things through and actually solve problems rather than allow some gadget to do it for them.
[You can encrypt the backups with a very long key.]
Except the encryption program and key you would be using would be on their server.
This idea is more proof that there are very few ideas in computing that haven’t been tried before. To be brief, diskless PCs failed once before (in the 90s) for numerous reasons, one of which was that in most businesses you are legally responsible for your client’s data as well as your own business data, regardless of who has custody of it; i.e. regardless of where it is stored. Heavily regulated or highly competitive industries such as financial services or biotechnology would be the last ones to hand over their data.
No. You will be charged with posessing an unlicensed storage device. This will gain the ready acceptance of many of the law-and-order types here.
“‘supboena ‘ whats that?”
Having beans for supper
That will not work except for students IMO.
That will not work except for students IMO.
That's coming here too unless we are willing to kill or die for our keys.
Some of us are.
There are plenty of crypto options with Linux. You can encrypt your home partition, the whole drive, or you can have encrypted volumes with built in plausible deniablilty.
They are calling this “Cloud Computing” I think. Anyone who would trust everything to Google has to have a screw loose.
In the corporate world, PCs themselves are nearly obsolete with virtual machines/desktops. The concept of a physical server dedicated to a single purpose is past obsolete. Funny how in many places, Virtualization began in the data center, and eventually worked it’s way to the client end.
Where I work, I have managed to shrink around 75 physical servers down to 4 ESX hosts(3+1 failover), attached to a EMC SAN. We still have around 30 physical servers left that couldn’t be VM’d due to primarily hardware constraints, but I hope to get them converted sometime next year. My goal is to have our entire data center down to those 4 rack spaces+SAN. How cool is that? lol (would have been unthinkable to us just 5 years ago)
The last server I’ll convert will be my Linux email firewall. I built that thing from scratch, and it’s close to 1,000 days of uptime(would be much much more, but for my stupidity). I’m sure I can convert it to a VM, but I can’t bring myself to do it, because I would have to briefly take it down for the ‘P2V’ conversion.
amazon has his books
I bought one of those for my netbook last yr
I'll give you the classic IT answer: It depends.
You can specify that all servers and data remain on your site, in your datacenter. Of course, you could add offsite back-ups...and it's prudent to do so.
Or, you could put it all in the provider's datacenter and trust them.
The middle ground is to specify, under5 contract, how your servers and data will be treated in the "cloud".
MOST of the big guys won't even discuss this. They have a standard SLA for everyone.
I use Jungle Disk for online backup. You buy your own space on Amazon S3 for backup, instead of using Carbonite.
It costs about $1.50 a month and can use my own encryption. ...although, there is nothing really worthy of encryption, just photos and documents. The few important files are run through Truecrypt before they are backed up.
There are some things that work great with “cloud” services — email, in particular. ...but as a photographer, there is no substitute for fast, local hard drive storage.
What about hackers and virus/worm spreaders? Would cloud computing be more open to them?
Yeah, uh, no.
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