💾 Archived View for whitemercury.ddns.net › remotecomputing.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:12:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
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It feels, to me, like one day we will have low-powered devices. They will have bare minimum capabilities. Whether it's for work, gaming whatever you will have a "dumb terminal". The operating system and the software you want to run will live on Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc owned data centres and remotely take input/output to/from your device.
This is already possible. mainframes used to have many users connecting, each doing their own thing. You can use text-based ssh or graphical remote X sessions, VNC sessions or RDP etc. But generally you have a computer and much of what you need/want it to do is processed remotely.
More recently "cloud gaming" came into being. NVIDIA, EA, Google and Microsoft have all made a game streaming service. The game plays remotely and is displayed on your device locally. This could easily be done for any type of app or software.
In some ways this is great, no more needing to keep up with the latest hardware to play the latest games. This, potentially, means less environmental impact throwing away perfectly good hardware. Less need to correctly configure and optimise your hardware, as long as your internet is fast it'll work. Even with an ageing, low spec laptop you could play the latest games.
I have issues with it, though.
Firstly, if you don't own it, you don't control it. Imagine your whole desktop experience ran remotely. Your software service provider might upgrade, but you liked the old version. Imagine your laptop suddenly updated from Windows 8 to Windows 10 but you didn't want it to.
Because it's not your computer anymore, everything is remote. What if they thought you had pirated software, books or movies? They can scan through your files whenever they want. They would make sure it's in the T's and C's. But mistakes can be made. They might delete something you legally own or offer you up for prosecution.
They wouldn't sell you the software anymore, they'd rent it to you. You could never own it. You stop paying, you lose access to your files. They put up the prices, you pay or else. You would be entirely locked in.
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