Technofeudalism. Great book by Yanis Varoufakis. He called it and it’s actually happening.
The people who would be okay with this already don’t own computers, they go with a phone.
I worked in a Citrix environment for long enough to know this is just stupid.
I’m comforted by the fact that we have such a substandard internet in Australia that the day would be over before an only online machine would even boot. And before you start, there’s no way I’d usr the flaky starlink solution either. I say “bring back the video store”. Where is Schitts Creek star Johnny Rose?
I’d give up computing altogether, or even commit suicide if living mainly means being subservient to these soulless parasites.
Live on. We need manpower to fight the upcoming fight. Every person counts.
Don’t die for nothing. Die for something.
Or better yet, don’t die. Better the oligarchs die for you, than the other way around. Get movin’1
My real PC hope is to fashion the case into a French style billionaire solver
I think I’ll pass. I’ve been going to too many lengths lately to keep my data in my possession. I have no interest in giving it Bezos.
you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
Little Lex Luthor should climb into one of his dick rockets and aim for Venus.
And the future thin client will just be a locked down chatgpt prompt. It will still suck just as much as it does now. You just won’t have choice.
He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.
I had a friend who was a true believer in Stadia, he even sold his gaming PC as he was gaming in Stadia full time.
When Stadia shut down he told me “at least I get to keep the controller”
And get to it how? Through a PC?
Yes, Microsoft is already selling these
Shitty ass thin client running cheap hw that can’t do anything, a.k.a. Chromebook.
Yeah, nope. No matter what OS, no matter what specs, I’m going to keep my PC.
I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
I just don’t trust bezos to not be greedy.
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
- This assumes latency between one’s current location and the remote location is almost non-existent. It isn’t.
- This assumes we have fast and available internet all the time. I sure don’t.
- This assumes we can use the remote computer in every way we use our current computers. No way.
- This assumes, as you point out, they won’t be greedy once they control everyone’s machines. They will be.
- This assumes they won’t censor ‘dangerous’ sites on these machines. They will.
I will happily pay more for freedom from the corporation.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client
Amazing how we’re come full circle
Right! I had no idea Bezos used Lemmy either!
If only “greedy” was his only problem!
