How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?

Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by imaginenore on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @07:48PM (#10815458)

As internet speed increases, we will see computers turning into thin clients. Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that's idle 98% of the time?

Once you reach gigabit speeds, you can do all kinds of crazy cool things, like editing 4K videos remotely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHOzG-1KvM

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by userbinator on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @08:44PM (#10815635)

Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that's idle 98% of the time?

Because you actually own the physical machine; some may disagree, especially the DRM crowd, but there's a big difference between having hardware that is and on your property and just having volatile control over a machine in some unknown location.

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by DanBC on Thursday December 31, 2015 @02:58PM (#10819339)

People used to buy DVD machines and DVDs, now they have Netflix and set top boxes.

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by userbinator on Thursday December 31, 2015 @08:02PM (#10820655)

...and buy BluRays instead of DVDs.

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by astrodust on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @07:53PM (#10815472)

This always seems to be one of those things on the verge of happening, but every effort to promote it has failed.

Even 10ms of latency can be a serious drag on your user interface. Thin clients kind of suck for this reason.

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by xiaoma on Thursday December 31, 2015 @07:19AM (#10817304)

Until the speed of light starts increasing, latency will always be an issue for thin clients.

Fun experiment: Try ssh-ing into a web host or a school account. Peruse a few directories and open a few files in VI. Type in a paragraph of text. Now try the same on your local machine's terminal and compare the responsiveness!

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by imaginenore on Thursday December 31, 2015 @08:33AM (#10817478)

I'm a developer, I SSH into remote machines and type code all the time. As long as you're 10-15ms away, it's not an issue.

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by xiaoma on Friday January 01, 2016 @02:19PM (#10822945)

10-15ms is good enough of a ping for an FPS. That's fantastic!

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Re:How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? by xorcist on Thursday December 31, 2015 @03:58AM (#10816874)

Not really. So far the use cases have become wider rather than simpler, and we've simply found use for that extra power. You need a pretty powerful machine just to watch 4K video, and to fill up that gigabit pipe. And if you want to play modern games you need to get a very powerful one.

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