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A comment on How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global spy network. Parent comment

Re:How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global... by trevyn on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @12:56PM (#13707491)
Computation done on behalf of one client by another (more powerful) remote client, with a timesharing model, is kind of the defining characteristic of both, though. ;)
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Re:How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global... by jdminhbg on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @02:11PM (#13708262)
That's not at all the defining characteristic of modern cloud computing; if it were, you would call VR systems (laptop or phone does computation on behalf of video system on your face) "cloud computing."

What's different about cloud computing is the persistent connection and availability, combined with the ownership model and the resulting implied scalability.

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Re:How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global... by acoard on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @03:13PM (#13708766)
>persistent connection and availability

I can't really comment on the ownership model, but surely a persistent connection and availability is an incremental change.

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Re:How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global... by jdminhbg on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @10:47PM (#13711460)
If always-on-from-everywhere is incremental, then what isn't incremental? Are smart phones an incremental change from desktops?
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Re:How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global... by nickpsecurity on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @11:26PM (#13711623)
If we give you that, they have one breakthrough over mainframes. That makes them "mainframes that are always on from everywhere." Mainframe apps were already doing that with terminal, thin clients, web apps, and so on. It was part of modernization efforts to give workers or customers better access to data or business logic on mainframes by putting better interfaces in front of them. Situation is improved today with cloud stuff but core capability was there.
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