Hook up your oculus rift to their paperweight and have a full powered computer anywhere (with internet access).
While they are mentioning you can use AutoCad, I'd say that is merely to show that it can handle intensive applications. The majority wants to be able to surf the internet, and with this, you would never need to buy another computer again. For the random times you need to run Photoshop it can do it and will scale up to it, other times it scales down to handle your reddit addiction.
Look at how many people use Dropbox, iCloud, Google drive, etc etc. Everyone is already ok with storing their files in a datacenter. Privacy issues or not, people have accepted it is fact and the high majority already do it. That's not to say it is right, but it's a given that people want convenience over privacy.
Buying a Macbook air costs around 1k. And most people seem to upgrade ever 4-6 years. This costs $10/month. The cost savings are blatant. I know I’m comparing it with a mac and they are overpriced and you could do so much better, blah blah blah.
The fact is that if latency problems can be overcome, there is really no reason beside privacy that one needs to own and maintain their own computer. Rented space that you pay monthly for is cheaper, and will adapt to fit your specific needs. It works much better for a internet connected society to share several supercomputers then for individuals to each own their own.
Local storage and local compute continue to fall in cost.
As long as humans remain sensitive to subsecond latency of repeated stimulus, and the speed of light remains unchanged, local user interfaces will offer competititve advantages.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy graybeard, it's impressive how all of these things have been implemented at least in Plan 9 for almost twenty years now.
The Plan 9 documentation is pretty good, but 9front's introductory documents ( https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/fqa ) are probably a little better to get your feet wet with.
> Are Plan9 users mostly running on bare-metal or VMs? If the latter, would you recommend VMware, Xen or something else?
Both, I guess... VirtualBox is the only one I tried it on. Its distributed nature makes it fairly easy to run it on a server and connect to that from a system running Plan 9 from User Space (see http://swtch.com/plan9port/ ), so that you also get a... well, a functional desktop, I guess.
[1] Nearly so---for me, there's no true replacement for an IBM model M keyboard.
When a friend had his laptop stolen he said that it wasn't a big deal other than the money lost, as 90% of his files were in dropbox or Google drive.
In my world at least, this is the way the wind is blowing.
I've seen stuff covered under bloody NDAs being carelessly shoved into Dropbox or Google drive.
No one serious about their work is using them as a platform to work their files on, but they are used for that.
People would rather have convenience of access across their devices. Despite the fact that people tend to have home networks and go around with a wifi-enabled device in their pocket, syncing tools remain atrocious.
That's the pain that dropbox addresses, not the cost of storage.
Yep. Fact is, HNers are much more concerned with privacy than your average consumer is. Most people care much more about convenience than privacy. I don't really know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a truth.
I see people complaining about the hassles of maintaining a computer. Seriously? It's been like... how many years since basically everyone introduced that "revert to when this was working" state?
And even if it weren't for that, if maintaining a computer is so much of a hassle, how exactly is this supposed to be accessed? With browsers running on the holodeck? "From a consumer-level device, like a tablet"? Yes, I can't wait to use AutoCAD with a pointing device that has a precision of ughhh about my thumb's size.
And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?