this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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https://imgur.com/j0S32zL.jpg
Once we have super fast reliable internet we'll likely have the whole computer as a service. We'll just have access terminals basically and a subscription with a login, except for the nerds who want their own physical machine.
Bro just reinvented mainframes.
They've been reinvented repeatedly. Citrix, terminal servers, thin clients, cloud desktops, web apps, remote app delivery......
Most people (not necessarily here) need a web browser and an office program. Most people are well suited to terminals or something like a Chromebook.
I need actual hardware for my job and hobbies, but even I have a mini PC set up like a gaming console so that if I want to play games on my bedroom TV I don't have to hook up my Steam Deck or gaming laptop. I just stream them.
Microsoft: Write it down! Write it down!
& thin clients
No. Just no.
And get off my lawn, ya whippersnapper.
Mhmm... Computer as a service. Why does that sound familiar...?
RAM as a service can't happen. It's just far too slow. The whole computer can though. It's RAM can be local so it can access it quickly, then it just needs to stream the video over, which is relatively simple if creating some amount of latency to deal with.
Given how so many of us communicate, work, and compute using cloud platforms and services, we’re basically already there.
How many apps are basically just a dumb client using a REST API?
you will own nothing and be happy!
Wait, we already had that in the 70s.
You have to know that some dinosaur at ibm is screaming about how they gave up the centralized computer and is salivating over gigabit fiber so he can charge everyone 15 bucks a month to use an ibm mainframe.
Stadia almost didn’t suck, I bet we’re 10 years from phones just being hand terminals that tap into a local server and desktops won’t be far behind.
sweaty gamers and nerds as always unite over having proper physical PCs rather than online services or consoles.
It'll never be fast enough. An SSD is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than cache. Internet speed is orders of magnitude slower than the slowest of hard drives, which is still way too slow to be used for anything that needs memory relatively soon.
Need faster than light travel speeds and we can colocate it on the moon
A SATA SSD has ballpark 500MB/s, a 10g ethernet link 1250MB/s. Which means that it can indeed be faster to swap to the RAM of another box on the LAN that to your local SSD.
A Crucial P5 has a bit over 3GB/s but then there's 25g ethernet. Let's not speak of 400g direct attach.
Bandwidth isn't really most of the issue. It's latency. It's the amount of time from the CPU requesting a segment of memory to receiving it, which bandwidth doesn't effect.
So I could download more RAM?
You can do it today, just put your swapfile on sshfs and you're done.
It will crash as soon as it needs to touch the swap due to the relatively insane latency difference.
So use a small area in memory as cache
the infinite memory paradox. quaint. (lol)
Imagine doing this on a dial-up 56K modem
A:\SPICYMEMES\MODEMSOUND.WAV
Bwa-hahahahhah "A:" 🤣
bro is still using floppies
all the cool kids use iomega
wait, didn't some tech youtubers like LTT try using cloud storage as swap/RAM? afaik they failed because of latency
This guy used ICMP data payload as a hard drive. It kinda worked.
I remember using ICMP data to bypass my high school's firewall. TCP and UDP were very locked down, but they allowed pings. It was slow though - I think I managed to get a few KB per sec. Maybe there's faster/fancier firewall bypass methods these days. This was back in the 2000s when an entire school would have a single OC-1 fiber connection.
Afaik they used it as redundant off-site backup
I wonder if there would be a speed boost by setting 2 gdrive as raid 0 for off site backups
The limiting factor is mostly your upload speed. And also you need to have a good QoS set up, or you have very limited internet usability. Where as on-site you can get way higher speeds for cheaper
I feel like this might be a giant gaping security risk.
So is pretty much all of the cloud services the average user already subscribes to. People still use them though.
Obviously you should set up device mapper to encrypt the gdrive device then put the swap on the encrypted mapper device.
If your kernel isn't using 90% of your CPU resources, are you really even using it to it's full potential? /s
Oh wow, I didn't even know Gdrive offered a 1 petabyte option 😂
They don't to my knowledge, I believe that's mounted through rclone which just usually sets the filesystem size to 1PB so that it doesn't have to try to query what the actual limit is for the various providers (and your specific plan).
Once upon a time, Google offered unlimited drive storage as part of some GSuite tiers. They stopped offering it a while ago and have kicked most/all legacy users off of it in the past few months. It was glorious while it lasted 😢
Guess they ran everyone out of business that they needed to, so now the premium features get yanked and your choice of alternatives is curtailed. Hooray for enshittification.
It's not that, it's that people were abusing it by using it for things like Plex with 100TB+ of data, which cost Google more than the revenue they got as a result. Blame the people that abused the policy. They're not a charity and can't keep an offer if they lose money as a result. Keep in mind that Google Drive data has several replicas and is also backed up to cold storage on LTO tapes, so people abusing the storage policy is actually pretty expensive for them .
They do still have unlimited data in some cases, for example with custom plans for large companies (like 50k+ employees).
And Google docs/sheets/slides used to not count in your used space.