"Cloud" desktops.. Isn't it a waste?

[earlz]

Hello, recently I've been thinking about "the cloud" and stuff like that. Back in the days before I was alive you could dial up a phone number on a dumb terminal and poof instant computer.

Will those kind of days come back now that the cloud is some huge hype? I'd like to think not for these reasons:

1. Latency. Now that the internet is more world wide it's much more difficult for everyone to have reasonable latency. There is no way to decrease the latency of say Australia to the US. Light can only travel so fast. (I believe usual ping times for that is like 1 second or so)
2. Wasteful. Even the cheapest modern computer you can buy today is quite a power house. It's difficult to find anything without multiple logical processors or less than 1G of RAM, or even with less than 100G of harddrive space. Why should we connect to some remote server when all our needs can be met right here?
3. Internet. The internet is still not free everywhere and not everyone has access to what is considered broadband internet.

So what do you think? Everyone seems to be so excited for this cloud stuff but the real purpose of it doesn't make sense for anything but hosting websites.

[NickJohnson]

1. First, it would take .133 seconds for light to go from one side of the Earth to the other, along the circumference, which is not terrible, although of course the ping is greater than that. Second, the whole idea of a cloud is a distributed system, so you would have copies of common things on multiple mirrors, so latency would be no higher than it is now.

2. The "cloud" doesn't really imply "cloud computers" - as you mentioned, the idea is mostly used for hosting and large companies' databases, where it makes sense. Computers that do most of their processing online don't make much sense, but online data storage can, as all of us who use revision control know. There is also a definite paradigm shift toward mobile devices, which use less power and are much less powerful as well, so the "cloud" is not overkill for them.

3. Where is the Internet free? How far away is it?

Why exactly are we complaining about this stuff again?

[gerryg400]

Isn't it even less than that?

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t = 20,000 km / 300,000 km/s * 1.5 = 100ms

Ping times to Nth America from Melbourne are around 220 ms and bandwidth is huge.

[NickJohnson]

Whoops - I used diameter times pi instead of diameter times pi halves (or radius times pi.) Where are you getting the multiplier of 1.5 though?

[gerryg400]

Refractive index of glass = 1.5

[NickJohnson]

But if you do it through space (adding 2000 km to the radius for low earth orbit), you get a refractive index of 1, and reduce the latency to 88 ms.

[gerryg400]

Yeah that's true but we use fibre. We have more than 8 TB/s of fibre running north off our east coast. That's more than a MB/s per household.