USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010720.1249 (On Screen): Breathlessly this article describes how we will in future keep all our data on central servers and we will be able to access it from anywhere, and we will etc. No sign of the words "might" and "maybe", which is surprising because there's very little chance of this becoming omnipresent. As usual, the reporter is intepreting the fact that there's a great deal of interest in this by companies as a sign that it will become inevitable. Like, say, "thin clients" were. Remember those? By now the desktop PC was going to be dead, replaced by small terminals connected to big iron. Yup! Gee whiz!

Like so many things, there's no congruence between what's good for companies and what's good for consumers. Companies want to hold our data for us and charge us to access it. Companies promise to hold the data securely. Companies promise to be there forever. Companies can stick it where the sun don't shine.

Every time there's a high profile announcement that yet another retailer has had its computer broken into and thousands of data records stolen (including customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers) the chance of this actually happening becomes even more remote, let alone the fact that I can carry all my data with me on my laptop (and I do) so I have it everywhere I go anyway without their help. With PDAs becoming cheaper and more powerful and carrying more and more data, why does anyone need a server for anything?

The article does acknowledge the problem, but it refers to it as "changing everyone's mindset". It estimates that it won't become common until 2030. By 2030 your PDA will have 100 gigabytes of flashROM (or some equivalent) on board. If you can carry the data equivalent of 30 feature length movies in your jacket pocket, why would you need their services? (discuss)