> > We're gonna get to the end of Moore's law and find that instead of using > > computing power to solve really complex and important problems, we've > > wasted it all on making transparent windows and wavy "ribbons" and pretty > > pictures dance around on our screens. > > > >That stuff is only froth - virtualisation is taking off, elastic >distributed computing is taking off - all that helps maximise >utilisation of the silicon that we have.
Well, my tongue was in my cheek about the end of Moore's Law. In my opinion, distributed computing has a limited future, once a few more massive security breaches make it clear what a really bad idea it is to have critical data accessible to the internet. No matter *what* ANYBODY does, or tries to do, to protect it, if there's a wire running between a hacker and sensitive data, sooner or later, the hacker will get through to it, especially if the hacker is part of an organized criminal gang or a government agent. The only way to protect the data is to cut the wire. Also, there's the possibility that data will be impounded by law enforcement. There was a recent case where some "cloud" provider did something shady, and ALL of the data on ALL of its servers was impounded, including the data their innocent customers foolishly entrusted to them, because the investigators had no way of knowing which machines contained what. You can look for that to happen again, too, not only when the cloud provider gets in trouble, but when one of their customers does. Distributed computing will probably continue to be used in closed intranets. But I don't think very many PHBs are ever going to decide that it would be better for humanity to pay really good programmers lots of money to write really efficient code when they can put out product much more cheaply by chewing up gigabytes of RAM and HDD space, and CPU cycles. So for the most part we will continue to run in place; each new version of a piece of software will require more memory and processor speed while not providing any noticeable speed increases to the end user, or any new features that more than a tiny minority of people will ever use. Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
