Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

< 9:11:12 PM        >

1) An application specific backwater.  Networks of voluntary PC networks slaved to work on specific projects/games and clusters of servers dedicated to specific apps.

2) Virtualized PCs.  People would run a terminal on their desk and connect with a pool of rack mounted 1U PCs that allocate resources via a grid.

3) Virtualized Servers.  People would continue to run PCs on their desktop but they would share resources with a central system that would crunch through tasks normally reserved for expensive server systems.  Apps would run against this generalized system depending on need.

Basically, the push here is being driven by companies (IBM and Sun) that see an increasing imbalance between centralized resources vs. decentralized.  For example, this year 140 m or so 1.5 GHz PCs with 60 Gb hard drives will be sold.  Only 4-5m servers will be sold, with capabilities not much greater on average than what is being sold to individual users.  The business opportunity for IBM and Sun is to get these desktop PCs (mostly built by Dell, Gateway, and a large number of independents) running software they have a hand in developing, customizing, and managing.  However, will this desire translate into a major change in the way we use computers (scenarios 2 and 3)?  Probably not (or at least not until Microsoft jumps in), but it is interesting to think about. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

comments < 9:08:37 PM        >

Today the BBC announced that they are providing RSS feeds that can be used with all the popular news aggregators including our own Radio UserLand.   [Scripting News]
comments < 9:03:12 PM        >