End of the "Wintel" Personal Computer?

Foggy · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 5:58 am

One of my mantras: In five years, you won't recognize the Intartoobz from what they are today. It's happening, too.

Cloud Leaves Some Tech Giants Seeking a Silver Lining (NY Times)

Quote:

[brief description of new cloud-based tablets released by Apple, Microsoft and Google] ...

Remarkably fast, a multibillion-dollar industry is moving away from personal computers made mostly with Microsoft Windows software and Intel semiconductor chips. The combined revenue from these largely so-called Wintel desktops and laptops last year was about $70 billion at Dell and Hewlett-Packard. But these companies played virtually no part in the June shows from Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Asked what part it hoped to play in the cloud-dominated future, Dell declined to comment. An H.P. spokesman said in a statement that his company had computer servers and software in “eight of 10 of the world’s most trafficked sites, four out of five of the world’s largest search engines, the three most popular social media properties in the U.S.” He said nothing about PCs.

The tech future also poses challenges for Intel, which has been diversifying. Its chips are now in Apple computers and a host of other devices. Intel still has a significant place in the market, but often with lower-margin chips, and increased competition. Another chip company, Nvidia, got a shout from Google’s stage.

We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud.

John Thomas8 · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 6:01 am

Are you trusting your personal data to a cloud that anyone with the skills can crack?

I'm not that sedate about my data.

Foggy · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 6:07 am

Good point, and the answer so far has been "no". I still love my desktop PC.

I've used Dropbox and haven't had too many problems with it. And Google Docs seem to be mostly secure.

All I'm really saying is, technological progress is accelerating. As fast as the Internet took over the world, things are moving faster now. I've posted this before, and it still says what I mean by starting this thread:

Quote:

When my father turned 80, at his birthday party, we all gave speeches like we do in my fambly. My niece was teasin' the poor ol' guy on account of when he was her age, the only communications technology he had was radio and the moving pictures.

"I don't know how I'd be able to live without my Wii and my iPod and my Blackberry," says she.

I stood up and told her, "Little girl ..." [-X

"When you're 80 years old, try telling YOUR grandchildren about your Wii and your iPod and your Blackberry. You might even be able to take them to a museum and show them some of those ancient, obsolete artifacts. And they will laugh so hard, at your primitive technology."

Because the world is changing FASTER today than it was in the 1930s. And the technology is ACCELERATING. [Hah! The mantra --►] In five years, you won't be able to recognize the Innertubes. Our science is still in its pre-infancy.

Hektor · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 8:18 am

Dell and HP tried to get into the tablet market and failed miserably with the Streak and Touchpad.

Asus and Acer did manage to get in and Asus makes Google's $200 tablet.

I do have concerns about the cloud, but I've been using Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail for years. I have a Google Drive, Windows Sky Drive, Ubuntu One and a Dropbox account. I do my major backups to my home NAS though. Most home users may not be able to set up a NAS and then back up their computers to it, but installing Dropbox and paying for additional storage is.

Frankly, JT, though most consumers should be concerned with their data and their privacy, many simply aren't. Facebook is a massive example of this.

wavey davey · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 12:35 pm

There are two major problems with the cloud:

1) The huge expense.

2) Terrible, slow performance.

If you have rinky dinky "toy" data, and you don't need a lot of processing horsepower, the cloud might be OK. But many applications involve datasets that are hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes in size, and use lots-o-CPU crunching (e.g., image processing). In these situations, the cloud will be like a sailboat: going nowhere, slowly, and at great expense.

esseff44 · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:12 pm

I would never want to put anything on the cloud that I wanted a permanent record of or would need to access without interruption or having the rules and routes of access changed. It's fine for temporary stuff that you want others to have access to or don't mind if others have access to.

I worry about things like financial records disappearing and not having a hard copy for back up. I have been in the situation of changing banks or other services and no longer having access to the records since I was 'no longer a customer.' That's in addition to the frequent cases of hacking for all kinds of reasons including vandalism or sabotage.

TollandRCR · **Posted:** Sun Jul 01, 2012 2:38 pm

I am sure that I've bought my last Wintel personal computer. With eight cores, an SSD system disk, and a terabyte data disk, I avoid the issues with the Cloud identified above. On the other hand, I use Dropbox extensively for mobile access and have Carbonite back up my data. I also back up to a local two terabyte Hitachi USB drive. The machine is 1/3 the weight of the old 2006 Dell 690MP workstation, very much smaller, and virtually noiseless. That, plus the iPad and iPhone, are an ideal computing environment for me.

Kyser Soze · **Joined:** Sun Apr 17, 2011 1:16 am **Posts:** 34

Our reliance on the intertubes and computers in general worries me somewhat. I keep thinking about how much of our daily lives is impacted by electronic data moving through the ether. What happens if there is a massive attack by cyber terrorists, or we have another massive solar burp like the Carrington Super Flare in 1859?

I tend to keep hard copies of things I deem to be important, and just for grins I bought a 2005 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica last year for $350. If nothing else it'll be a curiosity piece for my grand kids when they grow up.

Somerset · **Posted:** Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:29 am

wavey davey wrote:

There are two major problems with the cloud:

1) The huge expense.

2) Terrible, slow performance.

If you have rinky dinky "toy" data, and you don't need a lot of processing horsepower, the cloud might be OK. But many applications involve datasets that are hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes in size, and use lots-o-CPU crunching (e.g., image processing). In these situations, the cloud will be like a sailboat: going nowhere, slowly, and at great expense.

OK, but even in a CPU intensive environment (I'd consider IC design to be pretty hardcore) you work in a form of a "cloud." The data usually isn't on your own workstation, and even the processing is handed off to a "server farm" where it hopefully gets routed to the biggest, baddest Linux box available. You're working in a "private cloud" so the data isn't encrypted, but it's essentially a cloud nonetheless.

Once upon a time I ran my own mail server and web server, hooked up to a T1 line. It wasn't all that difficult, but I also couldn't support much and it was kinda expensive. I later moved everything to a hosting service and never looked back. I do have some data security concerns, but I've never considered e-mail to be private (an analogy from long ago was that you should consider e-mail like a post card). If I need to have data private I'm going to use some kind of encryption, regardless of whether I send it via e-mail, store it in a public cloud, or even keep it on my computer.

John Thomas8 · **Posted:** Mon Jul 02, 2012 7:12 pm

Another obnoxious side effect of "cloud computing": who owns it and the access:

Cisco’s cloud vision (extremetech, Joel Hruska): Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion

poutine · **Posted:** Mon Jul 02, 2012 7:41 pm

I heavily use clouds for personal and work use. Work use is strictly on a temporary and quick basis, i.e., for the purpose of transferring data or documents from one device to another, after which they are deleted.

Paperwork at home has always been a nightmare for me, in terms of saving it or organizing it. The cloud has been a life saver in that regard. The only step I need to follow now, to respond to some of the cloud criticism in this thread, is to occasionally back it up on a flash drive or CD somewhere.

Threats of security hacks? There is no 100 percent immunity from security hacks. I got a letter from the FBI some years ago informing me that they'd arrested someone found with tons of mail stored in the trunk of their car, which included social security statements stolen from my personal mailbox outside my house. Information theft has always been around and will always be around, in one form or another.

John Thomas8 · **Posted:** Mon Jul 02, 2012 7:46 pm

Quote:

after which they are deleted.

You deleted your access to data.

You did not delete the data, the technology behind the cloud retains a copy of everything ever written to it.

listeme · **Posted:** Mon Jul 02, 2012 7:47 pm

I don't really worry much about security for the things I use the cloud for. I have some redundancies blah blah. But I do have something of a flaw in my system at the moment -- my redundancies are also online-based, and so for this past weekend I couldn't work on the things I wanted to work on. I could access using cell phone, but I couldn't work on the documents.

This was a big hassle. So I'm working on some new methods.

Falsehoods unchallenged only fester and grow.

End of the "Wintel" Personal Computer?

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