Just ordered...

[Martin Naef]

Hi Peter

Quoting Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com>:
>> I'm sceptical - we've heard the story before too many times under
>> different names, yet it always turned out that bandwidth was more scarce
>> than local processing power or storage capacity. However, it is clear
>> that some form of centralised document storage will be used for
>> increasingly more services (it's already standard for e-mail).
>
> It's more of a social issue than a technical one, I believe. We've seen
> people become much more mobile, where it's not immediately clear whether
> they've become more mobile because technology in the form of mobile
> phones allowed them to, or that mobile phones found an open market after
> people started to become much more mobile.

It's probably a cycle that reinforces itself. But my main point
remains the same: While I think data will increasingly be kept
somewhere on a network, I don't see the the processing power becoming
centralized to the same extent: It's just too cheap, also from a power
point of view: Wireless transmission is a major battery drain, and
it's harder to make that efficient than a low-power CPU. Therefore I
don't see client-server architectures coming big time outside specific
domains where they've been standard for a long time (e.g. corporate
databases, supercomputing).

So yes, mobile computing is here already, and it will stay and evolve.
So is the internet. But will it have such an impact on the computing
model? This is where I have my doubts.

Bye
Martin