Screaming Penguin

Bandwidth has been on my mind lately. From considering a move to LaGrange, to reading some threads from the latest Slashdot poll, Ive been thinking about what fast and readily-available bandwidth will do to the future of computing. Contention 1 (no, not inherency...how many get that?): Computing has gone 180 degrees The story of modern computers starts with a large mainframe powering many dummy terminals, but in its evolution, the terminal itself began to take more and more computational responsibility. 50 years later, we have the personal computer; small, lightweight, powerful, and more server-independant than ever. In the majority of PC configurations in the home or office network, the extent to which the server plays a roll is controlling resource access, serving up a net connection, forwarding e-mail, and possibly hosting some files. They no longer take on the brunt of the computational strain as they used to, that can now be done on the PC. Contention 2: The bandwidth will reverse the trend One of the posts I read on slashdot said that faster bandwidth is bad because people will just need more RAM/disk space to cache all the data. But lets look at why we use RAM in the first place. We depend on RAM simply because it is the fastest storage device in our PC. We need that speed to do things like refresh the screen and keep applications running, but if the hard drive was faster than RAM, than we wouldent use it at all. So what if we had a faster storage device? What if the link between me and my ISP was faster than the link between my processor and my RAM? Why would I have to cache the data in RAM or on a hard drive at all?? The answer of course is that I wouldent. I could boot off the network, load apps off the network, cache data off the network, use the network for all the things I would once use my slow (hehe, imagine the day) RAM for. It could even take a certain amount of the computational load off my system processor. Contention 3: Computing will come full circle Once we have bandwidth that can transfer data faster than my system bus can, Athlon 1GHz's, 512MB of RAM, and Nvidia GeForce cards all seem sorta pointless, dont they? Why not have a cheap computer with a fast network card, moniter, and keyboard, and have it function faster than todays fastest PC? Better yet, have a nice flat screen moniter with a fiber optic port in the back of it and a built in microphone for I/O, then have that run faster than todays fastest PC. See it now? The return to the dummy terminal. But this time just a little bit faster.