does the desktop matter anymore? [LWN.net]

does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 28, 2005 2:18 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
In reply to: does the desktop matter anymore? by oseemann
Parent article: KDE 4 promises radical changes to the free desktop (NewsForge)

why would anyone want to entrust all their private memories to a foreign company?

Because consumer-oriented data storage can have one unrecoverable failure every 3 weeks yet still operate within its reliability specs, and the warranties cover the media and/or drives, not the data. Backups are nice, automated backups are nicer, but they're nicest of all if you can just pay someone else to do them.
Because some people have the photos so they can share them with other people. That's possible to do on a server system in your own basement, but it's often more convenient to farm that sort of task out a hosting service, especially if you live in a small apartment, own only one noisy computer and don't want to keep it online and malware-free 24/7. As a bonus, if your photography is attractive to a Slashdot-sized crowd, it's your hosting service that goes down in flames, not your personal Internet feed. I've learned that particular lesson the hard way...
Because so many systems are misconfigured, compromised, or just plain broken, such that they slowly corrupt data over time. A bit gets flipped here, a word gets doubled or zeroed there...unless you're verifying your data every day, it's possible to have this going on for years without causing anything to visibly fail. Since most people don't run 'md5sum -c' over their entire filesystem every day, most people don't notice the damage until it's too late. I look for it proactively, and find it disturbingly often.
Because beginner-oriented articles in digital photography magazines advocate storing digital images on flash cards, CD-R's and DVD's, even on paper...but never ever on the system hard drive, except as a backup of all the other media, or for editing or transmission.

Enterprise data storage, which by definition includes facilities and technical staff, is too expensive for many users to purchase at home; however, a photo-album-sized chunk of an enterprise data server is affordable to many consumers, and a few megabits is sufficient bandwidth as you're only shooting pictures on special occasions.

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does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 28, 2005 14:45 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

Entrust data !

Google offered 2Gb for mail, they could easly offer as much for descriptionary user/client backup, now that single disk devices are at 1Terabyte,... no?

Is everybody so dumb they need photo applications do backups for them, or they can trust a simple dialogue a configure a automated backup for photos or other relevante folders, and many things more, from their desktops ?

In your line of operations, applications are king, and if consider many type of data, you soon get **LOCKED-IN** to particular applications and to perticular service providers, incompatible between eachother, preventing you from changing application... CONGRATULATION YOU ARE NOW A SLAVE IN M$ DREAM.

Me i rather TRUST MY DESKTOP, buy a external disk for autometed/manual backups, because the probability of 2 disks, the main and backup, failing at exactly the same time is very close to 0(zero)... and i only have to pay for the disk, say 200GB, that most certainly will be cheaper them to rent online space, from any angle you look at it.

So the Desktop matter more now then ever before, which wont invalidate me from renting online disk space or other valuable Web-Services that dont enslave me.

does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 29, 2005 3:45 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

People do actually advertise outsourced backup services over the Internet. With "military grade" 56-bit DES encryption, even. If I could remember who they were, I'd check to see if they were still around.

The cost proposition for general backups is fairly bad, unless they are able to do something intelligent, like merge identical files from different customers together in their backup database. The bandwidth requirement can be quite high, you typically use a lot of bandwidth sending data that you don't necessarily retrieve, and in the (typical) disaster case, nothing short of 10GBE will be fast enough for an impatient and/or desparate user. This is all costs for the service provider that are incurred by users who hope they'll never really need the service. It's a hard sell to anyone who isn't already desparate to have an off-site copy of their data somewhere (and do you really want such people as your customers? What _is_ this data, anyway? etc).

That said, there are some advantages. If you back up your own machine, you'll need a gigabyte or two for all the system software and applications; however, if someone backs up ten computers like yours, then the marginal disk space used for the 10th customer is just their own personal files. If someone backs up her MP3 collection they downloaded from the internet, it takes up virtually no space as long as the same company also backs up the guy who she downloaded it from. I use this trick myself when backing up 30 machines at the office, and it saves dozens of gigabytes on tape. Over 10,000 customers, the efficiencies could be quite substantial...or the indexing overhead could be crippling. If you are running the service, and you know that the population of users is all e.g. Fedora 4 systems with OpenOffice, then you can give customers a discount on the contents of /usr (because it will be gigabytes of identical data, it will be cheap for you to store, and your customer has the convenience of not having to reinstall it all on restore).

I agree that application-specific web services (particularly those that are heavily optimized to be used by human browsers) are damned annoying things to use in combination with other application-specific web services. Sometimes it is possible to cobble together some Perl scripts that act as a gateway from one web application to another. Sometimes it is possible to cobble together some Perl scripts that combine a few desktop GUI components together, too, and increasingly a bunch of GUI components is starting to look and feel like a bunch of web servers (or is it the other way around?). Sometimes it is just easier to find someone who has put all this stuff together for you in some useful way.

does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 28, 2005 15:57 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" Because so many systems are misconfigured, compromised, or just plain broken, such that they slowly corrupt data over time. A bit gets flipped here, a word gets doubled or zeroed there...unless you're verifying your data every day, it's possible to have this going on for years without causing anything to visibly fail. Since most people don't run 'md5sum -c' over their entire filesystem every day, most people don't notice the damage until it's too late. I look for it proactively, and find it disturbingly often. "

The big fault here, for not saying the only is of the concept of FILE SYSTEM.

I'm the one that belives that an enourmity of resources and money have been spent in the last 25 years building insecure systems... many other reasons came to mind besides technical insufficience.

Enter a pure capability *real safe e secure* system:
http://www.eros-os.org/essays/reliability/paper.html and here
http://www.eros-os.org/essays/wherefrom.html
http://www.eros-os.org/essays/wherefrom.html

And what is a persistente sinle level store that cuts down *for good* with all those nasty inconsistente file systems, without being incompatible with them.
http://www.eros-os.org/essays/Persistence.html
http://www.eros-os.org/papers/storedesign2002.pdf