Just had a sudden thought and thought I'd share...

Given the apparent success of OnLive www.onlive.com and the fact that it is now possible to play the latest games on any from a netbook upwrads (as long as you have an internet connection) I was wondering how long it would be before there are services for more specific software in the cloud computing world.

Would it be feasible to see a cloud version of Maya or something similar? 3D modelling on a NetBook but using the super computing power of a cloud server to render the graphics.

Or Photoshop, or Final Cut, etc...

Instant access to processor intensive applications without having to pay out the initial cost of a top end computer to do the work.

Call me old-fashioned, but I intensely dislike the cloud. Centralised control of my data, applications, processing power etc, is not a concept I relish.

That said, I also don't like Google, Facebook, Android or iTunes, but the rest of the world continue to give away their personal info at an alarming rate irrespective of my apprehension....

I have to agree. I prefer to have control over my apps. I like the idea of syncing services so I can keep my machines in sync but I hate the fact that you need a connection for some things. If you have a bad connection would you be restricted in what you can do? Also for video editing there would be the time required to download the program for use, or uploading the data for a faster server to do the work. So commercial editors would need high bandwidth connections and that might more than offset the costs of extra licenses and hardware.

A business I work for keeps a lump of shared stuff on a cloud-based file server so that I, and others, can access shared files. Previously, I’ve had to either FTP files, or in the case when the whole project needed sending in for archiving, I’ve had to post them a USB stick or a DVD. So for that kind of thing, it’s not bad. However, the files are here - that is if there is a web-cut off, I don’t lose anything and can continue working if needed.

However, relying on a service where the master file is in the cloud and only accessible if there is a web connection seems like a folly to me.

It's not new, it's just thought of as new because it's doing it commercially over the Internet.

The people at Sun were laughing about this kind of thing when I was there because networked computing is what they do, and it's been what they've been doing since the 80s, indeed one of their sayings was "the network is the computer".

For this new Internet computing, we know we can do it, the technology is there, but new protocols need to be designed in order for all of this to work together correctly.

I know someone who set up the DTP for the Mirror papers when Maxwell was running the show. It has been run like that for decades. The modern Cloud also has the additional problems of data caps from ISP's. That alone could ruin the idea or make it very expensive.

Fogmeister is talking about something that is basically no different to publishing an application over Citrix, or hosting a virtual machine on VDI/View. The data sent back and forward over the internet connection is usually little more than mouse clicks and screen updates - and even those are typically compressed to speed up the response times. The heavy traffic and the large files and system images all live within the ethernet networks inside a data centre, where the unit costs (if you have sufficient customers) are much lower than they would be for an end user. So sufficient storage and compute power can always be made available at reasonable prices.

I'm sure that the publishers of Maya have considered Fog's plan, which is surely quite feasible. Licensing issues and pricing might get in the way though. There's also a possible issue with some apps that are written to take advantage of specific hardware such as high-end gfx cards that aren't found in generic x86 servers and also aren't easy to provide for virtual machines. So some optimisation for EC2 etc might be required.

Well I fully appreciate there are very different services. Not being an expert on such systems I guessed that it would be a scaled up version of a consumer cloud service for video editing, where you have to upload your work before it can be edited and manipulated. If it is just clicks and mouse actions then it becomes much easier, and immeasurably cheaper. All you need is a fast response network. If it is keyboard clicks like a customer database it can be much more practical.

For games would the amount of data transferred be higher than a local machine could manipulate? I think not so really would it be any benefit for games other than MMORPG?

I think you are mistakenly fixating on data, when there are lots of other factors to take into account.

An online video editing site would require you to upload your raw content, and that could be huge. But it should be relatively simple to use tech along the lines of Riverbed's steelhead mobile to massively compress it (saving big bandwidth bucks, but more importantly allowing the user access the service quickly - nothing buggers up an impulse buy like waiting a week for your cruddy video to reach the server).

But once the data is there, you have the capability to import it into software you couldn't afford to purchase outright. You can run that software on a virtual machine that spans a huge number of CPU cores, allowing you to render in minutes something that would take your home computer hours or days - or in Fog's example (a netbook) to do stuff that it couldn't do at all without immediately crashing. You could have a Mac, a PC and a Sparc workstation all at once and effortlessly move your file between whatever apps they run. Only the very nerdiest among us can do that sort of thing at home. For everyone else, the cloud is simply about renting time on remote computers that you therefore don't have to have littering your house or office.

As for games, you will have little choice. Whatever consoles Microsoft and Sony might be developing now, those will be the last ones you ever get to buy and take home.

Sony aren't going to spend millions developing a PS5. If they have smarts they will be busy right now developing their OS to sit happily on x86 servers and stream nicely to cheap hardware. Otherwise Microsoft - who have been doing that sort of thing for a long time already - will have a giant head start when they go that way.

So the future of XBox and Playstation is a portable device for you to play with on the train; when you get home you can plug it into your TV and get your high end gaming kicks over the net. And if you don't buy their portable, you can use an iPad or your old PS3 or any device that has enough computing power to connect your game pad to wherever the real computer lives. They can let Dell and Sun and Lenovo fight over the crappy hardware margins and concentrate on packaging content, and keeping their publishers and developers incredibly loyal.

I can definitely see the advantages of accessing really powerful machines for processing, it was the fact that most people in my situation would have data issues. Though if that is resolved then it does have very big advantages, especially as you are effectively just renting processors. As Foggy said you could run it on old kits which could never handle it otherwise.

As for consoles I still think that there may be consoles because people plug them into their high end TV's. So I would see a console that is more like a dumb terminal that is able to process some graphics for the TV, and relying on the server for the vast bulk of the processing. It would make online game accounts essential. These would be much cheaper than todays consoles and could even be free with a two year contract pretty much like a phone. With no physical media piracy might be non existent though would they be cheaper? I think not. The second hand market would disappear as the media disappears, Though would game accounts be traded instead, pretty much like MMORPG items are now?

You'll get a console in a serial box one day, even cheap TVs will have them built in, your ISP will throw one at you. And Apple will charge you $200 dollars for a shiny one with a glowing logo. The objective is to have the interface that people use to get at the content that they pay for, and scim a little money off each transaction. Everyone except Apple will give you some free games.

As for your privacy, that is going to be an increasingly expensive luxury. Facial and location recognition software is only going to get better and cheaper and more ubiquitous. If you use cloudilicious apps to edit photo or vvideo, somebody will know who you are, were you've been and when, just as they already can (to an extent) from all your facebook and flickr photos.

Screen realestate is the biggest problem, but theoretically, yes.

We have been using terminals for photo editing, Office and ERP system for years. They have a 600Mhz VIA processor, 256MB RAM and a 1GB Flash card for the Linux Embedded OS. They don't have the more modern versions of RDP, so they don't benefit from the increased data compression that Windows Server 2008 brings, so they only work on the LAN. Over a 2MB ADSL connection, we can have about 12 users working, but because of the older protocol support, things like Eclipse and Office 2010 start to stutter a bit, using a Nettop with a 24" screen instead is perfectly fine.

For things like Maya, you need to have a much bigger server (physically) with multiple OpenGL graphics cards. For Photoshop, that isn't necessary and our multiple blade server is fine (40 employees working on a dual 6 core Xeon setup with 128GB RAM), each user has either a Windows Embedded XP or Igel Linux terminal on their desk with 20" 1600x1200 or 24" 1920x1200 displays.

We've been using "cloud" computing since the early 80s. When I first started work (1981), I had a 24" graphic terminal with a 2048x2048 resolution with 3D, which was displaying data from our data centre in Houston, Texas, several thousand miles away.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks at the moment, for cloud services, is the US Patriot Act, which is incompatible with Cloud computing outside of America. In the EU, if your data is sent outside the EU borders, the owner of the data (cloud service or a third party renting space on the cloud) cannot send the data without gaining your explicit permission. If the company has an OFFICE (not an HQ or a server) in America, it has to hand the data over to the US Government without informing you - which is illegal...

For gaming or something, it probably isn't so bad, it would be in the terms and conditions of the service that you are using.

It is more of a problem for large companies that are put their data in the Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. cloud. If they have a list of customers in the data, the company is responsible for ensuring the data isn't sent outside the EU borders, but the cloud provider is behoven to the US Government and Patriot Act, which means that they have to hand over the data without inforing the company and without informing the individuals affected. If this comes out, the company (not the cloud provider) is legally responsible, can end up being fined or imprisoned and can be sued by the affected individuals!

The rules for sharing the data within the EU are strict and cover similar rules, if the data is sent to a third party, they must inform you and get your permission (the usual "we will share the data with our marketing partners" etc. clauses in EULAs or on sign-up pages). They don't have to inform you, if the police turn up with a court order for the data.

The Patriot Act doesn't require a valid court order in America, let alone the EU and thus means that no cloud service provider can legally run a cloud service in the EU as well as in the USA. This is the reason why the Dutch Government excluded Google and Microsoft from tendering for the outsourcing of their IT services 2 weeks ago.