And that’s your Netbook & Cloud debates in a nutshell.

Hard drives are required, by you or whatever server you use — perhaps more so by the servers. 1 GB is 1 GB wherever it is, & your provider will have more redundancy than you will.

RE: Clouds… Legally you can drive 1 max speed on the highway, regardless your vehicles top end… people still buy fast cars. Some people will buy more PC than they’ll ever need, & intuitively dislike the Cloud, seeking rational arguments like security, while too often utterly ignoring it themselves .

Just an FYI for you globalist who think that a world with no borders and your leaders running it will be some sort of Utopia: SCREW YOU. Americans want no part of your foolish attempt to centralize all power under the control of a few Socialist’s.

Freedom is Everything. The point of centralization of government is control.

Free people need less government, not more. World government is satanic to its core.

As we allow companies to tell us where computing is going, we better keep in mind the real reason they want to become your replacement for traditional hard drives and memory modules. Your stored data or net use will be carefully analyzed, reported, and stored for future reference.

It’s what you get when you embrace globalism.

When you embrace what I call Darwinian ethics – where you say – “Hey, all life is connected, respect that”.

I once wrote in an essay (pretty much for the sake of putting thoughts out on paper formally) that the greatest things we do ? we do together.

The moon, bridges, dams, machines, language, money culture – so much potential when humanity comes online.

Recently in mathematics- in the last 10 years a new platform of study has emerged, that studies how network emerge.

Globalism is such a network emerging, it is no chance I observe that the internet came OUT of fear of the pinnacle demise of nationalism – the nuclear weapon – as nationalism roots form the word to break apart ? The nuclear weapon is the most fragmentary device – at least I can think of.

Cloud computing, and these new models for distributed OS functionality – remote data storage, remote email services etc ?

They are ALL really the same thing emerging before us – the integrity of the species is showing I believe. I am a fan that as humanity becomes one ? so do the nations, and they must.

Cloud computing will not arrive on Western Civilization’s doorstep until nationalism has been abandoned.

It very well may tear DOWN the wall that still stands.

Just as no nation state is needed anymore, no single PC is needed, just a gateway machine to the network.

We really haven’t built operating systems from the ground up for parallel processing, and ‘cloud computing’ is really a massively parallel computing paradigm.

While the new language Fortress out of Sun IS designed for parallel processing, and I am happy to see that project in the works for the last years, and due date up and coming… Because machines CAN be used in parallel providing high speed networks are in place ? Acting AS the databus – which used to be centric to the CPU ?

We will see cloud computing emerge only after we learn to let go of isolation based concepts in mechanical performance. The internet IS in a way – cloud computing – we just have some very Kludgy protocol for shared cpu processing at the moment.

Serializing at the scope of the CPU for problem solving in distributing computing has plenty of room for breakthroughs and improvement – Whoever is at the gateway to that, wins.

The PC is dead already, Microsoft just keeps releasing new colors and shapes, that’s about it- no new breakthroughs, even the Touch screen has nothing to do with the OS, and we’ve HAD touch screen now for 15 years, and what’s this ? NOW ? it’s new ?

We might experience exploit of TCP/IP IV and VI so great a new network inftrastrucute – stripped of nationalism emerges.

.us never took off anywa

32 GB of flash RAM is $70 – a 32 GB drive is probably 1/2 that.

It’s ALWAYS been about $1 a GB, but these new TB drives at $200 and $300 – make that $0.33 / GB.

Sounds like RAM is about $2 / GB now.

As that gap closes, we’ll start to see more PC’s without hard drives, just like we saw PC’s without 5 1/4 drives, then the 3 1/2 floppies showed up, now you don’t see 3 1/2 floppies anymore.

RAM will be the next storage, flash RAM, and likely replace hard drives when the price per GB goes down on RAM- and it’s getting there.

RAM beats the hard drive for communication speed as it uses the databus directly- but with high speed networking, we may see more people choosing to remote their storage.

I have seen Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all attempt to encourage remote storage.

When storage is remote ? and .net offers it’s promise of platform independence, remember, Microsoft went with ECMA on .net and the specs are open to the world, I know people that have created a free c# based on MS specs -thanks to ECMA – so MS may have shot themselves in the foot there, OR really were and are going for the Google based ad revenue approach, because frankly, write in MS .net ? Run anywhere.

Still plenty of time for new paradigms to emerge.

Google OS will be good for portables. MS is to big to see itself in front of any mirror, and has dropped the ball on MS CE.