The Future Of Computing

Dr Pedanticus has been considering the future of computing. This is his prophecy. He is the voice of reason.

Computing will be the new "miles per gallon" issue to hit all data centres...basically, with the cost of energy sky rocketing, we just can't afford to keep all these computers in data centres running all of the time

Computing will need to switch off when not in use - and that includes parts of servers not required.

Computing will need to learn to eliminate extra weight - the software bloat...in operating systems, in development frameworks. Get back to basics...and start coding efficiently.

Computing will need to de-deduplicate data - because we can store 1TB of data on a disk, doesn't mean we should. We can't consume it, so why store it, over and over again?

Computing will need to go on a diet - do we really need a fully blown operating sysem with all its complexity and configuration options. Just get the damn code to run on the virtual machine, with only the libraries it needs to function.

Computing doesn't have to worry about caching complexity anymore - memory is so cheap, so why do we have to worry about the issues of Object Relationship Mapping, Caching, Buffering and all that stuff, when you can put the whole damn dataset into memory!

Computing will need to tidy up/visit the spa - applications need to show less data AND clearer information. Less is more in this case. Think about design. Think about form - do we need to actually see something, why can't it be audible instead?

So simpler the better. Very small computing units, on single cores all linked by efficient IPV6 networks, with code running in memory (not cached to disk)

8 June 2011

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