Texas > Baylor in CWS
Not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on lately. Now that I’m a working man, I don’t get to do too much during the week. The internship by the way is going well I think. They’ve been keeping me busy with different projects and I like the pace of everything so far. The stuff I’ve been doing so far has generally been new to me which keeps things interesting. The people I work with are all cool as well and don’t seem to mind me asking for help from time to time. The company is in the process of interviewing some new developers, so on Friday we all got to go out to lunch with the interviewee on the company’s bill. They say in the economics world TANSTAAFL, but if it’s free to me then I’m happy.
I was reading online about how Google is going to take down PayPal with a new service called Google Wallet, and it reminded me of an idea I had a while back about Google phasing out Microsoft. Google easily has one of the biggest computer farms in the world for it’s search engine with over 300,000Ghz of processing power and 6,000TB of storage space. What if they built a similar farm and started offering computer accounts to be used by the public? Instead of having to a buy a new computer that may cost upwards of $2,000, a customer would just have to buy a thin client (manufactured by Google perhaps?) capable of opening a VNC connection and pay a monthly fee for their Google account. The user would just fire up their thin client and open up a remote desktop on the Google machine’s where all their information is kept. Google loves linux and is a big open-source advocate so they would be able to offer all sorts of free software to their users. A customer would never have to worry about losing their data because it’s redundantly stored by Google. A customer would never have to worry about their computer crashing because all the computers are managed by Google and are easily replaced. At most the customer would have to buy a new $200 thin client and then they’re up and running again. I’m sure there are many issues to be raised with this idea, particularly ones of privacy. Also, given current bandwidth limitations, computer gamers wouldn’t be interested in something like this because streaming a game over the internet isn’t possible. This is definitely a viable solution for families however, where nowadays it’s not uncommon for every kid to have their own computer. Just remember, you heard it here first.
