Several years ago, in a conversation my husband and I had on future technology and national security, my husband said that hard drives would cease to exist in PCs. Instead, we would have dumb terminals with all our files stored on remote servers hosted by various companies or the government. All backups would be provided by the host company. It wasn't around at the time of the conversation, but with the increasing viability of Open Source Software (OSS) and the push toward standardization, people wouldn't need to have their own hard drive to store software.

My point is that an article I read today made me think of that conversation. Here's a quote (emphasis mine):

quote:

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The EFF is concerned about a feature in Google Desktop 3 that lets users search their content on multiple computers.

To do this, people have to let Google transfer the files to its own servers.

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For instance, a lot (a lot, a lot, like hundreds of gigs by now) of the data I use regularly is in read-only media. Whereas the things that I regularly edit tend to be only a couple of megs if that (I mean, if you added them all together they certainly wouldn't be even one Gig). On the other hand, a lot of the software I use is either downloaded off the internet in the first place or is regularly updated (or at least can be regularly updated over the internet).

Since the speed of internet downloading and frequency with which much registers software should/must be updated are both increasing, eventually it won't be necessary to keep more than a small amount of the user data for the program on your personal machine. So there really are several factors combining to make it possible to have useful computers that do not have local storage, only memory, processing, and a connection to a network. We see this already in many of the mobile phones and network capable PDAs which have more capability than computers of just a decade ago.

On the other hand, desktop consoles will probably always have disk drives, for several reasons. For one, disk drives are getting cheaper relative to the amount of storage you "need" even though the storage you "need" is increasing by leaps and bounds. For another, it's possible to have a level of data security that just can't be achieved with an internet resource. Then again, more people are using their desktops as fileservers or development stations running/creating/storing at least some unique programs/content all the time.

So we'll continue to see ever more powerful devices that don't have local storage. And a lot of people won't need a device that has a hard drive (or anything similar). On the other hand, as storage becomes cheaper and smaller, it will be easier to include it in devices that don't really need it, and you'll always have users who do need their own storage.

The thing that gets me is the lack of security for the individual user. I laugh each time someone talks about privacy on the Net because it doesn't exist. Just look at how quickly various search engines handed in records of searches for porn simply to satisfy the curiosity of the U.S. government (Google's holding out on priciple since the records won't be part of a criminal investigation).

I think part of my concern is how clueless most people are about how often they're tracked on the Internet. They're offered a tool to make things go faster or save a little money and they download it without a second thought. It took me a long time before I was willing to use OSS on our computer because of privacy fears.

If everything does move entirely over to the Internet I'm sure there will be some who decide to keep some files private, but if most people have their files on a server, the question will be, "What do you have to hide?"