The future is old fashioned

Perhaps it has something to do with the mammoth amount of work i have to do, but I just had an idea, followed by others.

Look at sites like del.icio.us This is the future. Forget roaming profiles which carry lots of junk on them and lumber computer systems, forget local home directories that hold the information you need... on another computer.

The future is distributed information, I'm looking forward to a browser implementation of del.icio.us for my favourites. I'm sick and tired of having them unsorted and unyielding on different systems at home and at work (ok true there are a few *ahem* personal "favourites" I don't want on my work system) but on the hole this is fantastic. you can share them and have access to your friends top sites

But the future doesn't stop there. What did i say about "old fashioned"? Well In IT I have spent many years rebuilding and updating computers and the amount of time I spend improving my rate of productivity is incredible (more than the amount of time i spend actually being productive unfortunatly). So when you read about dumb terminals and thin clients coming back that means that all clients are going to be more up to date and on a home network (lets face it many of us geeks are headed this way, or a small business network (for the other geeks) maintaining 5 machines is a pain.

• Updating operating systems
• Updating applications
• Updating anti-virus
• General maintenance when you change something on your network
• Backing up
• etc...

so if you only have 1 main system to maintain and through a little extra work on that one the others more or less maintain themselves you save hours of tech time, yes OK it isn't the fastest or most efficient use of your hardware, like 4GL there are deficiency costs. But the time saving is exponential when you have a network of 5, 10 or 20 workstations (when you get to more than that Its a little out of the "home" area but with the growth in consumer electronics that network with computers including consoles, hand held game machines, laptops even mobile phones. I can see many houses in 5 years time having home networks with 5 - 10 clients where the current almost add-hoc way of doing things will work out costly. the computers that need the performance like games machines or office work horses (note most office computers aren't work horses filling their resources) like CAD and audio/video editing systems will require individual attention and optimisation but for most people simple set-ups will be better. Tie in things like on-line bookmarks, what Java could (have) bee(n), Ajax and a good open source web browser and you have a computer for what will be 80% of tasks (email, Internet, word processing etc...)

do you see my future?

I'm pissed off with rebuilding machines, loosing little things like bookmarks and other irritations. Oh well back to work