http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ [...] mputer.htm
 
Wow this is probably the stupidest idea ever, it would take what 1 hour for me to load my crysis game? It would be practical for just internet users who play solitare at most. It is impossible for a gamer to use this, unless our internet reaches 100gb/s real soon.  
 
What are your comments?
 
Wander if apple and google are stupid enough to even attempt it.

Not even close to the most stupid idea ever thought of....
It's basically what the internet is now, i.e. lots of servers with files we want on.
the only difference being, the files the so called 'cloud' computer would have would be things we'd use more often and not want to download all the time.

Theres so many problems with it, like loading times for intense games, if my internet is down i cant play single player on crysis or any game for that matter. Nothing but flaws and nothing good about it.

the most stupid thing i ever heard of was a voice activated tv remote control

this would be great for mobile things though. imagine a laptop w/o a cddrive or hdd, or an iphone/any all in one being able to run as a normal computer. other then that, the idea would cause more problems then help.

i think it would be used as more of an option than a completely new computing paradigm for everyone.

I can see a corporation using this idea for laptops.

This is the kind of idea someone who knows very little about the computing world would come up with... kind of like Peter Jackson and his new found video game interest... seriously the guy is an idiot and has no idea what he is talking about.

Sounds like a great idea.  It's called Skynet.

Why do you make the assumption it's going to be used for everything right off the bat?  Of course it doesn't make sense to run any kind of moderately taxing game on that!
 
Personally, as a home user, I don't really care much for cloud computing.  I have enough hard drive space for all my applications, and I'd rather keep my documents on my computer.  It's an issue of trust and control, personally.  However, why would it not be useful for businesses or someone who uses multiple machines in many places?
 
Remember, businesses account for a larger share of the PC market all gamers combined... easily. (unless someone here happens to run a Fortune 500 business?  In which case, I stand corrected.)
 
I don't mean to insult you or anyone else here, but please don't dismiss any ideas too quickly.  You gotta take some risks if you want to get rich.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
 
Apple and Google might be common targets to bash here, but they're not the only companies interested in cloud computing.  Microsoft and Amazon, among many many others, are interested in this.

it is a great idea for company pc, so IT will spend less time to take care everyone 's computer, no restore pc, no fail hard drive, personal pc will use less power and eaay to get replacement.  The major upgrade and update can done by center server, and all the information will store on the network drive.

 
That's such an ignorant response. Do you even realize how many things are done entirely on the internet today that would have been thought impossible 10-15 years ago? The entire premise of your argument against this is that technology will never increase.  

That statement is as laughable as "Who will ever need more than 640KB of memory?".

Although this idea is more SCI FI than reality right now, it may be feasible in a decade or two.  Of course, by then we will all be under water.  

 
I'm not a Fortune 500 business, but I run multiple computers and drop in here at Tom's while other programs are crunching numbers, doing research, or whatever. I also have a gaming computer for the relaxing time.
 
I see three potential probems with this "cloud computing". First is identity theft. Maybe no one here worries about it, and I know it happens as it is, but this would make it all that much easier. The more you put out on the net and in other people's hands, the more vulnerable you become.  
 
Second is the potential loss of your data, games, etc. As an example, a friend of mine uses AOL. Recently, AOL updated its programing and lost all his contact information, e-mails, and a few other things. Its gone forever. What do you do if you have no hard drive, for back-ups if nothing else, but are trusting everything to another company and the other company looses everything? Of course, with the proposed "cloud computing" you don't have a CD/DVD drive so you can't even load anything either. So those pictures that you or some relative took on vacation or whatever can't be loaded onto the cloud drive.  
 
A third problem, and I'm sure it covers at least some people in this forum, is that their surfing of porn would no longer be a semi-private thing. Everything done would be readily seen and known by anyone tapping into the cloud computer. You say you don't care? Ok, for those using pirated copies of games, such thing would be part of the past. How do you pirate something that is only available on the net, and thus can be obtained only by paying for it?  
 
One further thing. If I decide that I don't want to be on the net for any reason, I can presently take my computer and do whatever I want with it, play games, run business apps, whatever, without any connection whatsoever. On a cloud computer, it would only be useful if it was connected to the net. Did a hurricane, tornado, fire, flood, or something else interupt the net connection? On my present computer, as long as I have electricity, it doesn't matter. On a cloud computer, forget it. No net, no computer.

 
Bad news my friend.  This is the future of the internet, computers, etc.  I will bet that within the next 10 years you see most companies moving is this direction.  Its predicted that this is what the console games will become.  Instead of massively priced hardware to buy, you simply purchase keyboard, mouse/controller, basic cpu, and then the actual hardware is located on a server.  
Watch for Microsoft and Apple to offer their OS and software as subscriptions instead of selling the software, you log onto a server and then use all the proigrams you need.  
Now they just need to up the bandwidth and d/l speeds to make it happen.

 
Not that I'm saying we all will/should be using cloud computing in a year, but here are easy rebutals to all of you arguments:
Theft - We shop online, pay bills online, file taxes online etc, etc. All this stuff is already out there and is pretty secure. Yes security breaches do occur, but compared to how much financial info is out there it's pretty rare. Security is always an issue in any communications system and would have to be addressed but it's not going to be such major hurdle that it can't be cleared. I remember when broadband internet first came out and how people warned of the impending dangers of a always-on internet connection.
 
Loss of Data - Hard drives crash every day and very few home users have any sort of redundancy. In a cloud system redundancy would be dirt cheap and everybody would have it. There would still be a risk of some data loss, but in reality it would be much less than if data is stored on a single drive in a home system. AOL is the absolute worse example of any type of computing system. Google on the other hand is much better. Gmail is a great (albiet small) example of how such a system could work.
 
Privacy - Maybe some people still have an illusion of privacy, because that's about all you would be losing going to a cloud system. Your ISP can actively spy on you right now and there's nothing you can do about it- congress just guaranteed that. And are you advocating piracy? What about viruses and spyware? They too would pretty much be eliminated. Are you for are against that?

I doubt it will happen soon... maybe in a decade, maybe in two. Not a lot of people wants to store their personal data online, where they don't have complete control of it.
 
Aside from that fact, a lot of programs are simply too demanding to be run on internet. The supercomputer used to host these programs must be at least exponentially more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Sure, you can easily host online games, but what about single player, like others pointed out? Since everyone is playing at a different speed, are the files downloaded to your computer, or do the supercomputer have to run these games separately on each core?
 
My last point is, how is Google and Apple going to get paid for this? A modern supercomputer easily cost more than several hundred million dollars, let alone the maintenance of the computer, the electricity bill, and others. How are they going to recuperate the cost? What about storage? Assuming each person would need 1TB of space to store all of their photos, videos, games, etc, how big do the supercomputer harddrive needs to be in order to store these files? We're talking about more than several million of TBs here.
 
in short, no, I don't think this "cloud" computer idea is going to succeed in the short run. Computer hardwares are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and with their performance grow exponentially, I don't think cloud computing will take away household computing. What I see is a consolidation of website servers to a supercomputer. However, to actually run these programs online, and store the data, cloud computing simply cannot match the flexibility of household and mobile computing.

 
I don't mean to advocate piracy, only to bring the subject to awareness. And to be clear, I'm fully against piracy and have never been guilty of it. If I can't afford something, I do without it. As for viruses and spyware, while as individuals we wouldn't worry about it directly, the central system would still have vulnerabilities, and because it would be a centralized system, they could do more overall damage.
 
As I said at the beginning of my post, these were "potential problems", things to think about. Will solutions occur? Most like some will, but at the same time other problems are sure to crop up and need to be dealt with. I know hard drives crash from time to time. I've had it happen a couple times to me, which is why I practice backing up all essential data, and not just to one source, but to three sources at minimum. I learned that lesson well about 15 years ago when I had just completed writing a