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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

It'll probably bounce back. We've been here before, when computing was centralized and everybody logged into the mainframe. Then it turned out that to have independent computers gave users a huge advantage and helped control costs.

Now, we're back to centralized systems- and I couldn't believe it when I watched the shift: What first caught my attention that this could get serious was gmail. Then g-office (whatever they called it then). Meanwhile a whole host of other services started.

I was developing a desktop app because I still wasn't convinced that people wouldn't prefer having their software and data "in hand," as it were.

I expect a new advantage will emerge and we'll want our machines and data back.

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It's the tradeoff between local computing power and bandwidth/latency. It flips back and forth every couple decades based on what's expensive and what the last big advance was.

Even within the current era, render on server, render on client, ajax (the mix), etc.

We're seeing it now in gaming. Vidcards are the cost of a whole system now, games have become huge, and fast storage is still expensive; but bandwidth is increasing along with A/V streaming being perfected, so someone figured out how to minimize apparent control latency and now games are streaming. Once vidcards get cheap and SSD storage capacities catch up to 150GB games it'll flip back until the balance tips again.

Not enough to make even moderately latency-sensitive gaming worthwhile, though. I don't see that getting better unless there's widespread building of data centers all over the place to keep the services right in your neighborhood.

I’ve been pretty happy with PS Now, Shadow and GeForce Now. I show maybe an extra 50ms of latency max, more like 30ms avg.

I wouldn’t play really competitive shooters that way but it’s low enough to not bother me even in mouse/keyboard FPS (for the PC services). For controllers it’s completely negligible, like playing with a Bluetooth device or on a 2015 TV.

That said, I’m in Santa Clara County near one of the major Shadow datacenters, probably the others too, and I have gigabit. I am in the ideal situation you describe.

So is a lot of the world though. US is super rural for its economic weight but that’s not the norm. Most developed countries have much higher density and better networks. I think we’ll probably just end up dragging behind the curve until we mesh the flyover states better.

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