

ZumoDrive is going to change everything - echair
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/01/zumodrive_is_going_to_change_everything.html

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markessien
ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. There was an app exectly like this
back in 2001 or so. Back then, it did not work because the connections were
too slow and space was not cheap enough - at the moment, it will not work for
those same reasons.

There is no doubt that there are a lot of people who will use this - but it's
not yet ready for mainstream. It's much easier to store you stuff on an
external hard drive than on Zumo, and till it becomes easier, this will not
really hit.

The startup will be profitable very quickly, they will gain hundreds of
thousands of users, but ZumoDrive does not represent any big change in
computing... for now.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
It seems to me the fundamental question is whether the amount of data or
reliably available bandwidth grows faster.

~~~
jerf
Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just
barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures,
music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd
estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a
power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me
beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video,
too, for her it could be even more.

Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say.
Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger,
but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there
are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to
predict.

That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is
growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local
processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since
penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache
architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local
processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five
nanometers has a huge performance impact.

If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the
processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of
legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story
is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a _fool_ of epic
proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!)
Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be
partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be
a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is
hard, and easily consumed.

(And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud
is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as
reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent
(as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far
better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm not so sure about the cloud. That huge amount of data comes with a lot of
complexity as well and much of the data is only really valuable if you can
share it (video) or combine it with data from others (data mining). If data
needs to be close to the CPU, it could mean that both live locally or both
live in the cloud.

Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically
sustainable in the long run. On the other hand you're always going to need
idle resources to cope with peak demand. It's never going to balance out
completely, even in the cloud.

I don't think data growth is going to level off. There are so many untapped
sources; sensor data, 3D models, biometric data, etc. But I'm not sure people
will process all that data locally. I'm not even sure where locally is. People
move around, so the latency issue does not just arise when they're at home,
next to their game console super computer thingy.

I worked on location based systems in the past. Latency was a big problem then
(and probably still is), but having a PC at home with 16GB of RAM and a TB
hard disk doesn't help.

The scarcest resource in mobile devices is not memory or bandwidth or the CPU,
it's the battery. So for the time being, serious number crunching is not going
to happen locally on mobile devices.

There are so many factors and I know so little of potential technological
breakthroughs or even plain physics. Technology doesn't advance linearly.
Batteries could suddenly sustain 24 hours of biometric number crunching. There
could be Gigabit WiSuperMax in the air in 5 years time. I don't know.

But I feel people don't want super computers at home. I even block flash
simply because it keeps my laptop fan busy. I tried that world community grid
software a while back, but I just couldn't stand all the noise and heat.

I doubt that people will keep buying high powered general purpose computers.
My guess is that we'll have our game consoles, and our mobiles and various
sensors and the data is going to be streamed straight into to google's or
Microsoft's data centers. It makes me feel a little uneasy though.

~~~
anamax
> Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically
> sustainable in the long run.

Economic sustainability is a function of cost and benefits, not utilization.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
But benefits have a lot to do with utilization

~~~
anamax
Benefits are value received. The value that I get from a home computer do not
depend on how little time it spends in its idle loop (or even turned on). The
value also doesn't necessarily depend on how often I use it. (A home
defibrillator is extremely valuable even if it's only used once, and fairly
valuable even if it's never used.)

~~~
fauigerzigerk
There are opportunity costs. If I buy a hard drive that I never use I could
have bought shares of amazon instead. By your definition, money could never be
wasted or used inefficiently. If I waste money and my competitor does not,
then it's not economically sustainable for me.

~~~
anamax
Opportunity costs have nothing to do with utilization. Moreover, they're
covered in my initial comment "Economic sustainability is a function of cost
and benefits, not utilization."

Low utilization may imply "waste" but cost and benefit is what matters.
Benefits that I get for the costs I incur determine whether buying a new PC is
a good idea, not how idle it is.

In fact, trying to drive to maximum utilization frequently results in higher
costs and lower benefits.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
If you deny any link between benefits and utilization, then I understand your
argument. But I think your argument is wrong because it contradicts the very
purpose of buying capital goods.

You buy capital goods because utilizing them makes you a profit. Just owning
them does not. But I agree that this is just a general rule which is not true
in all situations, particularly not in economic downturns.

If I buy 3 TB of hard disk space expecting to serve 300000 customers and then
only 100 customers turn up, I have wasted much of my expenditure because it's
useless. If I buy a dynamic amount of hard disk space from a cloud service on
demand, then I have not wasted that money.

So, clearly, opportunity cost has a lot to do with utilization if you assume a
positive connection between utilization and profit, which you apparently
don't. Go ask any airline about it :)

~~~
anamax
> If you deny any link between benefits and utilization, then I understand
> your argument.

I deny it because there isn't any link - "excess" resources don't reduce
benefits.

> But I think your argument is wrong because it contradicts the very purpose
> of buying capital goods.

The purpose of buying capital goods is to receive more benefits than the costs
incurred, the metric being benefits-costs/costs. (Note - benefits are not
profit.)

Benefits don't depend on utilization. (While the amount of money that 100
people will pay me to fly them from NYC to LA might depend on how full their
plane is, it isn't affected by me having 1 vs 1e6 planes parked in AZ.)

Utilization can affect costs, but the connection isn't always strong.

For example, my PC could usually get by with 400MB of ram. However, several
times a year, I get significant benefit from having 1GBy. That benefit easily
exceeds the cost of 500MBy of ram, even the "utilization" of said extra ram is
low. (And no, the cost of renting ram when I need it isn't less.)

Note that the "utilization is key" argument would suggest that I'd be better
off with 400MB of RAM than 500MB. That's clearly absurd because 400MB costs
more than 500MB.

And then there's the difibrillator example. If I only use it once, is it
useless?

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is that
in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital goods,
based on your expectation of utilization. You must have an idea of utilization
because that's what determines cost and hence profit. That's the link I was
talking about and it doesn't contradict your parked airplanes example at all.

The original question we were discussing was whether buying excess resources
was economically sustainable. I think we can agree that economic
sustainability depends on profits. Higher costs reduce profits and therefore
threaten economic sustainability.

Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always
strong. No, it's not always strong, but it is strong enough for entire
industries to focus on exactly that issue.

People are fired right now because they cannot be "utilized". Planes are
rented away so they do not rot in AZ hangars. It's because machines lose value
over time. Owning them without being able to make money out of them means you
lose money every month. So spare capacity becomes a huge problem if growth
doesn't meet expectations.

Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and
reduces costs. If your expectations are wrong, you haven't spent the money
buying the hardware either. Many dot coms would've been very happy to accept
that logic in 2000.

But of course you pay a premium for that flexibility and if it turns out your
growth expectations were right, you may have been better off not paying that
flexibility premium. It's an insurance contract against the risk of wrong
expectations.

~~~
anamax
> You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is
> that in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital
> goods

I'm not misunderstanding you at all. I'm pointing out that your terminology is
non-standard and inconsistent.

There is no link between benefits and utilization. Utilization only affects
costs.

> Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always
> strong. No, it's not always strong,

The original claim was that low utilization was always unsustainable.
Conceding that the relationship between utilization and costs is not always
strong is an admission that said claim was wrong. It is strong in some
circumstances but not others.

The specific example was mostly idle computers, the claim being that having an
idle computer is unsustainable.

> Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and
> reduces costs.

Not always. Consider my home PC. I could have gotten one less powerful for
somewhat less money. The less powerful one would suit my needs much of the
time. Moreover, said computer is idle much of the time. However, the costs of
trying to optimize for utilization are significantly higher than the costs of
just having a reasonable computer, even though the utilization is low.

The problem with the "actually use" argument is that there are costs
associated with flexibility. That's why I mentioned 400MB of ram. (Which
reminds me - that use of "flexibility" is somewhat idiocynratic. Having 1GB of
ram is more flexible than having 200mb and going out and renting 800mb on
demand.)

However, that's just me. So, let's find out if you're any different. Do you
own any devices that are significantly underutilized? Why?

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tdavis
I like ZumoDrive, but I can't understand why anybody in their right mind would
want all of their stuff in "the cloud". I'm still not comfortable with
_anything_ in the cloud, though I cautiously make an exception with Zumo
because I want all my music everywhere, dammit.

To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely
relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything. And it
surely should not be considered secure, unless all my data is heavily
encrypted in transit and storage.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely
relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything._

This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in
your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy
and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by
electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload
bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored
there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and
the power doesn't glitch.

The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary
scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of
your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives
are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.

You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move
from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and
recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of
work, and I'm always behind.

As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds
of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds
of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives
(except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that
the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in
turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with
the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing _Happy Birthday_.

~~~
tdavis
I should have clarified: I think online _backups_ are a great idea (provided
they're encrypted archives). The author of the article says, quote, _I don’t
want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like
buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their
data WITH them is living in the wrong century._

This is a different thing entirely. He's basically saying that personal hard
drives are obsolete as a storage medium, which I find incredibly preposterous.
The "century" doesn't matter; the Internet is nowhere near ubiquitous around
the globe, and I imagine it never truly will be. Of course there are other
concerns: bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies, etc.

I'll be the first to admit that if you burnt down my apartment right now, the
only stuff that would be saved is code for projects I'm currently tracking. I
do hourly backups, but they're all done to a local drive. Everyone, including
me, should have off-site backups if they have important information on their
computer hard drives. That's something I think everyone could agree on.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage
medium..._

I don't think that argument is preposterous at all. I'm halfway there,
already, even with my anemic cable internet connection. It just requires a
shift in thinking. You may look at my setup and say "you're storing data in a
personal hard drive and backing it up online over a fairly slow internet
connection". But someone else could look at the _very same setup_ and say
"you're storing your data online, but because your data connection is kind of
slow, you're keeping a big local cache in a personal hard drive."

It's not as if the distinction between _storage_ and _backup_ and _cache_ is
necessarily cut and dried. They're amorphous and fluid categories. If called
upon to distinguish between them, I'd probably claim that "primary storage" is
a label for "whichever medium is most durable" -- in which case it's not at
all clear that the cloud isn't more "primary" than my hard drive. There are
risks and downsides to storing cloud data (bandwidth, security, fly-by-night
companies), but there are also risks to storing local data (crashes, security,
fly-by-night system administration :), and it's unclear which is better. The
best thing is to diversify and keep copies in several places.

I would never refer to my iPhone as "storage": I conceptualize it as a cache,
a subset of my data that I carry around with me only because the network is
slow, not ubiquitous, and not always trustworthy. I now treat my laptop the
same way. If I weren't too cheap to buy a whole terabyte of S3 storage, I
might well come to think of _all_ my local machines as nothing but local
caches of my S3 data, as well as local backups in case S3 gets taken over by
Skynet or IP lawyers or some other threat to humanity.

------
tptacek
$60/mo to put my whole "200gb" iTunes library "in the cloud", or the same
amount of money to buy a much larger storage appliance for my home.

~~~
cperciva
Agreed. As someone who sells online backups by the byte, I should be trying to
get people to back up all the data they have -- but as I routinely point out
to people, some stuff really doesn't need offsite backup. If your house burns
down, there are lots of things you're going to be upset about losing; a
collection of downloaded MP3s probably isn't one of them.

~~~
guruz
I disagree. Losing my MP3 collection would mean losing part of my identity I
had over the years.

It's really interesting/funny to look at the different stuff and say to
yourself "Did I really like this? Did I really go to concerts from these
bands?"

But of course, the cat/dog and the girlfriend would need to get out of the
burning appartment first :)

But 60 USD? Probably not. :)

~~~
swombat
Agreed. In fact, one of my friends lost over 1TB of painstakingly collected
mp3s (mostly scene stuff, prog house, techno, sets, etc), and was devastated
by the loss. It took him over 10 years to assemble that collection.

~~~
cperciva
I did say _probably_. Most people don't take music quite as seriously as your
TB-collecting friend.

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seshagiric
ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. From box.net to liveMesh there are
simple to complex solutions. With Live Mesh you not only can access your
'share' from anywhere you can also remote login to your home PC from anywhere
and vice versa (yeah access office PC from home even across firewall).

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andrewtj
Perhaps if you're in a connectivity rich part of the world this cloud storage
and computing stuff is alluring but for those of us with imperfect
connectivity it represents more inconvenience not less.

~~~
jhancock
absolutely. Try using this from China ;).

~~~
toisanji
just wondering, are you in china, I currently am in guangzhou.

~~~
jaaron
I'm in Hong Kong.

