PCs Are a Useful Tool For All the Family and Are Now More Affordable Than Previously
Modern laptops are everywhere. The progression of Net technology has also guaranteed that accessing the internet is speedier than ever before, and Wi-Fi cafes where you can access the internet automatically for free are becoming increasingly common. Many are light-weight and portable. If you combine the use of a dongle in areas with no Wi-Fi connection with using Wi-Fi in cafes frequently, your Internet scanning bills will stay comparatively little.
Many cell-phone providers offer inexpensive laptops that can be utilized with a dongle, that allow you to connect to the internet for a set quantity of time before it must be replaced.
If you like a smaller model, why don’t you try a netbook? Many key makers are making smaller, more portable versions that cost a fraction of the price of their premium laptops.
Thousands of Hours of Work Lost in a Click
This week has provided me with a few challenges.
I lost months of work in one fell swoop when my computer crashed. Having not backed up my system this meant that I lost all of my music, videos, photos, products, e-books and documents. This constituted several thousand hours of work and memories saved onto my hard drive.
Apart from the loss of my work came the added expense of replacing my computer. This served as a hard hit initially. It is fair to say that it took a few days to fully process the learnings of this.
Then I had my epiphany….
Could Online Storage Be the Way of the Future?
Nearly 15 years ago, a little company called Juno provided free internet and email access in exchange for displaying an ad-bar during internet browsing. The storage space you got with the mail client was minimal by today’s standards, and even when you switched their pay service you only got about 5 megabytes of storage space. Fast forward a few years; Microsoft and Yahoo are in the e-mail game, competing with the likes of AOL. Yahoo’s mail service begins offering a 100 megabyte email service, which Microsoft’s Hotmail soon matches. Even later, Google enters the market, offering an unprecedented 1 gigabyte of data, though only for users invited to the beta test of their Gmail service. Now, many email providers are in the gigabyte game, though Google still remains one of the largest email service providers, offering over 7 gigabytes of storage for the cost of a signup. Of course, along with the mail storage offered by these providers came websites offering a similar service, though for data instead of mail. Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload became hosts for data that consumers needed stored, which they would then be able to send to others to retrieve, or could get it back themselves at a later date or different location.
With a push for faster data transfers and superior internet providers will come an increased ability to store data online; not only in “cyberlockers” like those listed above, but also through new services which will be able to provide data over the internet in real-time. Google already has services which work like this to an extent (Google Docs, for example,) though these are small scale examples. A larger-scale example of this might be storing a large program on a private off-site server which you could connect to and run from any computer. The potential uses for this are limitless, though the clear advantage would be the ability to produce and store programs larger than the average consumer level hard-drive can reasonably hold. Of course, the issue of processing comes into play, but that could be remedied itself by utilizing on-site processing to perform tasks, and shipping coded data on the fly.
As the world tries to find the next “big thing” in storage, will we continue to develop personal physical media, and simply increase the storage space of our internal/external hard drives and disk mediums, or will we move toward more digital solutions? The answer to this question will almost certainly be decided by the market, but either way, the future looks bright.
