LOL *NSFW* *The new Demote thread*

I sure many corps work like that already, its been like that for decades for me, no compute in office, all somewhere in mainland Europe, it's what makes it so easy to work anywhere and could be on almost anything if the company didn't like to restrict hardware.

 

Yeah, and before you know it, they're charging £3k for a thin client

 

Those machines look like they’d make for brilliant little USFF boxes.

However… You just know they’ll be pre-loaded with encrypted firmware that forces it to act as a “cloud PC” client. Of course let’s not forget the implications of jail-breaking that firmware, which can potentially include criminal charges for “bypassing a technological protection measure”.

That’s great for you, I’m sure it makes your job easier.

However. I tried estimating the cost of an Azure Virtual desktop that matches my work laptop’s specs - you don’t get pricing information for “365 Cloud PC”, it’s a $PoA type affair, so Azure Virtual Desktop was the best I could do. I got to about $170 per month for a machine that matches the RAM spec but only has 8vCPU - I couldn’t even find a suitable alternative for the GPU in the M2 Pro.

Let’s say it’s $150 per month, easier maths.

I’ve been here since Dec 2023, so that’s 28 months so far. At $150 per month, it would have cost $4,200 to provide me with a “laptop”. As opposed to the ~£2,500 that this laptop originally cost, which likely has at least another year or two of serviceable life left in it.

And we haven’t even got into the “less tangible” aspects, like “a fantastic display”, or “a keyboard that’s surprisingly good to type on”, or “the best trackpad I’ve ever used”, or “all day battery life”. Or, for that matter, providing me a suitable portable device with which to access the virtual machine.

I love the idea of “dumb terminals” and “remote compute”, where your “PC” is just a terminal to access a much more powerful back-end somewhere else. It’s potentially a much more efficient use of compute resource, and I’m all about “reuse over replace”.

But sometimes there is absolutely no replacement for local compute. And I absolutely don’t love it when I have to rent it by the minute from one of only a handful of unfathomably rich corporate overlords.

 

Just to make you feel better about "AI"... (/s)

https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

 

It works well until the internet goes down but even if we had local machines licences check etc are done over internets so you would still be doing nothing.

Where it works is you don't often use all the power all the time, so you don't have this behemoth under your desk with unnecessary costs required, especially the level required to get a chip out, many hundreds of Gigs of RAM all the cores across numerous machines via distributed computing you have a much more modest user machine, I don't even know the specs, enough for most day to day stuff, I've probably got more power at home but that's because I don't have my own datacentre, I can just submit a ticket and add cores and ram in minutes, access to all the power, if the fixed farm machines aren't enough simple. Also helps that its 24hours resource, so when you are not using your resources, the resources are there for others.

A bit like geforce now, I have a pretty awesome gaming system, it cost more than I dare to think about but I can log on to there, have more power, more VRAM etc, for a 15quid a month, pretty nuts really, just need something dumb like my TV to play it on. The cost of my PC would probably sustain that monthly for the rest of my life and I'd never have to upgrade as they would do it. OK from a gaming perspective it is not quite a good as native but still its pretty decent for most casuals.

Back in the day we used to have local Sparc Stations, well even further back transputer based VAX let's not go there , these have massive maintenance and support costs and the cost to scale up high while I am sure the datacentre is not cheap, it's going to be more efficient and easier to manage than lots of machines at differing hardware specs over time and easier to scale up build out etc. so you can see why companies do it.

 

Like I said, if it works for you, great.

But it’d be a shame if Nvidia started increasing prices. Or effectively limiting you to 4hrs a day and charging extra for more time.

 

I was thinking the same, 65w PSU, seems a bit much for a dumb terminal but probably to run local spyware, pretty sure that is all we have laptops for due to the load of all the tracking clients.

 

Oi, don’t fat-shame, they’re trying their hardest.



Honestly I didn’t see specs, I only skimmed through the various links, and I was mostly looking out for pricing.

 

Larry Ellison lets the mask slip...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-fNzsRDUwaI

 

"For some reason people want to keep their private data private"
Really Larry? So you don't mind if we share your private data?

But none of that matters, because Oracle is happy to share all of that private data as long as it's in an Oracle database - including, I'm guessing, mySQL databases as well...

 

And this is why nothing is ever made better by the involvement of Oracle.