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Dev boots a PC from Google Drive cloud storage — a storage-less laptop becomes a truly cloud-native computer (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Ersei, the developer behind this so-called Cloud Native Computer, says the project was primarily a “silly” pursuit. There is also a problem with booting from Google Drive currently being very slow. However, the dev also boasts that “the possibilities are endless” and would welcome any companies or individuals who wish to get in contact and discuss commercializing this project or something related to it.

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[–] FelipeFelop 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can see two issues here:

It’s not really a storageless computer. It’s using EFI as storage to build the ramdisk.

What happens if you need to change things because of a change of cloud account, change of cloud API etc etc

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

No computer is ever really storageless. Even the BIOS has to be stored somewhere. If you didn't have any storage, you wouldn't be able to load any code, and it would not be a computer, it would be a brick.

[–] FelipeFelop 1 points 5 months ago

The point is that calling the computer storage less is what’s wrong.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Not necessarily, you could build all of the boot stuff into hardware, have it send all input to the cloud server, and only have enough hardware to render images. Boom, no storage, everything is static.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 9 points 5 months ago

Where is that boot code kept? Is that not storage? I mean, even magnetic core memory is storage. An array of vacuum tubes is storage. If you wired up a bunch of transistors to perform mathematic operations, do the wires and transistors on the breadboard count as storage? Maybe not. If you did it on an FPGA, I would say yes, though.

This is all semantics, of course, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless. Ask a web developer and a BIOS ROM developer about what's programmable, and you'll get two very different answers. :P