Re: [Userops] Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis.

[韋嘉誠]

On Apr 10, 2015 8:27 PM, "Christopher Allan Webber" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) writes:

> > Or to embrace and extend the FSF's recent slogan: There is no Cloud,
> > there's only other people's (very convenient and efficient!)
> > computers.
>
> Having started my career working at fixing machines in
> $BIG_CLOUD_COMPANY datacenter, I have some skepticism of the efficiency
> thesis here.  I think "cloud computing" has probably increased power
> usage a lot (and also discarded hardware) since users are now running
> both a machine at home and portions of many machines remotely they don't
> know of.
>
> But it's hard to quantify, so I guess it's not really a point against.
> I'm just skeptical of the argument.

Maybe we are agreeing. I mean that X CPU cycles in a datacenter are cheaper than in my home, but it's also likely that because they are cheap and accessible, we are using more of them than before.

So datacenters have probably increased the power used for computations, and that may be bad, but still if we are looking at "should I run this particular process in my old laptop, my HDMI stick, my Raspberry Pi-equivalent device or on a small VPS", the VPS is probably the most efficient.