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.

  • @[email protected]
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    185 months ago

    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

    • @[email protected]
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      155 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          95 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