As with anything it all depends on context. In the context of
developers/IT people and platforms, your description is a reasonable
one for the term cloud computing. In the consumer context, the term
has a different meaning in it's most common use. In that context, the
term is used to refer to any service where the majority of the
application's execution and storage happens on centralized servers
which completely abstract any operational concerns from the user.
Examples would include gmail, dropbox, google docs, etherpad, github,
and squarespace.
All of these services allow technically competent but not necessarily
sophisticated users to setup, configure, scale, and use systems which
previously they would have had to have hired an IT administrator to
setup and manage. They don't need to worry about dealing with
outages, running out of resources, or keeping track of backups. This
is enormously powerful and valuable for a very large section of users.
Finally as a bit of a bonus, there are a number of collaboration type
features which become much easier to implement when users are all
working on a common system.
If the privacy concerns are too great of a risk for you and you are
willing to spend the time and money to operate your own systems that's
absolutely your business and your right. Understand however that for
many other people, the ability to fill out a form and not have email
infrastructure be a problem for their company anymore is incredibly
valuable.
A side note on the privacy concern/trust issue: think about the
incentives for Google or any other large "cloud computing" company.
They basically make more money in the logn term by increasing the
number of people who use their services. Anything they do to
significantly violate a user's trust decreases the number of people
who will use their service over the long term. At the end of the day,
they may do stupid things (e.g. expose your address book via buzz) but
they have very strong incentives to correct those mistakes quickly and
to learn from them. When evaluating a service you need to look at
more than just what could they do and think about what makes sense for
them to do. Look at the consequences for them if they do something
"evil".
____________________________
Sean O'Connor
http://seanoc.com
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 10:55 PM, Chris Knadle
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Monday 01 March 2010 21:54:51 Matthias Johnson wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:14 PM, Mark Wallace
>
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I see. the problem is that I just experienced over 60
hours with no
> > internet access. Wouldn't that make it impossible to do
much of
> > anything with my computer?
>
> Ok so this is probably the biggest back and forth on lug I
have seen
> to date and it has morphed slightly off the original email
but to me
> this is the most damning thing about cloud computing. If we
were in an
> always connected world it might work but we are not. Also
the fact
> that open wifi is slowly becoming illegal these days the
filtered
> options for public wifi will probably be less than
desirable. Cloud
> computing is definately something not needed IMO. It also
brings up
> the issues of fair use and such. Which laws apply? Where
the server
> resides or the user?
>
> Matthias Johnson
I'll throw this in, as it might answer some of your questions
concerning
"cloud computing" such as... "Whaaat is it?!?" [Cat from Red
Dwarf...]
I recently went to an IEEE meeting about cloud computing (Nov
2009 I think?).
As far as I could tell the term "cloud computing" mostly means
"an automated
method for a user to request and for a system to provision a
virtual machine,
with the specified resources". In other words, you visit a
web page to order
a virtual box, you choose what kind of setup you want from a
list of
predefined configurations (one of which hopefully fits most of
what you need),
you click "go", and in a couple of minutes you've got a remote
box available
to you that you can ssh to, where you can modify the setup
from there.
Sounded like from there you can automate spawning virtual
machines with
duplicate configurations if you need to scale some network
application.
As far as I could tell, it's mostly geared towards businesses
that can use
that kind of automation in order to handle a network load that
varies. It's
not an end-all be-all solution -- it's essentially a niche
market.
For an individual, there isn't much need for this kind of
system unless that
person is running a business like Craig's List, Paypal, etc --
something that
needs to be able to scale. Whether "cloud computing" could
host services like
these more cheaply than doing it "in-house" isn't clear. If
it isn't, then
"cloud computing" is essentially a solution in search of a
problem.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group
http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS
Auditorium
Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration
Apr 7 - Nagios
May 5 - Android
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration
Apr 7 - Nagios
May 5 - Android
