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On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Jack Oley wrote:
What are the group's thoughts on the cloud? I think that there's a lot of advantage in terms of user friendliness and up to date security, etc., but the flip side includes security (!) and for me, the most negative aspect, dependence. Too much reliance on the Net is foolhardy.
What is "the cloud" to you? It has so many different meanings depending on who you talk to )-:At one level it's just hosted (virtual) servers. At another it's a full-on suite of applications hosted on someone elses servers with you running a thin-client type thing locally (e.g. the upcoming google PC)
... which is more or less what Google Docs are - the application runs locally (written in javascript running inside a browser), but your data is hosted ... well, somewhere else. And you might not know where (and does it matter?)
Or you might have an application that you test small with a few GB of RAM and disk, then decide it needs more, so push a button and it's seamlessly transfered to a bigger platform... Or push another button and you have 3 more platforms (great if your application scales that way), etc. (Think Amazon EC2).
Or cloud storage? Have a network drive accessable ove the Internet - you need more space, just push a button and there it is... (think Amazon S3)
Or just a lowly virtual server where all you need is 512MB of RAM, but one day might need more.. (Think Bytemark, or even Drogon Systems ;-)
And so on...I actually hate it when people tell me their application is "in the cloud". It's meaningless. (Even though I've used it myself - and even blogged about it)
You might want to read this - but he's not finished writing it all yet: http://www.bluegrasscs.com/home/blog/archives/91
Local contingencies are an absolute must and SSDs, cheaper chips and smaller form factors are facilitating this. Synthetic and 'artificial' intelligence will help greatly with security, back up and efficiency, but there's an ever increasing green price to pay for all of this so I think we have to use the cloud judiciously, not just chuck our lot in.
Spinny disks will be with us for a very long time yet, so don't dive them up and jump of the SSD bandwaggon. People have been going on about AI since before I was at uny (30+ years ago) and it's still not there. Right now I'd not trust security to a computer either.
Gratuitous, 'always on' connection is unwarranted, un-needed (for most private users) and undesirable.
Trry telling that to the people who want to download > 1TB of data a month. I want an always on connection and most people these days want it and use it, even without thinking about it. Want a TV guide? Want the weather on your Joggler? Want a map on your PC, want a phone number on your mobile (smart) phone, want to synchronise your calendar with your phone/email/wife, etc. We've already got it and are using it daily.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq