Ahh..a little sanity about the cloud..

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/15/intel_fellows_talk_cloud/

 

Some very good points in that Register article. Thanks, Longboard. I tried out a "cloud" OS just this past weekend. I spent an hour or so with Jolicloud 1.0 where they've moved away from desktop apps and storage. Yes, it's pretty and extremely simple. But...(after the pretty screenshot)....



But...(there's always a but)....I was dumbfounded to discover that Jolicloud will only work if you sign-in(!) each and every time you use the OS. They call it a "Social OS"...I call it a "Snoopy OS." If you sign-in every time you use your computer (no way around it) it's no different than the old AOL. They know every single thing you do from sign-on to sign-off. I don't mean you sign-in like a Windows login, you actually sign into the Jolicloud service.

Will Google be so brazen as to try this? Needless to say, my one-hour experiment with Jolicloud left me jaded about an OS "in the cloud."

 

I've never cared for the whole cloud thing. Once your data is on someone else's server, it isn't your data anymore. And as bad as a widespread internet outage would be now, having everything in the cloud would bring us all to a dead stop.

 

I agree with you, but let's not forget that this "in-the-cloud" thing is nothing new. It's as old as Internet is.

We all have e-mail services, right? And, unless we're running an internal one, then we also are in-the-cloud, when talking about e-mails.

 

Do you expect to access the cloud OS without logging in, sort of like just surfing to another web page?

I agree that internet outages would be a big issue against going for this type of tech.

If it isn't on your computer isn't it in the cloud?
I have been using my OS in the cloud since 1997.

What would be the point in having 2 OS's?
One to boot my system, then a second to do everything else, and only in the cloud.

 

Okay, I plead guilty of being terrible at detecting sarcasm. You were just joking, right?

 

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions i recall . . . .
I really don't know clouds at all.
-Joni Mitchell

My problem: I could never decide whether to compute from the cumulo nimbus or cirro stratus environment.