The Cloud
December 30, 2009mike No Comments »The Cloud, a favorite topic of mine. I will probably write a hundred articles on the topic in my life, well I hope not, but who knows.
For those of you not up on the Cloud, the Cloud is something like a unicorn everyone has heard of this mythical being but no one has ever seen one. It is said to possess magical powers, but most of them a regular old horse could do.
The regular old horse in this analogy is the computer. Maybe that computer is a PC, a PDA, a smartphone, an SD card, whatever. the “computer” is locally saved, stored, and accessed data. Subject to corruption or failure, but otherwise right there when you need it. You can take it with you without the need to have 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, or whatever linked up to the sky. You can pass it off to someone on a disk, CD, memory card whatever. It’s your’s and your’s alone.
The Cloud on the other hand does what the computer does: save, store and access your data with a little twist. You have no idea where that little string of binary known as your vacation photos is. Maybe its in California, maybe Taiwan, maybe its bouncing off a low orbit satellite you really have no idea and that’s the way they like it.
The master of the cloud is whoever you trust to make your cloud device and/or Google. You have lost control and your data is spinning, not at 8000 RPM on a mirrored piece of plastic in the beige box next to you, but over miles and miles of cables, bouncing of dishes, to who knows where. Sure you can pick up that data when you are on a trip to Rome, but you also could have brought a tiny USB drive with you just the same and you wouldn’t have to wonder weather CDMA or GSM works in the EU (and how much Ma Bell is going to charge you to roam) or how many Euro per minute Barnes & Noble Italia charges for using their WiFi connection. You simply slap in the stick and keep working on that silly paper you’re writing about the Cloud.
To quote the great Kanye West “I’m just sayin’” the cloud is good, but the computer had the best music video storing ability of all time.
Join the discussion