Mistrust of Today's Technology

narramissic writes to tell us that Sean McGrath has an interesting look at a general mistrust of today's technology and draws a comparison to the proofreading of photocopies. From the article: "The constant availability of web services out there in the cloud is one such idea. Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."

Comments

Re:Jargon usage

[bladesjester]

My assumption was that "the cloud" was sort of in reference to the diagrams in Comer's book on TCP/IP. The sections of the internet (and of networks in general) that weren't really of interest for the sake of the discussion at hand were often represented with clouds which the lines went into and came out of.

For example, discussing how something got from a desktop to a computer (at a really really high level) might be depicted as:

Desktop -> Cloud (labeled as "internet") -> Server

Given that the professor I had for internetworking and operating systems was a student of Comer's, I got to know the material and conventions used in the book pretty well.