The Effects of the Cloud On Business, Education

g8orade points out two recent articles in The Economist about the rise of cloud computing. The first discusses how software-as-a-service has come to pervade online interactions. "Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology visionary at IBM, compares cloud computing to the Cambrian explosion some 500m years ago when the rate of evolution sped up, in part because the cell had been perfected and standardised, allowing evolution to build more complex organisms." The next article examines how the cloud will force a "trade-off between sovereignty and efficiency." Reader pjones contributes news that the Virtual Computer Lab will be supplementing more traditional computer labs at North Carolina State University, and adds, "NCSU's Virtual Computing Lab and IBM are offering the VCL code as a software 'appliance' for use in schools to link to the program. Downloads are available at ibiblio at UNC-Chapel Hill. The VCL also is partnering with Apache.org to make the software available and to allow further community participation in future development."

Comments

letter to the cloud

[ocularDeathRay]

dear cloud,
please stop crapping up the front page of slashdot with your buzzword laden stories. I have not been this annoyed since everybody started "surfing" the "information superhighway". I hope you soon turn to "rain" and fall from the "cybersky" and die.

thank you,
umbrellaman

Re:letter to the cloud

[causality]

dear cloud, please stop crapping up the front page of slashdot with your buzzword laden stories. I have not been this annoyed since everybody started "surfing" the "information superhighway". I hope you soon turn to "rain" and fall from the "cybersky" and die. thank you, umbrellaman

Amen. Imagine something like BitTorrent but instead of receiving and transmitting data among many other clients, you instead receive and transmit slices of computing power AND data among many other clients. I would perhaps call that "cloud computing" in the same way that you could call BitTorrent "swarm downloading". I would liken it to the distributed SETI processing or the distributed efforts to crack various encryption schemes, except more general-purpose.

So instead of a single monolithic machine centrally running everyone's programs, something more like a Beowulf cluster centrally runs everyone's programs. As others have pointed out, this really seems to be just another iteration of the mainframe model. I share parent's wariness of anything that is so thoroughly buzzword-laden.

Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody really needs to do a good job to convince me that "cloud" is not just a new name for the mainframe. Really.

Cloud apps...

[blahplusplus]

... really have a long way to go IMHO. The user interface for many websites and webapps is horrible, and I doubt they will ever fully replace offline apps (i.e. photoshop, 3d studio max, etc, etc), until we have a quantum leap in bandwidth + latency reduction (i.e. some kind of 'quantum' internet).

I like a lot of google apps, like Google notebook, Gmail, etc, but they are nowhere near as good as a well made offline app. Too many apps lack developmental time and focus, IMHO or lack vision to how the program could be made into a better app, with better integration. So people don't need to juggle many smaller apps which is cumbersome to get tasks done.

Reaction to copyright?

[BountyX]

Could be a reaction to failed attempts to control client side data. By utilizing software as a service you ensure that your programming language and database is never compromised. Naturally, software as a service is ideal for many business models. I feare that the cloud computing will result in a centralization of data one day and hope the integrity of a decentralized system is maintained.

The only problem with this

[kilodelta]

Is that whether you want to believe it or not, cloud computing is a subscription service.

Company I work for right now shells about $250 a month for Central Desktop, plus another $12 per mailbox for 26 people. Oh and add about $14 per Blackberry for about 8 people. Adds up to $674 a month, or $8,088 a year.

I frequently make the case that a little shoebox server could run Linux with Qmail and Apache on it and we could get the whole kit and kaboodle for lots less than $8K a year.