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Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech?
Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between. "I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Atonomo.us mailing list. For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had. The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source."
If you mean a big hit that everyone knows.
I don't think that's what they meant by turning Hotel California into an adjective or analogy.
I believe the one-way street attribute would probably be the easiest way to describe it. Although there's more subtle caveats to 'Hotel California' as a lyrical work. Though interpretations have been numerous (I've heard it compared to prison), the writers describe it as an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in Southern California--especially the music industry (that we all know and love). From the Wikipedia entry:
"Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into LA at night. Nobody was from California, and if you drive into LA at night... you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that... what we started writing the song about. Coming into LA... and from that Life In The Fast Lane came out of it, and Wasted Time and a bunch of other songs."
So if I may elaborate the analogy may be trying to describe cloud computing as something you're kind of forced into and it would seem stupid not to take it ... but then you start to realize that it's not everything it was made out to be at the beginning. You are promised success and all the resources imaginary but then at the end when you realize you don't have control over the situation and your data or privacy becomes seriously important to you, it's nowhere to be found and irreclaimable. The song's final lyrics before the guitar solo and double stop bass: "You can checkout any time you like/But you can never leave."
No, this isn't unique, Lynyrd Skynyrd felt the same way as did The Kinks and I bet if I sat and thought I'd come up with much much more. I guess you'd be better off explaining it outright than calling cloud computing Hotel California but the English language allows one to play and invent I guess. The author might consider the younger crowds though for this piece.
My work here is dung.
Clearly Asay doesn't know about Google's internal team specifically working on ways to get your data out of the cloud. http://www.dataliberation.org/home specifically details what data you can pull from each of Google's services and how to do it. They concede they haven't "liberated" all the data from every service, but they're working on it.
So data checks in but doesn't check out?
That's more like the Roach Motel.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Or even just keeping a copy of your own data on your own system.
Thats why I don't call it "cloud computing", I prefer OPS (other peoples servers). Its more self-explanitory.
Oh that's the Hotel CA reference.
I was thinking that I can stab it with my steely knife, but I just can't kill the beast...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Bingo.
Let's see, you upload images and text onto Facebook. Now, what's stopping you from uploading the same images and text onto MySpace? _Nothing_.
The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?
That's the business deal here. There's structural lock-in, but not data lock-in, in exchange for free use of the structure. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, and even if you do, you remain free to use your images and text however you want.
I've got an Ubuntu computer here. It's loaded with data and configurations. If I migrate to Windows or Mac, it's going to take hours of work before the new box is 'my' box in the same way, though in the end it will be done. Is Ubuntu or anyone else an asshole because of that?
This is the idiot that posts this nonsense... http://slashdot.org/~mister_playboy
He forgot to hit the anonymous button on his last post. I still don't understand what the point is... these guys never even respond when I ask.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price.
But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.
But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.
Because building and maintaining any remotely reliable IT infrastructure is expensive and requires expertise that is, for most companies, utterly irrelevant to their core business.