Survey Reveals a Majority Believe "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather

SmartAboutThings writes "In a recent survey performed by Wakefield Research, it has been discovered that the majority of the surveyed Americans are quite confused about the notion of Cloud, when it relates to Cloud Storage/Computing. The most interesting fact is that 51% of the surveyed persons thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing!"

Comments

I weep for my country

[Isara]

In a saner world, our educational systems would teach science and technology...

Re:I weep for my country

[CanHasDIY]

My uncle is a biological engineer; he was a member of the team who first managed to grow human body parts in rats.

I asked him what he knew about 'The Cloud' the other day; his response?
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"

In a saner world, our educational systems would teach science and technology...

You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."

Stop it. Stop it right now.

Re:I weep for my country

[icebike]

In a saner world we wouldn't let hypsters foist stupid names on an entire industry for things as simple to explain as "remote storage".

Re:I weep for my country

[b4dc0d3r]

You seem to have a severely myopic view of what is important in the world. Until very recently, even cloud providers could not define cloud computing beyond whatever their implementation was. Not knowing what "the cloud" is does not exemplify in any way anti-intellectualism. I think your rant is a generalized one, way off topic, and pretty much a knee-jerk response to any sign that someone doesn't know about something you consider important.

Reading your post history, you realize that you are part of a small minority of people who are aware of the business behind service offerings, whether it is data mining of social networking or broad categories such as cloud offerings. Based on that reading, it should not surprise you to find that people don't care how their phone works, or what powers their website. And they don't want to know. Not because of anti-intellectualism. They just have no need to know, or don't have any connection to people who do know.

Sure they lack curiosity, but we can only say that about this subject, where they may have interests in mechanics or art or cuisine instead.

So you have rated your opinion of the nation on people who don't need to know about something, being asked about that thing, and making a guess based on the information they already have at hand. Or, you used this as an excuse to jump up on your soapbox.

Either way, you are my example of why someone should pity a culture, not the people who were busy minding their own business when a surveyor gave them a pop quiz.

The actual study has a much less exaggerated title, and as far as I can tell from the actual survey, it was a true random sampling. Ask a random person what "the could" is, given no context, and I'm surprised that only 29% said it related to weather. "51%" is described as "most", and as posted above that bunch of people are technically correct that weather can cause problems, including damage from lightning and flooding or just plain power outage.

The margin of error was +/- 3% meaning it could have been as low as 48%. You can't even claim "majority" with those numbers. And this was an e-mail invitation to an online survey. Automatically, anyone who clicked on an unexpected mail to answer questions is an idiot, but my opinion aside this is self-selection. There is no description of what measure they took to ensure the sample was anything other than "too stupid not to click."

So now you got your panties in a bunch over "People who think it's okay to click on e-mail links don't care how technology works." Which everyone here already knew.

Re:I weep for my country

[Obfuscant]

Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject. At least he didn't go and form a strong opinion and start arguing about a subject he knows nothing about.

And, from reading TFA, neither did those 51% who thought that weather would interfere with the cloud. They were asked about it and they answered. They weren't protesting on the streets demanding something be done about the weather to protect their access to the cloud.

You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous.

So you think that people who don't know what the rather nebulous concept of "the cloud" (which is quite appropriate since "clouds" are already nebulous and consist of many different kinds) is "hate thinking" etc. etc.? Quite a leap, I'd say.

They do mean well but they tend to be childish, indulgent, and haven't the maturity to overcome their own thoughts and their own worries.

And people who rant about others who simply don't care about technical things are grown up, mature individuals who are fastidious? By the way, I think you want to call them "self-indulgent", because most people are indugent of others.

I am seriously wondering just how hard it is for an American to immigrate to a small Western European nation and become a naturalized citizen.

I sense that this statement is much like the random movie or TV star who tries to influence voting trends by claiming that "if X wins, I'm moving to England" or similar. It's not hard to move to Europe, but why you'd want to become a citizen there is a mystery. You'd just be stuck in the same kind of situation where you'd threaten to "move to the US" if politics didn't go the way you wanted.

Re:I weep for my country

[roc97007]

> You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."

You are my favorite person for this week. And it's only Wednesday.

I am more worried about the 49%...

[MarcoAtWork]

... that believes that the cloud is this magical place disconnected from the utility grid, immune to lightning strikes, floods, storm surges, etc. etc.

or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / cab

[Joe_Dragon]

or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / cable lines.

Also stormy weather can take down your cable line even if you still have power in your area the cables from your place to the headend may have areas with no power and dead battery (they don't have the number of needed portable generators to cover all of them) in the nodes.

DSL works better and the phone RT's (Remote Terminals) and central offices have a better power backup system.

Re:It isn't?

[sjames]

Yes. The people who believe storms may disrupt cloud computing are 100% correct. Not only can they, but there is a history of it.

As for not knowing what the cloud is, I'd argue that they're in the same boat as marketing and the media that pumps out the breathless cloud stories 24/7.

Satellite rain fade

[tepples]

Or when you're stuck out in BFE where cable and DSL aren't available and rain fade hurts your satellite connection. Not that people who rely on satellite would use "the Cloud" anyway because of the single digit GB/mo caps typical of satellite Internet service.

Re:Satellite rain fade

[aurispector]

Or when people find stupid survey questions amusing and deliberately answer them incorrectly.

Re:It isn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly... I'm more worried about the ones who think cloud computing is NOT impacted by weather. If some random person walked up to me on the street and asked me this, I'd say, "sure, it can", and I'm quite technical.

This seems much like the hand-writing shocked headlines announcing that most Americans think humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time... the only problem being that we DID exist at the same time. Paleontologists consider modern birds to be dinosaurs, so most people are quite correct.

Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma ago> .

In both cases, this shows that most people are not as dumb as the ones giving the survey.

"On Somebody Else's Computer".

[wanderfowl]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Every instance of "In the Cloud", facing a naive end user, should be replaced with "On somebody else's computer". This study shows that people have absolutely no idea what The Cloud is, and that might, just maybe, be affecting their choice of what to upload to it. "I keep our business records in the cloud" sounds sane, but “Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer” doesn't.

Re:Weather does affect it

[Dahamma]

Actually, no, it sounds like it WAS a completely useless question. Most people did NOT realize what the question being asked was about.

"54% of Americans do not know what the cloud is and claim to never have used it. ... also, another alarming number is that 51% of the surveyed Americans think that stormy weather can interfere with the functionality of the cloud."

So, if 54% surveyed had never heard the term, and and almost identical 51% surveyed who don't know it refers to computing services over the Internet, then it doesn't mean people are stupid, just uninformed, and the second number means nothing (of course, the survey doesn't mention how these numbers overlap, which makes it all the more useless).

And honestly, I would bet over 50% of those who BUILD network-based services that could be considered "in the Cloud" think the whole "Cloud" terminology is one of the stupidest things pseudo-technology journalists and marketers have foisted on the public in years. Based on the over-saturation of "the Cloud", I'm surprised everyone isn't starting to call the Internet "the Tubes"...

Re:Weather does affect it

[19thNervousBreakdown]

By that metric weather affects everything, and you'd be asking a completely useless question.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

Most people realize the actual question being asked is whether cloud computing is affected by weather more than other generic things, to which the answer is no, in fact it's less affected by weather than other generic things. What do you prove by deliberately misinterpreting the survey question?

Rank the following in terms of likelihood:

1.) A person thinks cloud computing involves actual clouds.
2.) The people running the survey deliberately asked ridiculous or trick questions in order to get a sensational response that would drive readership and therefore profits.
3.) A person genuinely gave an over-literal response due to the weather's actual ability to take out a data center despite the question being intended to gauge whether a person thinks cloud computing involves actual clouds.

Re:It isn't?

[danaris]

Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?

Eating at McDonalds?

And you think that's a good idea in the first place?

Dan Aris

Re:It does

[Culture20]

A friend of mine transfered his VM instances out of New Orleans datacenters yesterday.