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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!"
When that stormy weather takes out power supplies to the data centres.
Didn't we have a story in the last couple weeks about Amazon's cloud servers getting taken out by a large storm and the resulting power outage or something like that?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Recent outages of AWS and other providers demonstrate that weather does affect the "Cloud" platforms.
... that believes that the cloud is this magical place disconnected from the utility grid, immune to lightning strikes, floods, storm surges, etc. etc.
-- the cake is a lie
Surveys suggest most surveys are wrong :)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/amazon-web-services-knocked-offline-by-storms/
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!"
You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."
Stop it. Stop it right now.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
Ironically, one of the bigger outages we had where our AWS instances went down was due to ..... weather.
BOFH collection, which includes but is not limited to:
blade computing requires routine sharpening
grid computing can sometimes get out of alignment and needs to be centered and degaussed sometimes
clustered computing includes a creamy nougat center
network degradation can be attributed to stains on the network fabric that didnt come out after the last wash
the datacenter certification plaque specifies the air pressure for the tires as well as the type of oil to be used in the cloud
Good people go to bed earlier.
Survey Reveals a Majority Know "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather, Along With Pretty Much Everything Else
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-on-that-cloud-thing-that-everyone-else-is-talki,28789/
Funny they list facebook, twitter, online photo sharing, online banking and shopping as "the cloud". It would be interesting to hear from TFA what on the Internet does not count as "the cloud" ?
Had noticed TFA is making fun of people who think stormy weather can "interfere with the functionality of the cloud" when just a few weeks ago an electrical storm triggered a massive outage in the Amazon "cloud".
For icing on my cloud cake we have marketeers commenting about how everyone has a favorable view of the cloud when the only thing that seems clear is too many people including the author does not seem to have a coherent grasp of what it is their talking about.
Bad weather can knock "the cloud" offline or make access unreliable, Bad weather can knock down suspended power and data lines, interrupting access between you and the cloud. It can flood service tunnels, basement and first floor switches and short out improperly sealed equipment.
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.
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!"
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.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'." -- Isaac Asimov
This Slashdot article may as well have said "average public school-educated Americans unable to distinguish their own (obese) ass from a hole in the ground."
Sure that may sound like I am being negative. But it's so hard not to be negative about this. Without even considering its finances, there is good reason to question the long-term viability of my nation. You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous. It's not even just anti-intellectualism, as though that were not bad enough. Emotional intelligence is on the decline as well, and it manifests as a bunch of people who generally mean well, but are far too self-absorbed to understand things so basic as "needlessly blocking a doorway in a public place is rude".
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. That's why when I say "self-absorbed" I don't mean it in terms of narcissism, I mean it in terms of having become so thoroughly alienated from their fellow humans that they are unable to consider how their actions affect others. Generally the USA is becoming decadent like every other great nation just before its collapse.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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".
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The root cause of this belief is what allows companies to sell cloud computing.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
This particular problem with the US is not with technology education, it's with antiquated power and communications grids. Though fortunate not to be exposed to any wars on home soil in the last century, it means many of these systems consist of 100 year old wires strung up on wooden poles rather than buried underground like much of Europe, etc. Weather thus *significantly* affects Cloud computing in many areas of the country...
ahahah let's all laugh at the ignorance of the masses... I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers/doctors/plumbers that laugh at the /. crowd for their lack of knowledge...
Most people in IT can't agree on the same definition of cloud, or what it is and what it is not. Is cloud an application, infrastructure, platform, API? It can be.
In other news...
Most Americans think RAID is a bug spray.
Yes, a huge data center in Ireland was knocked out by a severe storm last year, causing major disruptions. Why people seem to think Cloud computing = distributed computing I have no idea. See http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/07/lightning-in-dublin-knocks-amazon-microsoft-data-centers-offline/
51%? So what this tells me is that a majority of respondents didn't understand enough to care, or didn't care enough to understand and provided random answers. This is what happens when you take squishy social science methodologies and put them in the hands of even squishier marketing consultancies. Just bend the scientific method over and shove a white paper up it's ass.
In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
Om, nomnomnom...
Roger that...there are still Telco lines out there that are wick...eh, I mean paper insulated "dry" core.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I was told once by the cable crew who came to fix my cable, that because of squirrels eating at the cable, water had leaked in. As it was a 3 pole run,, some stupid amount of *gallons* of water poured out of the cable.
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.
And then nuke it from orbit yes?
No, we'd nuke it from the cloud.
I was told once by the cable crew who came to fix my cable, that because of squirrels eating at the cable, water had leaked in. As it was a 3 pole run,, some stupid amount of *gallons* of water poured out of the cable.
I had a cable guy try to tell me that the plasma in a plasma TV was the same as the plasma in human blood. I gave up trying to explain it to him as he was pretty adamant about it. I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.
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.
This cloud== distributed computing. Everyone else? Not so much.
So how is it different from client-server? Other than "It's HIP, it's NEW, give me the mooola!".
No way! I don't know if Stormy Weather is alive but if she is she must be in her 70s. Bump, grind, BUMP - there goes another server off line! More bumps, grinds, etc and whoops there goes her top. What a rack! STACK OVERFLOW.
Nate
We just had a cloudless day around here. I wonder how well cloud computing works on such days. How would parts of the cloud communicate with each other?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.
It's what's left over after they make Soylent Green. By-product.
>>>Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject.
Which is actually the OPPOSITE of what modern schooling teaches. The current method taught in education is that admitting you don't know will get scolded by the teacher ("Shame on you! Should have read the chapters!"). Plus it is better to GUESS on the typical mutliple choice test than leave it blank because you don't know.
So more of this government schooling would just lead to MORE of these types of answers from Americans: "Is cloud computing affected by weather?" Um.... well it's a cloud, haha. So I'll guess yes. (Surveyor writes down yes.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
>>>strictly speaking the cloud is 'remote storage and remote processing', which is a bit of a mouthful
"Mainframe computing"
Term invented in the 1960s or 70s (not sure which). Why do people think it's necessary to come up with new terms for old concepts? The other day I read about something called a "plugin hybrid" that is supposed to be revolutionary leap forward in automobiles. Then I realized it's the same concept as the old 1920s Electric Cars that were sold with add-on generators. New term; old concept.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Had I mod points, I'd mod this informative just to see people's reaction.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."
You are my favorite person for this week. And it's only Wednesday.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
I just now had a fantasy of a town without hipsters... Of being able to go into a coffee shop and not have to stand behind a skinny guy in a long leather jacket with a shaved head ordering a drink so complicated that the clerk has to take notes. ...and then demand in a screechy voice that she check "in the back" for whatever esoteric food item he wants that they don't have.
John Pinette voice: Get out of the liiiiine.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I worked in a Fortune 115 company where the VOIP went down, and along with it all incoming calls. Root cause was Squirrel. Yes, the cute furry toothy bitches.
Official explanation was: squirrels had gnawed off the insulation. One particularly unlucky squirrel had successfully penetrated the insulation, fried itself, and everything around it.
Traditional squirrel fry was held, a good time was had by all. Also, 2/3 of this post is true.
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"
Is his last name "McCoy" by any chance?
Dark Reflection
You are absolutely right. There is no reason to worry about losing your data on the Cloud.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Surely they need plasma from Soylent Red and Blue too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Obviously that is the 1/3 of the comment that isn't true.