I've still to hear a cogent explanation of how running your own servers can bring you the main "cloud" benefit, i.e. only paying for the resources that you actually need.
Remember, Microsoft Bob was once a disruptive technology too.
In the literal sense that it disrupted the lives of those who installed it, I guess.
But in the more specific sense of "disruptive technology", MS Bob failed to disrupt anything.
The thing with disruptive technology is that it's very difficult to predict which ones are going to succeed. The rule of thumb is to invest in 10 potentially disruptive projects, with the expectation that one will succeed enough to fund the nine failures.
The whole point of a disruptive technology is that people like it so much, that it disrupts the "bad" old stable status quo. e.g. UNIX disrupted the mainframes. Hydraulic excavators disrupted chain diggers. LCD disrupted CRT. etc.
Come on - find these good people an alternative. Easy non-techo install. Encryption would be a bonus. PHP based would be nice for ongoing popular support.
... absolutely must not run on a cluster of servers for fault tolerance. Because that would make it a cloud, and they hate that.
Why are we nerds so bad at naming things? Instead of "the cloud" why don't we stop calling a spade a "iBigSpoon" call "the cloud" what it is -- OPS, or "other people's servers".
I think cloud is a pretty decent name for what it is. If you want to get pernickety, it's a "cloud of servers".
Just as a normal cloud is made of water droplets, or a cloud of gnats is made of, well, gnats. A server cloud is made of servers.
They might be other people's servers. They might be your own. The technology does not specify that.
Despite your bringing it up in every cloud related thread, your 'OPS' is not going to catch on.
"cloud computing" is just a sexy name for "centralized computing" or server-based computing, which is a throwback to the '50s-'70s. People seem to have forgotten why everyone was so excited to be able to get away from that model in the first place.
People were mostly excited by instant response times, which couldn't be replicated over a 1200 baud modem, and by whizzy graphical user interfaces, which couldn't be delivered over the networks of the time.
Neither of those are problems for a well written web app now.
Another aspect was being superuser on your own machine, a big release in the days of the BOFH. But your target cloud user doesn't want to be a system administrator. They'll gladly let someone do that for them. But any company that gets BOFH on their customers, is going to see those customers go elsewhere.
But, "review" suggests somebody at Google *will* look at that content. Imagine that -- some drone at Google will be looking at your private work
This part is certainly a big, big concern. I can understand why Google feels the need to do it -- they want to avoid facilitating a paedophile ring or whatever -- but normal users should expect that their data is not ordinarily looked at.
OTOH I'm sure there's something in the Google TOS about this. Ah here we go:
- 8.3 Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service.
IMO just the possibility of this happening at all makes the whole thing suspect, and could bite you in the ass right in the worst moment. "Sorry boss, I can't share that report because Google thinks there's porn in it. We'll have to wait until somebody at Google looks at it". I'm sure that would make for an interesting day.
To be fair, you can always save-as HTML/RTF/DOC/etc. and send your boss that.
Why is google worrying about whether your content is even appropriate or not? Are they going to stop a neo-nazi publishing their beliefs? They're awful, but free speech is more important.
This is a concern, but remember we're talking about the free service here. Google's free services are great while everything works, but if you need a human being's attention, you're likely to be waiting a long time. I've had bad experiences with YouTube publishing glitches.
I'd hope that the paid Google Apps service has much better support. Can anyone confirm?
Meanwhile, in these cases, all that these people were unable to do was make their docs public. They could continue to edit them. They could presumably share them with specific contacts.
I think there needs to be a fix for this, but I don't think it's the end of the world for SaaS.
If not the government, then who? Saucer People? Mole Men?
A L0pht type who gets off on comms hacking? Someone hoping to glean trading tips from the chatter of financial workers?
Yeah, it could have been the government. But it could easily have been anyone. As others have pointed out, the equipment necessary is cheap and non-specialized. This stuff was floating around the RF spectrum unencrypted. Note that the entire archive is only 13MB compressed. When I say it wouldn't be expensive, I mean you could log all pager traffic for a year, for well under $1000.
Pagers are used all over the world and have been for decades.
Pagers were never widespread in the UK, nor I think in mainland Europe. SMS dominated before the pager market could take off. I believe pricing issues slowed SMS adoption in the USA.
Let me translate for you: the "interception" here was by the government. The "security issue" is that somebody in the government leaked that info, or (less likely) that it was swiped by someone outside the government.
Anyone could have been logging all that pager traffic. Not necessarily government. With 2009 technology, it wouldn't even be expensive. In 2001, it would only be a little expensive.
Do we have the technology for Open Source miniatures to work? It's certainly easy enough to make a lossy reproduction of a suitably designed miniature, by making a mould and melting some lead. 3D printing could become mainstream soonish. It just needs enough people to be interested.
That sort of makes your post a bit redundant, or at least misplaced.
It was meant more as an analogy. If you need to go back in time 10 months to see the analogous situation, so be it.
I suspect that Apple removed DRM precisely because enough of their users had started to become aware of the genuine practical problems with having their content locked into Apple players. They were responding to consumer demand, and to competition from music sellers who didn't have DRM.
Likewise cloud users will become aware of the lock-in issue. Cloud software providers will provide export tools, becasue consumers will want it, and if they don't provide, their competitors will.
Seeing it as a marketing ploy strikes me as silly since people are not yet informed about such things. They hardly understand DRM yet..
Google seems to believe that if they're popular with geeks, it'll trickle down to everyone else. It seems to work.
When the Google search engine first went public, they didn't have even close to the whole internet archived. Their spiders were starting with the low hanging fruit, and what Google engineers thought users would want to find first. As it happens, they chose a lot of techie sites. Google always beat the rival search engines in finding Linux FAQs and reference documents, and putting them near the top of the results.
I think this led to geeks recommending Google to their friends. I think that strategy has stayed with Google. Whether it still works, that impressing the geeks helps get non-geek users, I'm not sure. I am sure that pissing off the geeks would be disastrous for them.
People are stupid when money comes in to question. Many choose a little bit cheaper, but more crappier thing over a quality product. That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
Maybe people buy at exactly the price/quality point they want. Am I stupid for buying a cheap Seat Ibiza rather than an expensive Ferrari Testarossa? I don't think so. The difference in utility I'd get from the Ferrari is worth less to me than the money I've saved.
Given the choice between a $200 netbook and a $1000 high-spec laptop, one has to ask, is the extra stuff you can do worth $800? Different people will have different answers to that question.
ChromeOS requires a google ID to log in. Imagine that, if that isn't vendor lock in I don't know what is.
You don't know what vendor lock in means, then.
It means that you're prevented from leaving a vendor's product because your assets are tied up so tightly with it. For example, a company has a million line VBA application that's critical to the running of their business. That company is locked into Windows.
You could leap into ChromeOS world with both feet - use nothing but ChromeOS, GMail, Google Docs - and not be locked in. Because any time you liked, you could ditch ChromeOS for Windows, download your email archives and docs, and never touch a Google product again.
If it weren't for competition between OSs, we'd still be using MS-DOS.
Windows only came about because of competition from the Apple Mac.
MacOS and Windows only got things like pre-emptive multitasking because Linux showed it was possible on consumer level hardware.
I remember thinking there was something inherent about PC hardware that meant you had to reboot in order to change IP address, until Linux proved otherwise. I'm *certain* Windows wouldn't have fixed this without competition from Linux.
Which is why the iPod has gone from #1 to last place in the mp3 player market. Wait, no. That hasn't happened.
Um. I don't follow you.
I have an iPod. I *like* my iPod.
But I won't buy DRM'd tracks from the iTunes store, because I want to be able to play the music I buy on my iPod *and* on my no-name supermarket MP3 player.
Now, I knew the issues before getting stung. But imagine the person who's spent hundreds of dollars on iTunes tracks, then buys, some other MP3 device with the very reasonable expectation that they'll be able to play it.
That's someone who's once bitten, and should be twice shy. It doesn't mean they won't buy another iPod -- indeed, it even means they're more likely to buy another iPod, though gnashing their teeth as they do. It does mean that in future they'll be asking more questions about what they can do with files they buy or create.
I think you misunderstand. My understanding is that it's a BIOS option, or maybe even a physical switch, marked "Developer switch". As in "turn this on if you want to be a developer". Any end user can choose to turn it on. It means they're disabling security features that are supposed to benefit the user.
I don't see how your links about censorship are relevant.
No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
That's a feature. It's supposed to make you feel safe.
From what I understand, it'll be possible to disable the check, with a "developer switch". After all, Google wants outside help with its open source OS. I can't find a source to cite right now, but why assume the worst?
Slashdot Mirror
I've still to hear a cogent explanation of how running your own servers can bring you the main "cloud" benefit, i.e. only paying for the resources that you actually need.
It only works if you're big enough.
Isn't that done by a robot?
Yes, people in the same office modifying common "documents" with the goal of avoiding any physical contact.
Or people in different continents, running a start-up together with almost no upfront costs.
Remember, Microsoft Bob was once a disruptive technology too.
In the literal sense that it disrupted the lives of those who installed it, I guess.
But in the more specific sense of "disruptive technology", MS Bob failed to disrupt anything.
The thing with disruptive technology is that it's very difficult to predict which ones are going to succeed. The rule of thumb is to invest in 10 potentially disruptive projects, with the expectation that one will succeed enough to fund the nine failures.
The whole point of a disruptive technology is that people like it so much, that it disrupts the "bad" old stable status quo. e.g. UNIX disrupted the mainframes. Hydraulic excavators disrupted chain diggers. LCD disrupted CRT. etc.
Come on - find these good people an alternative. Easy non-techo install. Encryption would be a bonus. PHP based would be nice for ongoing popular support.
... absolutely must not run on a cluster of servers for fault tolerance. Because that would make it a cloud, and they hate that.
Why are we nerds so bad at naming things? Instead of "the cloud" why don't we stop calling a spade a "iBigSpoon" call "the cloud" what it is -- OPS, or "other people's servers".
I think cloud is a pretty decent name for what it is. If you want to get pernickety, it's a "cloud of servers".
Just as a normal cloud is made of water droplets, or a cloud of gnats is made of, well, gnats. A server cloud is made of servers.
They might be other people's servers. They might be your own. The technology does not specify that.
Despite your bringing it up in every cloud related thread, your 'OPS' is not going to catch on.
"cloud computing" is just a sexy name for "centralized computing" or server-based computing, which is a throwback to the '50s-'70s. People seem to have forgotten why everyone was so excited to be able to get away from that model in the first place.
People were mostly excited by instant response times, which couldn't be replicated over a 1200 baud modem, and by whizzy graphical user interfaces, which couldn't be delivered over the networks of the time.
Neither of those are problems for a well written web app now.
Another aspect was being superuser on your own machine, a big release in the days of the BOFH. But your target cloud user doesn't want to be a system administrator. They'll gladly let someone do that for them. But any company that gets BOFH on their customers, is going to see those customers go elsewhere.
But, "review" suggests somebody at Google *will* look at that content. Imagine that -- some drone at Google will be looking at your private work
This part is certainly a big, big concern. I can understand why Google feels the need to do it -- they want to avoid facilitating a paedophile ring or whatever -- but normal users should expect that their data is not ordinarily looked at.
OTOH I'm sure there's something in the Google TOS about this. Ah here we go:
- 8.3 Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service.
IMO just the possibility of this happening at all makes the whole thing suspect, and could bite you in the ass right in the worst moment. "Sorry boss, I can't share that report because Google thinks there's porn in it. We'll have to wait until somebody at Google looks at it". I'm sure that would make for an interesting day.
To be fair, you can always save-as HTML/RTF/DOC/etc. and send your boss that.
Why is google worrying about whether your content is even appropriate or not? Are they going to stop a neo-nazi publishing their beliefs? They're awful, but free speech is more important.
Tricky one. Link to their content policy: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148505
"Hate speech" is explicitly forbidden.
I think one angle is "We accept your right to free speech, but we won't be your vehicle for transmitting it."
But it's a bit of an ethical minefield, I accept.
This is a concern, but remember we're talking about the free service here. Google's free services are great while everything works, but if you need a human being's attention, you're likely to be waiting a long time. I've had bad experiences with YouTube publishing glitches.
I'd hope that the paid Google Apps service has much better support. Can anyone confirm?
Meanwhile, in these cases, all that these people were unable to do was make their docs public. They could continue to edit them. They could presumably share them with specific contacts.
I think there needs to be a fix for this, but I don't think it's the end of the world for SaaS.
If not the government, then who? Saucer People? Mole Men?
A L0pht type who gets off on comms hacking?
Someone hoping to glean trading tips from the chatter of financial workers?
Yeah, it could have been the government. But it could easily have been anyone. As others have pointed out, the equipment necessary is cheap and non-specialized. This stuff was floating around the RF spectrum unencrypted. Note that the entire archive is only 13MB compressed. When I say it wouldn't be expensive, I mean you could log all pager traffic for a year, for well under $1000.
Saddam Hussein is dictator of Iraq. The US can't do shit about him.
Oh wait...
Yeah, but he had weapons of mass... ... oh, right you are. Carry on.
Pagers are used all over the world and have been for decades.
Pagers were never widespread in the UK, nor I think in mainland Europe. SMS dominated before the pager market could take off. I believe pricing issues slowed SMS adoption in the USA.
Let me translate for you: the "interception" here was by the government. The "security issue" is that somebody in the government leaked that info, or (less likely) that it was swiped by someone outside the government.
We don't know that.
Schneier on the issue: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_text.html
Anyone could have been logging all that pager traffic. Not necessarily government. With 2009 technology, it wouldn't even be expensive. In 2001, it would only be a little expensive.
I'm reliably informed by the colleague sitting next to me, that there are "loads" of free wargame and RPG rules out there.
I Googled, and he's right. Sample hit: http://www.miniaturewargaming.com/index.php/mwg/category/Rules%20Universal/
Do we have the technology for Open Source miniatures to work? It's certainly easy enough to make a lossy reproduction of a suitably designed miniature, by making a mould and melting some lead. 3D printing could become mainstream soonish. It just needs enough people to be interested.
That sort of makes your post a bit redundant, or at least misplaced.
It was meant more as an analogy. If you need to go back in time 10 months to see the analogous situation, so be it.
I suspect that Apple removed DRM precisely because enough of their users had started to become aware of the genuine practical problems with having their content locked into Apple players. They were responding to consumer demand, and to competition from music sellers who didn't have DRM.
Likewise cloud users will become aware of the lock-in issue. Cloud software providers will provide export tools, becasue consumers will want it, and if they don't provide, their competitors will.
Having to log into Chrome with your Google ID is *something*. It's a not-so-gentle hint to use Google's online apps rather than someone else's.
But it's not lock in.
Feel free to criticise it. But don't criticise it by calling it something it isn't.
Seeing it as a marketing ploy strikes me as silly since people are not yet informed about such things. They hardly understand DRM yet..
Google seems to believe that if they're popular with geeks, it'll trickle down to everyone else. It seems to work.
When the Google search engine first went public, they didn't have even close to the whole internet archived. Their spiders were starting with the low hanging fruit, and what Google engineers thought users would want to find first. As it happens, they chose a lot of techie sites. Google always beat the rival search engines in finding Linux FAQs and reference documents, and putting them near the top of the results.
I think this led to geeks recommending Google to their friends. I think that strategy has stayed with Google. Whether it still works, that impressing the geeks helps get non-geek users, I'm not sure. I am sure that pissing off the geeks would be disastrous for them.
People are stupid when money comes in to question. Many choose a little bit cheaper, but more crappier thing over a quality product. That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
Maybe people buy at exactly the price/quality point they want. Am I stupid for buying a cheap Seat Ibiza rather than an expensive Ferrari Testarossa? I don't think so. The difference in utility I'd get from the Ferrari is worth less to me than the money I've saved.
Given the choice between a $200 netbook and a $1000 high-spec laptop, one has to ask, is the extra stuff you can do worth $800? Different people will have different answers to that question.
ChromeOS requires a google ID to log in. Imagine that, if that isn't vendor lock in I don't know what is.
You don't know what vendor lock in means, then.
It means that you're prevented from leaving a vendor's product because your assets are tied up so tightly with it. For example, a company has a million line VBA application that's critical to the running of their business. That company is locked into Windows.
You could leap into ChromeOS world with both feet - use nothing but ChromeOS, GMail, Google Docs - and not be locked in. Because any time you liked, you could ditch ChromeOS for Windows, download your email archives and docs, and never touch a Google product again.
If it weren't for competition between OSs, we'd still be using MS-DOS.
Windows only came about because of competition from the Apple Mac.
MacOS and Windows only got things like pre-emptive multitasking because Linux showed it was possible on consumer level hardware.
I remember thinking there was something inherent about PC hardware that meant you had to reboot in order to change IP address, until Linux proved otherwise. I'm *certain* Windows wouldn't have fixed this without competition from Linux.
Also, you can change the search engine to something else if you really are that committed to using something inferior.
Blimey; you can fix anything by directly editing an executable file.
Which is why the iPod has gone from #1 to last place in the mp3 player market. Wait, no. That hasn't happened.
Um. I don't follow you.
I have an iPod. I *like* my iPod.
But I won't buy DRM'd tracks from the iTunes store, because I want to be able to play the music I buy on my iPod *and* on my no-name supermarket MP3 player.
Now, I knew the issues before getting stung. But imagine the person who's spent hundreds of dollars on iTunes tracks, then buys, some other MP3 device with the very reasonable expectation that they'll be able to play it.
That's someone who's once bitten, and should be twice shy. It doesn't mean they won't buy another iPod -- indeed, it even means they're more likely to buy another iPod, though gnashing their teeth as they do. It does mean that in future they'll be asking more questions about what they can do with files they buy or create.
Then make it so the end user can, too.
I think you misunderstand. My understanding is that it's a BIOS option, or maybe even a physical switch, marked "Developer switch". As in "turn this on if you want to be a developer". Any end user can choose to turn it on. It means they're disabling security features that are supposed to benefit the user.
I don't see how your links about censorship are relevant.
No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks ... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
That's a feature. It's supposed to make you feel safe.
From what I understand, it'll be possible to disable the check, with a "developer switch". After all, Google wants outside help with its open source OS. I can't find a source to cite right now, but why assume the worst?