Because the place where they sleep at night, have their clothes, their stuff, the place they go to after work, the place where their phone rings, and potentially even their wife and kids live...that's not their "home."
Yes, a person's worth as a human being can definitively be determined by where they were born. Does it ever blow your mind when you consider that George Washington wasn't a natural-born citizen?
They're willing to do things you're not willing to do. Why does one person's attempts to better themselves, and experience the liberties here in the US (which I served to help protect, in the USMC), bother you so?
I mean when you can take time away from being on public video, told what you can and can not say, carrying papers
Now, how am I taking the current AZ situation out of context? Is racial profiling not occurring, with people being told to show papers? In fact, that's exactly what is occurring. Which means, it is no longer valid to use Europe's habit of asking for papers as an indication that we have more liberties here - since that is now occurring here.
Note also that I didn't really indicate how I felt about the new law, either - I just said that it makes it silly to say we're different in that regard, since we're no longer different.
Thoreau, after being jailed for refusing to pay taxes due to his stance against the Mexican war (oddly appropriate...), wrote a dialogue containing these lines:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,--the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.
So a person with dark skin is walking along, and a police officer spots them and asks them for their papers. Note that can be the primary cause for the contact; the person doesn't have to have been doing anything wrong, they merely need to be a victim of racism. If the person doesn't have paperwork on them, they are jailed, and have to prove they are allowed to be here. Would I run that risk, being white? Nope. And thus, the issue that many people have with the new law.
There's a substantial difference between a shaved 30yo woman, and a pre-pubescent girl. Stating the obvious shouldn't normally be necessary, except when dealing with tired old responses like yours. The shape of a woman changes, they develop a pair of things called "breasts," and also something called "hips." Baby fat goes away. Etc, etc. But I guess if you're just focused on pubic hair, and that's what makes/breaks a woman for you, hey.
If a 30yo woman has a gigantic bush but still has the mindset of a 10yo, hopefully that would be more of a turnoff for you than if the same woman shaved, and started acting like a 30yo. There are benefits to grooming. Cutting to merely/short/ is too much work, and is uncomfortable.
I worry about permanently assigning blame only once those responsible decide they're going to do nothing (or next to nothing) ala Exxon Valdez. Accidents happen, and unless BP acted in gross negligence, and unless they don't put much effort in to fixing the problem, I won't be worried about permanently affixing their name to it.
Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? ....That's not "the cloud" you're referring to. In these parts, we call it the "internet."
UNIX sysadmin for the last 16, even if my title has changed during that time. I don't do any sales. My passion for it is due to two things:
1) it makes sense, and is a dramatic framework improvement. An increasing user base will force applications to be geared for it better. I don't want to have to do goofy hacks to make things like mysql failover properly. Instead, I want their RDS service to improve enough for me to be able to use it.
2) I'm an environmentalist. It always bothered me that every single company in a corporate business park would go to the wasteful expense of building their own datacenter - putting in raised floors, redundant power, cooling, blah, etc. I always wished a business park could work together as a community, and build just 1 datacenter that they all use. Due to duplication of effort in all datacenters, having 10 companies share like this would make total resource usage be 75% less than each having their own.
And guess what? That's what cloud computing allows. It's communal resource usage, in the only way it could ever have been feasible. Companies don't want to share with their neighbors in a concrete way, but something abstract like the modern Cloud offerings is ok for them. Which saves resources, which makes me happy.
The problem with many people who think it's a buzzword is that they think the "Cloud" is nothing but VM hosting with a marketing label attached to it. As I mentioned elsewhere, where and how the cloud resources arrive is irrelevant; they could be entire servers, they could be VMs, it doesn't matter. That part is completely irrelevant. Getting stuck on the idea of a machine at all is an immediate indicator that someone isn't getting the idea in the first place.
This isn't a progression of VM hosting, it's a progression of distributed computing - aka, Beowulf clustering, etc. I was building, programming for, and using Beowulf clusters ages ago. I have people telling me that Cloud is a "buzzword" that haven't even heard of Skyld, or worse - don't know who Don Becker is. If someone pretends to be a sysadmin of any level and doesn't know those things, they have no place lecturing me and saying it's a buzzword.
Which isn't to say that people have to know Skyld & Don to grok the Cloud - just that they must know Sklyd & Don to lecture me on whether it's just the same old thing that's always been.
So yeah, it's not for everything...yet. And as a person that has done plenty of DoD work, I agree it's also not for that...yet. But it will be...especially considering there are DoD "Clouds" in the work that will only be reachable via NIPR/SIPR. Within a short amount of time, any application that hasn't changed itself to be usable on the cloud will have evaporated (apologies for the pun...), imo.
yeah, that's more or less my mark of whether people are getting it (or buying in to it, if you wish to say it that way). If you imagine your "cloud" to be in one specific place...it's not a cloud. The difference between a clouds are dispersed, and cover large areas. They're not merely ponds that happen to be up in the air.
One of my growing list of complaints about Ubuntu is their "cloud" concept, where it's nothing more than a front end to the VMs running in your company datacenter, changing nothing from the last 15 years or so. That's not a cloud - if I can walk over and touch the hardware involved, it's not a cloud. If a single failure can take out every application I have, they're not on a cloud. That's just VM host configuration. And Ubuntu's silly idea of calling remote desktops hosted on EC2 "cloud computing" is ridiculous as well; cloud computing is a progression of distributed computing ala Beowulf - the "hardware abstraction" (ala VM hosting) aspect of it is entirely inconsequential. I don't really care if Amazon gives me dedicated servers for my instances, or VMs running on large hosts - it doesn't impact how I use them. If I'm pointing at an application running on one particular machine, then no matter where that machine is hosted...it's not in the "cloud."
but you have to be seriously dedicated to toast for that to matter
You, my friend, have obviously never had good toast.
That, and I can take a slice of artisan bread, put some bruschetta on it, top it off with goat cheese, and put it in my toaster. The glass window lets me see the horizontally-placed foodstuffs, allowing me to ensure proper cheese meltage. Lets see your walmart toaster do that:P
Plus, I'm an environmentalist, and the idea of intentionally creating trash that frequently makes me sad.
I no longer need to build a tier4 datacenter, to have tier4-level service. If I run a company with 2 tier4 datacenters, and VM farms in each, not only is it incredibly expensive for me to do it but getting my data to the outside world is incredibly expensive as well.
We're starting to reach a progression in our economy indicating signs of communism - shared resource use. When even Wall Street firms start thinking of making their computing resources available after-hours the death of the datacenter becomes something we can see easily. We no longer need them. We no longer need a system administrator per 20-50 servers. I spin up, use, and destroy more in a week than the average sysadmin during the 90s had even touched in several years. My disaster recovery plan no longer has to involve me flying to some bunker in AZ with a laptop, hoping my bgp routes took affect and my stand-by servers are all up to date with recent backups, shipped in from the IronMountain down the road. Fark that noise, for less than the cost of having a single datacenter I can globally distribute my data on not just one CDN, but several.
And you think that's just business as normal? Clearly you've never touched the cloud, dealt with disaster recovery, or dealt with computational clustering.
If you bother to look at that to which I was replying, and if you have the ability to follow along, you'll get it.
"hardware abstraction" in the sense of VMs running in your company's datacenter stil puts you at being concerned with hardware - it's not abstracted. The vm hosts fail, and no matter how you try to heal the VM clients under them it still takes extra actions...if you're still using the old methods. It's not just the hardware that's changing, after all - it's also the applications themselves. As a person who worked with Skyld way back when (I was one of their very first clients), building computational clusters that dealt with queue and distributed application tasks, I am prime to think as you do; that this is no different than what was happening before. However, as a person actually using the cloud properly, I end up disagreeing with you - because it is in fact a shift, it is in fact a new way of doing things. Being able to reference the model makes sense precisely because it is different.
I've yet to dispute that it's a natural progression. I've yet to dispute that many people could see it coming long ago. But it being a natural progression does not mean it isn't different, just like it was a natural progression for the end-user experience to shift to GUI-based over text-based. Was the GUI a natural progression? Could we all see it coming? Of course, but that doesn't mean that GUI is a "buzzword" because of it.
So be the person that thinks grabbing 50 instances across 4 different EC2 regions and tying them to a CDN data source is just the same old, run of the mill thing we were doing 20, even 30 years ago. Be that person. See how employable you are 10 years from now.
And yes, "cloud computing" is a buzzword about making your product deployments extremely expensive, and about pretending that outsourcing is a great thing.
Since i just moved a company's main revenue source from extremely expensive dedicated servers with minimal fault tolerance, to a self-healing, globally distributed, never-down cluster in the cloud...with substantially cheaper monthly costs and substantially easier maintenance...it's your comments that are laughable.
reading comprehension has gone WAY downhill lately on slashdot...
I said nothing about hardware abstraction. A VM farm from the 90s that tried to heal and move to another VM isn't the same as having a dozen cheap instances that spin up and down on a whim, with no concern about whether one disappears unexpectedly.
Was it a crazy shock, an unexpected development? No, certainly not. But that doesn't in any way mean that it wasn't a change in the way things there done. I don't know what planet you've been on, but 10 years ago on this planet if several of your application servers not only crashed, but completely disappeared never to return again, that would be cause for alarm. Now (due to a coupling of lowered expectations of vendor product quality, thanks to China et. al, and the natural progression of the industry), one just creates the applications with the idea in mind that the roles are what is important, not the devices that may or may not from one moment to the next be fulfilling the roles. It isn't some massive mainframe we're all sharing bits of that, when it crashes, takes down an entire company...nor is it a mostly-manual VM farm where someone restores a backup, blah etc. There has been a real shift. Be contrary if you want, if your vision is too short-sighted to see it; soon enough though, you'll make as much sense as someone saying that the development of GUI layers wasn't a shift in the industry as well. "But but...it was obvious!" So what, doesn't mean it wasn't a change anyway. And that warrants something to refer to it by. You've simply missed the boat if you think the "cloud" is merely a buzzword.
The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Prior to 50 years ago, computers were only for personal use?
Listen, I know it's fun to be contrary, but you didn't respond to what I actually wrote at all. It's not a paradigm shift because we're sharing resources, it's a shift because the machines themselves no longer matter. I am still having to remind people constantly that monitoring systems is nearly useless, at this point - one monitors services and response time of the services, with little regard to the hosts those services are running on. The shift was in how applications bounce from one physical machine to another - and no matter how much you want to pretend that everyone had personal computers in the 50s and then BOOM, mainframes came after PCs, you're just bloody wrong. For once in your life, don't be contrary just for the sake of being contrary. It's a completely different set of problems and solutions, due to being a different environment - and the fact that you don't agree strongly indicates that you've merely not done much with it yourself.
I'm currently working out a way to deal with the fact that on EC2, instances disappear, IPs disappear, IPs can't be reallocated for heartbeat situations (no, elastic-ips don't work for that, too slow).
4 options: 1) elastic IP failover 2) dns change (I don't like this since many things don't do lookups after startup, otherwise they'd be horribly slow) 3) the MMM plugin that tries to trick dns resolution changes 4) the special extra I did instead (iptables rewrite of NAT table, which only affects NEW sockets, not ESTABLISHED, etc - meaning whatever is hanging up the first server gets a chance to finish)
I've got #4 working semi-well now, which is great. I have self-healing m1.small spot instances that cost 3 cents an hour, and can keep up large sites. People rag on the m1.smalls, but I get good performance out of them after a few minor tweeks.
In short, "cloud computing" is a very different paradigm than anything the industry has ever seen before, and as a person who has been a UNIX admin/engineer/architech/etc since the early 90's...I'm pretty turned on by the whole thing.
"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
I can't imagine what else in the post you actually thought was just a "buzzword."
woah, hold on there cowboy, I have a nice toaster myself. Fairly similar to the one you mention, in fact. No need to attempt to insult me for saying something, when it wasn't me saying it.
I think it's horrible to say you'd rather buy a crap-tastic product that breaks after a few months, just because it's so much cheaper. My 6-year plan has me hopefully out in the Pacific working on the Great Garbage Patch; last thing on my mind is creating excessive trash intentionally and on a regular basis.
I can't find a manual can opener anymore that lasts more than a few months. They're all made in china, and they all break very quickly. What does that have to do with anything? I mention it because it's a very very simple machine that is very very simple to make well. The quality of products in general is horrible these days, with special thanks to Walmart. Damnit, I'm happy to pay more for a can opener that falling apart and rusting within just a few months. I'm willing to pay more for a shovel that doesn't have a plastic handle that breaks in the first week of non-strenuous work. Why don't I, who have money and desire, have the ability to purchase such things without extrodinary effort? There doesn't need to be 20 brands of toasters that are all made from the same few chinese factories, and are all just as crappy - half that many, and a couple for those of us that want something better? Same with TV shows - other than short periods where I'm just avoiding installation fees, I've not had paid tv service for a decade. Why? Because the shows I like don't even last a season, generally. Those few that do, change to more "mainstream" and become unwatchable.
Every hi-speed internet outfit that isn't hella expensive around here requires you to order the TV portion as well, otherwise they charge you substantially more. So, I ordered tv and internet, and cancelled tv 31 days later. Doing so made my internet connection cheaper per month (with no promotional period), and made the installation free. I would have otherwise had to pay $250 for installation. I point-blank told the person I was going to cancel the tv service after a month and a day, and could they please just spare everyone the effort and not charge me installation, but...maybe my cleavage isn't good enough, cause he wasn't biting.
I still have my original "Orcs and Humans," in fact. And yet, not only did I not get in on the beta, but no one I know did either (which means, they couldn't invite me or whatnot).
Slashdot Mirror
...and sent home.
Because the place where they sleep at night, have their clothes, their stuff, the place they go to after work, the place where their phone rings, and potentially even their wife and kids live...that's not their "home."
Yes, a person's worth as a human being can definitively be determined by where they were born. Does it ever blow your mind when you consider that George Washington wasn't a natural-born citizen?
They're willing to do things you're not willing to do. Why does one person's attempts to better themselves, and experience the liberties here in the US (which I served to help protect, in the USMC), bother you so?
Let's look at what I was replying to:
I mean when you can take time away from being on public video, told what you can and can not say, carrying papers
Now, how am I taking the current AZ situation out of context? Is racial profiling not occurring, with people being told to show papers? In fact, that's exactly what is occurring. Which means, it is no longer valid to use Europe's habit of asking for papers as an indication that we have more liberties here - since that is now occurring here.
Note also that I didn't really indicate how I felt about the new law, either - I just said that it makes it silly to say we're different in that regard, since we're no longer different.
Thoreau, after being jailed for refusing to pay taxes due to his stance against the Mexican war (oddly appropriate...), wrote a dialogue containing these lines:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,--the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.
So a person with dark skin is walking along, and a police officer spots them and asks them for their papers. Note that can be the primary cause for the contact; the person doesn't have to have been doing anything wrong, they merely need to be a victim of racism. If the person doesn't have paperwork on them, they are jailed, and have to prove they are allowed to be here. Would I run that risk, being white? Nope. And thus, the issue that many people have with the new law.
your tired response is tired.
There's a substantial difference between a shaved 30yo woman, and a pre-pubescent girl. Stating the obvious shouldn't normally be necessary, except when dealing with tired old responses like yours. The shape of a woman changes, they develop a pair of things called "breasts," and also something called "hips." Baby fat goes away. Etc, etc. But I guess if you're just focused on pubic hair, and that's what makes/breaks a woman for you, hey.
If a 30yo woman has a gigantic bush but still has the mindset of a 10yo, hopefully that would be more of a turnoff for you than if the same woman shaved, and started acting like a 30yo. There are benefits to grooming. Cutting to merely /short/ is too much work, and is uncomfortable.
...carrying papers...
Haven't been listening to the news about AZ lately, eh?
I worry about permanently assigning blame only once those responsible decide they're going to do nothing (or next to nothing) ala Exxon Valdez. Accidents happen, and unless BP acted in gross negligence, and unless they don't put much effort in to fixing the problem, I won't be worried about permanently affixing their name to it.
But ymmv, I'm not your spiritual leader.
Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? ....That's not "the cloud" you're referring to. In these parts, we call it the "internet."
Speculators would be driven out...a lot of day traders just pooped their pants. I'm buying men's underwear stocks.
So, you're admitting you're a speculator?
using numbers like "4" and "7" to describe "years ago" for this is...odd. I was playing text-based mmorpgs 20 years ago.
UNIX sysadmin for the last 16, even if my title has changed during that time. I don't do any sales. My passion for it is due to two things:
1) it makes sense, and is a dramatic framework improvement. An increasing user base will force applications to be geared for it better. I don't want to have to do goofy hacks to make things like mysql failover properly. Instead, I want their RDS service to improve enough for me to be able to use it.
2) I'm an environmentalist. It always bothered me that every single company in a corporate business park would go to the wasteful expense of building their own datacenter - putting in raised floors, redundant power, cooling, blah, etc. I always wished a business park could work together as a community, and build just 1 datacenter that they all use. Due to duplication of effort in all datacenters, having 10 companies share like this would make total resource usage be 75% less than each having their own.
And guess what? That's what cloud computing allows. It's communal resource usage, in the only way it could ever have been feasible. Companies don't want to share with their neighbors in a concrete way, but something abstract like the modern Cloud offerings is ok for them. Which saves resources, which makes me happy.
The problem with many people who think it's a buzzword is that they think the "Cloud" is nothing but VM hosting with a marketing label attached to it. As I mentioned elsewhere, where and how the cloud resources arrive is irrelevant; they could be entire servers, they could be VMs, it doesn't matter. That part is completely irrelevant. Getting stuck on the idea of a machine at all is an immediate indicator that someone isn't getting the idea in the first place.
This isn't a progression of VM hosting, it's a progression of distributed computing - aka, Beowulf clustering, etc. I was building, programming for, and using Beowulf clusters ages ago. I have people telling me that Cloud is a "buzzword" that haven't even heard of Skyld, or worse - don't know who Don Becker is. If someone pretends to be a sysadmin of any level and doesn't know those things, they have no place lecturing me and saying it's a buzzword.
Which isn't to say that people have to know Skyld & Don to grok the Cloud - just that they must know Sklyd & Don to lecture me on whether it's just the same old thing that's always been.
So yeah, it's not for everything...yet. And as a person that has done plenty of DoD work, I agree it's also not for that...yet. But it will be...especially considering there are DoD "Clouds" in the work that will only be reachable via NIPR/SIPR. Within a short amount of time, any application that hasn't changed itself to be usable on the cloud will have evaporated (apologies for the pun...), imo.
yeah, that's more or less my mark of whether people are getting it (or buying in to it, if you wish to say it that way). If you imagine your "cloud" to be in one specific place...it's not a cloud. The difference between a clouds are dispersed, and cover large areas. They're not merely ponds that happen to be up in the air.
One of my growing list of complaints about Ubuntu is their "cloud" concept, where it's nothing more than a front end to the VMs running in your company datacenter, changing nothing from the last 15 years or so. That's not a cloud - if I can walk over and touch the hardware involved, it's not a cloud. If a single failure can take out every application I have, they're not on a cloud. That's just VM host configuration. And Ubuntu's silly idea of calling remote desktops hosted on EC2 "cloud computing" is ridiculous as well; cloud computing is a progression of distributed computing ala Beowulf - the "hardware abstraction" (ala VM hosting) aspect of it is entirely inconsequential. I don't really care if Amazon gives me dedicated servers for my instances, or VMs running on large hosts - it doesn't impact how I use them. If I'm pointing at an application running on one particular machine, then no matter where that machine is hosted...it's not in the "cloud."
but you have to be seriously dedicated to toast for that to matter
You, my friend, have obviously never had good toast.
That, and I can take a slice of artisan bread, put some bruschetta on it, top it off with goat cheese, and put it in my toaster. The glass window lets me see the horizontally-placed foodstuffs, allowing me to ensure proper cheese meltage. Lets see your walmart toaster do that :P
Plus, I'm an environmentalist, and the idea of intentionally creating trash that frequently makes me sad.
I'll go ahead and pre-empt you, btw.
I no longer need to build a tier4 datacenter, to have tier4-level service. If I run a company with 2 tier4 datacenters, and VM farms in each, not only is it incredibly expensive for me to do it but getting my data to the outside world is incredibly expensive as well.
We're starting to reach a progression in our economy indicating signs of communism - shared resource use. When even Wall Street firms start thinking of making their computing resources available after-hours the death of the datacenter becomes something we can see easily. We no longer need them. We no longer need a system administrator per 20-50 servers. I spin up, use, and destroy more in a week than the average sysadmin during the 90s had even touched in several years. My disaster recovery plan no longer has to involve me flying to some bunker in AZ with a laptop, hoping my bgp routes took affect and my stand-by servers are all up to date with recent backups, shipped in from the IronMountain down the road. Fark that noise, for less than the cost of having a single datacenter I can globally distribute my data on not just one CDN, but several.
And you think that's just business as normal? Clearly you've never touched the cloud, dealt with disaster recovery, or dealt with computational clustering.
yes, they have.
If you bother to look at that to which I was replying, and if you have the ability to follow along, you'll get it.
"hardware abstraction" in the sense of VMs running in your company's datacenter stil puts you at being concerned with hardware - it's not abstracted. The vm hosts fail, and no matter how you try to heal the VM clients under them it still takes extra actions...if you're still using the old methods. It's not just the hardware that's changing, after all - it's also the applications themselves. As a person who worked with Skyld way back when (I was one of their very first clients), building computational clusters that dealt with queue and distributed application tasks, I am prime to think as you do; that this is no different than what was happening before. However, as a person actually using the cloud properly, I end up disagreeing with you - because it is in fact a shift, it is in fact a new way of doing things. Being able to reference the model makes sense precisely because it is different.
I've yet to dispute that it's a natural progression. I've yet to dispute that many people could see it coming long ago. But it being a natural progression does not mean it isn't different, just like it was a natural progression for the end-user experience to shift to GUI-based over text-based. Was the GUI a natural progression? Could we all see it coming? Of course, but that doesn't mean that GUI is a "buzzword" because of it.
So be the person that thinks grabbing 50 instances across 4 different EC2 regions and tying them to a CDN data source is just the same old, run of the mill thing we were doing 20, even 30 years ago. Be that person. See how employable you are 10 years from now.
And yes, "cloud computing" is a buzzword about making your product deployments extremely expensive, and about pretending that outsourcing is a great thing.
Since i just moved a company's main revenue source from extremely expensive dedicated servers with minimal fault tolerance, to a self-healing, globally distributed, never-down cluster in the cloud...with substantially cheaper monthly costs and substantially easier maintenance...it's your comments that are laughable.
reading comprehension has gone WAY downhill lately on slashdot...
I said nothing about hardware abstraction. A VM farm from the 90s that tried to heal and move to another VM isn't the same as having a dozen cheap instances that spin up and down on a whim, with no concern about whether one disappears unexpectedly.
Was it a crazy shock, an unexpected development? No, certainly not. But that doesn't in any way mean that it wasn't a change in the way things there done. I don't know what planet you've been on, but 10 years ago on this planet if several of your application servers not only crashed, but completely disappeared never to return again, that would be cause for alarm. Now (due to a coupling of lowered expectations of vendor product quality, thanks to China et. al, and the natural progression of the industry), one just creates the applications with the idea in mind that the roles are what is important, not the devices that may or may not from one moment to the next be fulfilling the roles. It isn't some massive mainframe we're all sharing bits of that, when it crashes, takes down an entire company...nor is it a mostly-manual VM farm where someone restores a backup, blah etc. There has been a real shift. Be contrary if you want, if your vision is too short-sighted to see it; soon enough though, you'll make as much sense as someone saying that the development of GUI layers wasn't a shift in the industry as well. "But but...it was obvious!" So what, doesn't mean it wasn't a change anyway. And that warrants something to refer to it by. You've simply missed the boat if you think the "cloud" is merely a buzzword.
The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Prior to 50 years ago, computers were only for personal use?
Listen, I know it's fun to be contrary, but you didn't respond to what I actually wrote at all. It's not a paradigm shift because we're sharing resources, it's a shift because the machines themselves no longer matter. I am still having to remind people constantly that monitoring systems is nearly useless, at this point - one monitors services and response time of the services, with little regard to the hosts those services are running on. The shift was in how applications bounce from one physical machine to another - and no matter how much you want to pretend that everyone had personal computers in the 50s and then BOOM, mainframes came after PCs, you're just bloody wrong. For once in your life, don't be contrary just for the sake of being contrary. It's a completely different set of problems and solutions, due to being a different environment - and the fact that you don't agree strongly indicates that you've merely not done much with it yourself.
I'm currently working out a way to deal with the fact that on EC2, instances disappear, IPs disappear, IPs can't be reallocated for heartbeat situations (no, elastic-ips don't work for that, too slow).
4 options:
1) elastic IP failover
2) dns change (I don't like this since many things don't do lookups after startup, otherwise they'd be horribly slow)
3) the MMM plugin that tries to trick dns resolution changes
4) the special extra I did instead (iptables rewrite of NAT table, which only affects NEW sockets, not ESTABLISHED, etc - meaning whatever is hanging up the first server gets a chance to finish)
I've got #4 working semi-well now, which is great. I have self-healing m1.small spot instances that cost 3 cents an hour, and can keep up large sites. People rag on the m1.smalls, but I get good performance out of them after a few minor tweeks.
In short, "cloud computing" is a very different paradigm than anything the industry has ever seen before, and as a person who has been a UNIX admin/engineer/architech/etc since the early 90's...I'm pretty turned on by the whole thing.
I wish I could mod you down, yet still post.
"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
I can't imagine what else in the post you actually thought was just a "buzzword."
woah, hold on there cowboy, I have a nice toaster myself. Fairly similar to the one you mention, in fact. No need to attempt to insult me for saying something, when it wasn't me saying it.
I think it's horrible to say you'd rather buy a crap-tastic product that breaks after a few months, just because it's so much cheaper. My 6-year plan has me hopefully out in the Pacific working on the Great Garbage Patch; last thing on my mind is creating excessive trash intentionally and on a regular basis.
I can't find a manual can opener anymore that lasts more than a few months. They're all made in china, and they all break very quickly. What does that have to do with anything? I mention it because it's a very very simple machine that is very very simple to make well. The quality of products in general is horrible these days, with special thanks to Walmart. Damnit, I'm happy to pay more for a can opener that falling apart and rusting within just a few months. I'm willing to pay more for a shovel that doesn't have a plastic handle that breaks in the first week of non-strenuous work. Why don't I, who have money and desire, have the ability to purchase such things without extrodinary effort? There doesn't need to be 20 brands of toasters that are all made from the same few chinese factories, and are all just as crappy - half that many, and a couple for those of us that want something better? Same with TV shows - other than short periods where I'm just avoiding installation fees, I've not had paid tv service for a decade. Why? Because the shows I like don't even last a season, generally. Those few that do, change to more "mainstream" and become unwatchable.
And people wonder why I'm not pro-capitalism.
absolutely.
Every hi-speed internet outfit that isn't hella expensive around here requires you to order the TV portion as well, otherwise they charge you substantially more. So, I ordered tv and internet, and cancelled tv 31 days later. Doing so made my internet connection cheaper per month (with no promotional period), and made the installation free. I would have otherwise had to pay $250 for installation. I point-blank told the person I was going to cancel the tv service after a month and a day, and could they please just spare everyone the effort and not charge me installation, but...maybe my cleavage isn't good enough, cause he wasn't biting.
I still have my original "Orcs and Humans," in fact. And yet, not only did I not get in on the beta, but no one I know did either (which means, they couldn't invite me or whatnot).
Bah.
yeah, it's unfortunate that cds and usb weren't invented yet 18 months ago.
Seriously, I don't get why the farking hell gigabyte thought, so damn recently, most people would even have a floppy drive anymore.