Cloud computing is simply the name given to the virtualization and SaaS trends. It is a real phenomenon, so why not let it have a one-syllable name? I mean, we could call it "Utility-IT" or "virtual outsourced hosting services" or any of several terms which are slightly more descriptive, but such names certainly aren't any better.
In my opinion, "cloud computing" is a pretty decent name for scalable, on-demand, utility-billed IT services. At least it's not another acronym!
Well, the big problem is that "Cloud Computing" isn't used consistently. The useful use, IMO, relates to using virtualization to decouple logical machine from physical machines and enable dynamic provisioning. SaaS and utility-billed services are applications which predate that, though they are popular applications.
Using "Cloud Computing" to refer unspecifically to some vague amalgamation of some or all of elastic provisioning, SaaS, remote hosting, usage-based billing, etc., etc. renders the term meaningless.
The most annoying thing about some pop-up ads, is that you have no way of knowing which ad-serving network served them or who the responsible parties are.
No, the most annoying thing about all pop-up ads is that they are ads that pop-up. All other annoyances are secondary.
Fortunately, pop-ups are usually easily blocked, which deals with that annoyance and any other secondary annoyances they might have.
Only on Slashdot would we worry about a country violating the GPL without discussing their violation of most international treaties, common sense, the Bible, nuclear test ban treaties, and the basic human rights of their own citizens.
Its impossible to not violate at least some of that set, since they pose mutually exclusive demands. (In fact, the one you've capitalized, on its own, poses mutually exclusive demands, so its impossible not to violate it alone.)
We have a greater percentage of our population in prison than North Korea does.
Really? How do you know? Most lists I've seen of imprisonment rates have the US with the highest listed, but North Korea with no information, because most are based on government reports and/or reliable NGOs, and North Korea doesn't report data or provide the kind of access from which NGOs could produce anything like a reasonable estimate.
They aren't violating the GPL if they aren't distributing it (which i don't believe they are yet)...
They also aren't violating the GPL if the jurisdiction they are in does not require them to have the permission of the copyright holder to make a derivative work in the first place, since the GPL is merely a license by which the copyright holder grants someone else rights which would otherwise be exclusive under law to the copyright holder.
Since its the North Korean government operating within North Korea we're talking about, here, I'm pretty sure the local laws don't require them to have a license from anyone to do anything they want.
If you use the standalone computer for anything but storing the key,
Same problem occurs if I write doodles on the paper -- though I fail to see how that reduces the security, only the reliability.
Well, doodles on the paper affects reliability. Using the computer for other things affects reliability, true, but if it is separately physically secured, using it for other things means more opportunity for physical security problems, and not separately physically securing it is a pretty big security deficit compared to separately physically-secured paper.
Granted, it's easier to secure a piece of paper. But the same problem applies.
Right. Security issues are broadly the same regardless of medium; the available means, costs, and logistical challenges of addressing them are what differs.
Than a 4096 Bit RSA Key that is stored on a standalone computer?
If you use the standalone computer for anything but storing the key, or fail to physically secure the standalone computer from access (separate to any physical security on any computer on which data resides that is secured with the key) it is obviously more secure to keep the key on paper, physically secured in something that isn't opened except to access the key.
If you don't use the standalone computer for anything else, and have it separately physically secured, then for any reasonable use of the word "computer", it will probably be equally secure, and vastly less expensive to separately secure the key on paper, instead.
Perhaps the more relevant comparison is separately securing paper vs. separately securing long-term electronic storage media. The sheet of paper will probably be cheaper in any case (though the price difference drops if you are using inexpensive electronic storage media rather than a dedicate computer), and will likely be more likely to be practically usable to access data a longer time into the future. Though in this case, a key factor is making sure the paper has the key in a human-readable form as well as a machine-readable form, since long-term availability of tools to read any particular machine-readable format is an issue. If you use text in an OCR-friendly font, the human readable format and the machine readable format can be the same.
Because you're right, going by growth China has the rest of the world beat hands down.
By annual GDP growth rate, China is #4 from the most recent stats I've seen, and #10 in annual growth in per capita GDP. In neither case is it fairly characterized as having the rest of the rest of the world beat hands down.
actually right now the most successful economny on the planet is china, if in the traditional sense you measure success in the form of economic growth.
Only if by "most successful" in terms of economic growth, you mean "has the fourth highest GDP growth rate".
China doesn't even have the highest GDP growth rate if the only countries you consider are China and the countries which border it directly, as Mongolia has it beat.
(China is farther from first -- about #10 -- in the more meaningful measure of rate of annual growth in the GDP per capita.)
The delay and rearranging isn't so bad if you are just reading one book at a time always from start to finish, but it becomes really frustrating if you are skipping around or browsing through various documents and you want to navigate from one document to another like you might do while web browsing or working with legal briefs, etc.
If you had something like B&N's Nook -- with an e-ink screen and a smaller LCD touchscreen "strip" -- it would make sense to use the LCD screen for navigation more complex than simple page turning (searches, skimming thumbnails or scrolling ToC, etc.). AFAIK, the Nook doesn't do this now, but it would be interesting if it did (or someone made a similar product that did.)
But I wonder, if you are remoting to this machine, won't you be charged for twice the bandwidth if you are using it as your desktop to surf the web?
Why would you use the remote system for surfing the web? I can see using it to test a web page under Ubuntu if your normal desktop environment isn't Ubuntu, but since you need a local computer to connect to the remote one in the first place, and most computers will be more than capable of surfing the web, why would you do normal surfing on the remote?
(I can see using it that way if you are locally hosting your cloud, so that you are separating logical desktops from physical machines, and that's likely viable since Ubuntu Server includes an EC2-compatible cloud implementation, but if you are actually hosting it remotely with Amazon, that seems like a really odd use of it.)
EC2 charges based on CPU time and bandwidth usage, so this sounds like it'd end up eating up a monthly fee of ~$netbook per month. Why would anybody want to spend their money on this?
Ubuntu Server has, since I think 9.04, but definitely in 9.10, included open source, EC2-compatible cloud hosting software. So, presumably, you could also use this on your own cloud using Ubuntu Server, rather than on Amazon's cloud.
The uses motivating this are enumerated in TFA:
A few of the reasons why desktop in the cloud is interesting:
- Remote access from anywhere and any OS to an Ubuntu environment
- We can easily (check LTSP !!) put up to 100 users on the same server/VM
- Can be used for desktop/usability/feature testing
- Integration with Ubuntu ONE would make sure your data is always there.
Over the years I've heard people talk about social responsibility of corporations. It was always a bit of a joke, but you know what? I think Google was listening too. one of the few companies I can think of that I would say is 'socially responsible' as a corporation.
When Google went public, it took the somewhat unusual step of sharply limiting the voting rights of the class of stock available in the IPO compared to the class of stock held by its founders. This means that Google, while being a public and fairly widely held company, is much more narrowly controlled firm than it would appear at first glance. This means that the common interests of the people who control the voting stock -- and thus direct management strategy -- is much more likely than would otherwise be the case to extend beyond short-term financial results.
"We can't write working code because the only people willing to write this kind of code are incompetent morons. Skilled engineers think this type of code is a bad idea, and won't touch it. Rather than rethinking our position to be more in line with reality, we want laws that make illegal to circumvent the swiss cheese code that we can actually hire someone to write."
The reason they can't write "good" code in this area isn't that they can't attract "skilled engineers" -- a problem that could mostly be addressed by throwing more money at the problem, which there lobbying efforts in favor of anti-circumvention laws show that they are more than willing to do, but that the problem is fundamentally intractable. Everything the consumer needs to decode and access the media has to be avaialable, otherwise authorized use won't be possible. But once that's there, you have to prevent the user from using it. Effective technical measures are, therefore, fundamentally impractical, hence, anti-circumvention rules. Are proposed, to limit access to the information necessary to circumvent the fundamentally flawed technical measures.
I don't understand how using "free software" translates into a requirement for "unprotected content."
DRM, because it requires all the information for unlocking content to be present with the content on the users machine, but requires the user not to be able to use that information to acccess the content except consistent with the limits provided, inherently requires security-through-obscurity of a type that is fundamentally incompatible with free software.
Google is a remarkable company and a remarkable search engine, but it shouldn't be that hard for other engines to provide at least a facsimile of what it does in the search area.
I haven't seen much (in terms of free web-based services) to compete with Google Scholar in terms of searching journals, searching forward and back through their mutual citations, and finding the versions of articles that aren't the main one locked behind the original journal's paywall.
Before someone responds with the boring and done arguments, my initial goal in college was to become a philosophy professor. It was then I realized it ahs nothing new to offer the world. Even the most basic philosophy question have been answered.
No, they haven't.
Which came first, chicken or the egg? Evolution has taught is it was the egg.
That's not really a "basic philosophy question".
If yopu walk towards something, but only half the remaining difference, will you ever get there: Quantum mechanics has shown us that, yes, we would get there because there is a smallest distance that can be moved.
That's also not a basic philosophy question (and what the result you refer to would tell us is not "yes, if you do that, you will get there", it is "you can't do that"; if there is a quantum distance and you can't move a smaller amount, then you can't halve any distance that is equal to or smaller than that quantum distance -- in fact, you can't have any distance that isn't an even-number multiple of the quantum distance.)
Actual basic philosophical questions are usually not simple fact questions (though sometimes these are posed as illustrations of philosophical issues), but things like "what does it mean to say 'I know X'". (Actually, that's not just a basic philosophical question, its an entire subfield of philosophy known as epistemology.)
And basic philosophical questions mostly aren't questions that can be definitively "answered", because they aren't fact questions; they are questions to which answers can be proposed and the logical implications explored.
... but there's really now way all these countries are going to agree on everything these treaties propose. Some portions may even be contrary to a country's current laws, let alone their culture's mindset or philosophy.
Countries agree to treaties that are contrary to their pre-existing laws all the time; depending on the provisions of the treaty and the fundamental legal structure of the government, either the mere act of ratifying the treaty changes the law or subsequent conforming legislation is required, but it is a regular occurrence.
The "mindset and philosophy" is usually a bigger issue than preexisting law, and that's mostly because of public political pressure on the governments involved. But if you keep a treaty secret, that reduces the ability of public political pressure to be brought to bear against it.
With proprietary projects there will always be coders, and the existing coders will stay coding, because there is income involved with that.
Actually, proprietary projects often die because of lack of income involved in them. Just because something is proprietary doesn't mean it is bringing in money to support continued development (contrariwise, just because something is open source doesn't mean its not bringing in money.) "Open source" doesn't mean "not profitable", and "proprietary" doesn't mean "profitable".
Natural language (AS INPUT TO A COMPUTER) has always been a fad.
Its been a continuous area of research that has been regularly producing new products and offerings for several decades. There are certainly monents in times where particular approaches or areas of application are transitorily popular and might be remotely fairly described as "fads", but the broad subject itself is very much not a fad, and never has been.
The iPad is a better ebook reader than most netbooks, and a better multipurpose computing device than most ebook readers. The iPad's hope is that there is a compromise spot between those kinds of devices that really hits a sweet spot in the market.
It happens a lot to closed source projects, too, though since it is more likely (in either project) to happen when a project is in a state before it is consider "ready for prime time", its a lot less visible in closed source projects, since they aren't as likely to be widely available at that stage.
Natural language has been pretty popular for longer than all of recorded history, so its clearly not a fad.
Its also been pretty constantly a goal, for quite some time, to get computers to understand something approximating it for human interactions. For pretty obvious reasons -- its certainly a manner in which humans are generally pretty comfortable interacting.
Slashdot Mirror
A Rock Band Drum kit starts out as a rather expensive wireless game controller.
That's like "three easy steps to converting your Lamborghini Murcielago into a gasoline-powered automobile".
Well, the big problem is that "Cloud Computing" isn't used consistently. The useful use, IMO, relates to using virtualization to decouple logical machine from physical machines and enable dynamic provisioning. SaaS and utility-billed services are applications which predate that, though they are popular applications.
Using "Cloud Computing" to refer unspecifically to some vague amalgamation of some or all of elastic provisioning, SaaS, remote hosting, usage-based billing, etc., etc. renders the term meaningless.
No, the most annoying thing about all pop-up ads is that they are ads that pop-up. All other annoyances are secondary.
Fortunately, pop-ups are usually easily blocked, which deals with that annoyance and any other secondary annoyances they might have.
Its impossible to not violate at least some of that set, since they pose mutually exclusive demands. (In fact, the one you've capitalized, on its own, poses mutually exclusive demands, so its impossible not to violate it alone.)
Really? How do you know? Most lists I've seen of imprisonment rates have the US with the highest listed, but North Korea with no information, because most are based on government reports and/or reliable NGOs, and North Korea doesn't report data or provide the kind of access from which NGOs could produce anything like a reasonable estimate.
They also aren't violating the GPL if the jurisdiction they are in does not require them to have the permission of the copyright holder to make a derivative work in the first place, since the GPL is merely a license by which the copyright holder grants someone else rights which would otherwise be exclusive under law to the copyright holder.
Since its the North Korean government operating within North Korea we're talking about, here, I'm pretty sure the local laws don't require them to have a license from anyone to do anything they want.
Same problem occurs if I write doodles on the paper -- though I fail to see how that reduces the security, only the reliability.
Well, doodles on the paper affects reliability. Using the computer for other things affects reliability, true, but if it is separately physically secured, using it for other things means more opportunity for physical security problems, and not separately physically securing it is a pretty big security deficit compared to separately physically-secured paper.
Right. Security issues are broadly the same regardless of medium; the available means, costs, and logistical challenges of addressing them are what differs.
If you use the standalone computer for anything but storing the key, or fail to physically secure the standalone computer from access (separate to any physical security on any computer on which data resides that is secured with the key) it is obviously more secure to keep the key on paper, physically secured in something that isn't opened except to access the key.
If you don't use the standalone computer for anything else, and have it separately physically secured, then for any reasonable use of the word "computer", it will probably be equally secure, and vastly less expensive to separately secure the key on paper, instead.
Perhaps the more relevant comparison is separately securing paper vs. separately securing long-term electronic storage media. The sheet of paper will probably be cheaper in any case (though the price difference drops if you are using inexpensive electronic storage media rather than a dedicate computer), and will likely be more likely to be practically usable to access data a longer time into the future. Though in this case, a key factor is making sure the paper has the key in a human-readable form as well as a machine-readable form, since long-term availability of tools to read any particular machine-readable format is an issue. If you use text in an OCR-friendly font, the human readable format and the machine readable format can be the same.
By annual GDP growth rate, China is #4 from the most recent stats I've seen, and #10 in annual growth in per capita GDP. In neither case is it fairly characterized as having the rest of the rest of the world beat hands down.
Only if by "most successful" in terms of economic growth, you mean "has the fourth highest GDP growth rate".
China doesn't even have the highest GDP growth rate if the only countries you consider are China and the countries which border it directly, as Mongolia has it beat.
(China is farther from first -- about #10 -- in the more meaningful measure of rate of annual growth in the GDP per capita.)
If you had something like B&N's Nook -- with an e-ink screen and a smaller LCD touchscreen "strip" -- it would make sense to use the LCD screen for navigation more complex than simple page turning (searches, skimming thumbnails or scrolling ToC, etc.). AFAIK, the Nook doesn't do this now, but it would be interesting if it did (or someone made a similar product that did.)
Why would you use the remote system for surfing the web? I can see using it to test a web page under Ubuntu if your normal desktop environment isn't Ubuntu, but since you need a local computer to connect to the remote one in the first place, and most computers will be more than capable of surfing the web, why would you do normal surfing on the remote?
(I can see using it that way if you are locally hosting your cloud, so that you are separating logical desktops from physical machines, and that's likely viable since Ubuntu Server includes an EC2-compatible cloud implementation, but if you are actually hosting it remotely with Amazon, that seems like a really odd use of it.)
Ubuntu Server has, since I think 9.04, but definitely in 9.10, included open source, EC2-compatible cloud hosting software. So, presumably, you could also use this on your own cloud using Ubuntu Server, rather than on Amazon's cloud.
The uses motivating this are enumerated in TFA:
When Google went public, it took the somewhat unusual step of sharply limiting the voting rights of the class of stock available in the IPO compared to the class of stock held by its founders. This means that Google, while being a public and fairly widely held company, is much more narrowly controlled firm than it would appear at first glance. This means that the common interests of the people who control the voting stock -- and thus direct management strategy -- is much more likely than would otherwise be the case to extend beyond short-term financial results.
Maybe, but not for the reason you suggest.
The reason they can't write "good" code in this area isn't that they can't attract "skilled engineers" -- a problem that could mostly be addressed by throwing more money at the problem, which there lobbying efforts in favor of anti-circumvention laws show that they are more than willing to do, but that the problem is fundamentally intractable. Everything the consumer needs to decode and access the media has to be avaialable, otherwise authorized use won't be possible. But once that's there, you have to prevent the user from using it. Effective technical measures are, therefore, fundamentally impractical, hence, anti-circumvention rules. Are proposed, to limit access to the information necessary to circumvent the fundamentally flawed technical measures.
DRM, because it requires all the information for unlocking content to be present with the content on the users machine, but requires the user not to be able to use that information to acccess the content except consistent with the limits provided, inherently requires security-through-obscurity of a type that is fundamentally incompatible with free software.
For Erlang-style concurrency.
(OTOH, then the question becomes why pick Go when there's Erlang already...)
I haven't seen much (in terms of free web-based services) to compete with Google Scholar in terms of searching journals, searching forward and back through their mutual citations, and finding the versions of articles that aren't the main one locked behind the original journal's paywall.
No, they haven't.
That's not really a "basic philosophy question".
That's also not a basic philosophy question (and what the result you refer to would tell us is not "yes, if you do that, you will get there", it is "you can't do that"; if there is a quantum distance and you can't move a smaller amount, then you can't halve any distance that is equal to or smaller than that quantum distance -- in fact, you can't have any distance that isn't an even-number multiple of the quantum distance.)
Actual basic philosophical questions are usually not simple fact questions (though sometimes these are posed as illustrations of philosophical issues), but things like "what does it mean to say 'I know X'". (Actually, that's not just a basic philosophical question, its an entire subfield of philosophy known as epistemology.)
And basic philosophical questions mostly aren't questions that can be definitively "answered", because they aren't fact questions; they are questions to which answers can be proposed and the logical implications explored.
Countries agree to treaties that are contrary to their pre-existing laws all the time; depending on the provisions of the treaty and the fundamental legal structure of the government, either the mere act of ratifying the treaty changes the law or subsequent conforming legislation is required, but it is a regular occurrence.
The "mindset and philosophy" is usually a bigger issue than preexisting law, and that's mostly because of public political pressure on the governments involved. But if you keep a treaty secret, that reduces the ability of public political pressure to be brought to bear against it.
Actually, proprietary projects often die because of lack of income involved in them. Just because something is proprietary doesn't mean it is bringing in money to support continued development (contrariwise, just because something is open source doesn't mean its not bringing in money.) "Open source" doesn't mean "not profitable", and "proprietary" doesn't mean "profitable".
Its been a continuous area of research that has been regularly producing new products and offerings for several decades. There are certainly monents in times where particular approaches or areas of application are transitorily popular and might be remotely fairly described as "fads", but the broad subject itself is very much not a fad, and never has been.
The iPad is a better ebook reader than most netbooks, and a better multipurpose computing device than most ebook readers. The iPad's hope is that there is a compromise spot between those kinds of devices that really hits a sweet spot in the market.
It happens a lot to closed source projects, too, though since it is more likely (in either project) to happen when a project is in a state before it is consider "ready for prime time", its a lot less visible in closed source projects, since they aren't as likely to be widely available at that stage.
Um, what?
Natural language has been pretty popular for longer than all of recorded history, so its clearly not a fad.
Its also been pretty constantly a goal, for quite some time, to get computers to understand something approximating it for human interactions. For pretty obvious reasons -- its certainly a manner in which humans are generally pretty comfortable interacting.