If we are all in a cloud, where will conscience reside? We see often that it retreats to a few isolated individuals. Will mankind grow or be limited by the commonality of pursuits? Whenever we use a computer programme, we are required to think in the way someone else requires us to think. It may not be particularly evident now, but will this percolate through into all our thinking?

Yes, all this innovation is hugely seductive. But I feel safer, somehow, with pencil and paper and cupboards of mouldering books. I am not sure they achieve anything less, certainly in quality.

Perhaps we should beware of slowing our minds to the pace of a computer.

Great post!

I said, Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd
On my cloud, baby

The benefits are great and the move is inevitable. I commend you for jumping into the cloud and leaving the weight of the “hardware” world behind.

I initially went to wordpress looking for blog hosting and found your blog featured. It was the first one I read and was impressed and entertained.

As one who runs fault tolerant systems for both work and home, cloud computing has its allure, as with any proposal it has points for and points against.

It was interesting to read that most of the negative reactions to your post comes from concerns regarding security. Security is not an absolute. Think in likelihood and costs.

Is it likely that a very highly paid (compared to industry standards) a google or yahoo employee would find a given set of data useful? Out of all the petabytes available they find yours in a timeframe to be useful. Most security concerns are vastly overstated, as you mentioned in your post.

Most people would find vulnerabilities that compromise your system are not looking for data, they just want access to online banking ( valuable, and timely).

Given all that, I am now keen to research more into personal cloud computing.

thanks for a great post

A colleague of mine was recently horrified on checking an e-mail in his Gmail account. One of Gmail’s features is that it automatically recognizes event notifications in your e-mail and offers to add them to your calendar. And it does so quite well – recognizing date, venue, event name and such. While my colleague initially thought the feature was “cool”, he later realized this probably meant Google was reading/scanning his mails to be able to offer such features.

I was quite unable to understand what mattered ultimately to him. Is it the notion of loss of privacy, or an automatic functionality that makes checking mails easier?

I realize that I picked the eye corresponding in sequence to my card. I’m kind of sleep deprived and punchy.

I get more embarrassed than usual when I return to my comment on ” “, Mr Crotchety. I beg you to return your comment on that comment to its original position so that the whole world can enjoy endless, harmless laughter.

Agreed. Video editing and the like. Things that make unusual demands on the processor. The trajectory here will be: As long as the bus speed of the local machine is faster than the internet connection, those very intensive apps will stay local. Once the internet connection gets so fast that it no longer makes much of a difference, they will move too….

Then again–sticking with my banking analogy–we are probably in cloud computing where banking was in the 19th century, when runs on banks were common….

Nomads ( including the likes of Mr.Kluth!) would cope much better than those of us Tweeting and competing, addicted to Firefox and Facebook.

The fact that Mr. Kluth has garnered 33 comments thus far on a boring topic such as this (storage, computers, stuff, gigabytes, etc.) says something in itself!

Maybe I should quit writing stories about Plato and Socrates, Hester and Ma Joad, and write about technology.

I know, you philosophers out there will challenge the meaning of the word boring and its subjectivity.

And good!

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/esp.html

As I wrote the above, I thought about a documentary film I saw five or so years ago, called “The Story of the Weeping Camel”, set in deepest Mongolia. It is about a small band of nomadic people living in tents, who eke out a living in the harshest of environments, flat and arid, with frequent howling windstorms which would blow away the tents if their dwellers didn’t affix them firmly to the ground. Central to the people coping with everyday life, is having camels to transport them around, and generally act as beasts of burden.

Without electricity, indoor plumbing, credit cards, cushy jobs, social security, and the other comforts we take for granted, including, of course, laptops and cloud computing, it is a milieu as far removed from ours as we can imagine.

However, should something happen to cause all our very fragile technology to crash (think only of the consequences of communications satellites being shot down) who would deal better with its’ loss – ourselves, or the Mongolian tent-dwellers?

closing down “the cloud” actually happened couple years ago in my line of business, which is professional photography. Digital Railroad, one of the big players in the field (along with still existing Photoshelter) totally unexpectedly announced that they would close their business, and you (the client) would have something like 48 hours to retrieve your content and then it would be deleted. Now, 48 hours is not a lot of time – and professional level photography takes lots of storage space and bandwith (i.e time) to move across the net.
We are talking dozens of gigs of material at least per person and thousands of people (whose daily bread was at least partly dependent on this service) affected. It was a big issua at the time (with lots of twist we don’t have to get into now).
But, point being: it can happen – and it does happen.

I have OpenOffice on my PC at home, because I didn’t want to pay over $100 for MS Word and Excel (I don’t use PowerPoint). I’ve yet to try Google Docs, but if it’s as easy to use as you say, it’s worth checking out.

P.S. Sorry, my previous comment somehow came out duplicated, so you can erase one of the copies if you want.