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Posts in cloud computing
Your Hard Drive in the Cloud
Cloud computing may a little over-promised, but it isn’t “worse than stupidity,” as Richard Stallman would say. In fact, it’s really a very positive change in the way we use computers. Not only does it eliminate many of the barriers to using any operating system you want, but it also takes the responsibility of storing and backing up data off of the user. This is all in a very early stage, but the glitches should be worked out in a few years.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard for people to create successful web applications without backing from companies like Google and Microsoft. The problem is that when you start using, for example, Google Docs, it is very hard to switch to Zoho Office. You certainly can’t use both to edit the same documents as you could if they were stored on your hard drive. This means that you are locked into using a single application, naturally leading most of us to pick the one we trust the most. This problem also blocks out a lot of the hobbyist open-source projects that might otherwise appear as web applications.
What we need is a “hard drive in the cloud”: a personal storage space from which documents could be opened with any web application. For example, someone could create a document in Google Docs and save it to their “hard drive in the cloud.” Then, they could open that document from Zoho Office and continue working on it there.
The problem with this plan is that it would require an established web application vendor to adopt it before anyone would bother to use it, and no major web application vendor has an incentive to adopt a system which would make it easier for their customers to switch the a different service.
How will we get data portability in the cloud when companies like Google have it in their interest to prevent any such project?
As Boot Times Fall, Are Computers On/Off Appliances
When you want to turn your toaster off, you just flip the switch. There is no concept of putting your toaster to sleep or in hibernation. Computers, though, must move around a lot and survive on batteries, so we have all sorts of fancy power-saving techniques.
Across all operating systems, perhaps especially Ubuntu, boot times are falling like a rock. Granted the test linked before was both unscientific and performed on fairly nice hardware, but the time it takes the computer to get through the BIOS is almost as long as it takes for the operating system to boot. In other words, the total time from power button to web browser/any application is becoming very small.
As all of this happens, do we still need sleep, suspend, and hibernate or are computers just on/off devices? Have computers finally become just appliances?
I don’t think that we have quite reached either stage in computing yet, but I think we are on track for both. Soon there will be little reason to put your computer to sleep when it is just as fast to hit the power switch. As far as becoming an appliance, geeks will probably always have non-appliance computers, but devices such as netbooks and the CrunchPad are essentially just appliances.
We’re not quite there yet, but sooner than we think we may arrive at a point where most computers are just another appliance.
Cloud Computing Is Not Bad: It Just Needs Some Openness
Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing “worse than stupidity.” His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.
I agree with Stallman that there is a potential risk to putting your data in a closed-source, closed standards web application. I do not believe, however, that it is fair to say that web applications in general are a data trap, or, for that matter, in any way something to avoid.
If a web application is open-source, supports open standards, and has a good privacy policy, I see little to worry about. The privacy policy, which you can in part confirm through the source code, ensures that your privacy is protected, assuming there are also some reasonable data protection methods in place; and the open standards ensure that you can easily get data in and out of the application, so you don’t have to worry about losing your data or being locked into the application.
I understand the concerns about locking your data into a web application, but we should keep in mind that, as long as you have good open standards and a good privacy policy, (open-source is, of course, good, but not absolutley needed), you don’t have to worry too much about your data.