Cloud

[ptonsparky]

What is the "Cloud"? Looking at new laptops and this showed up in a software reference.

 

[George Stolz]

Google is your friend.

Basically, storing your files on the internet, rather than on the hard drive sitting in front of you.

 

[ptonsparky]

thank you.

 

[don_resqcapt19]

And a marketing ploy to get more money out of you. For now it is free, but it is all part of the plan to have all software and data on a rental system where you pay to use it.

 

[zbang]

And a marketing ploy to get more money out of you. For now it is free, but it is all part of the plan to have all software and data on a rental system where you pay to use it.

It's real, it's not free, and for some applications, it works pretty well. Most of the online data backup services are 'cloud-based'. Same for Google docs and corporate email service (which isn't free). Salesforce is a cloud-based service.

Just like any thing else, it's right for some things and flat wrong for others.

 

[al hildenbrand]

What is the "Cloud"?

The term "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

That's a quote from a Wikipedia article "cloud computing". It's a big article.

The underlying idea is just like the phone. The plain old phone connects to a set of wires, relays, switches, light pipes, RF transmissions, digitizers, etc. that is massively reconfigurable based upon the call I make. I own none of that hardware, just the terminal device (the handset). I don't even know where it is.

After going through the "cloud", my self dialed call connects to the party I dialed. The conversation happens. I hang up. The linkage of the hardware in the cloud disappears, except for a data field containing the call billing info.

Right now, large businesses can set up, for a fee, business wide networks without buying the infrastructure.

Google, that makes it's money by advertising, gives individual use of certain resources of the cloud for free in exchange for the advertising they expose the individual to.

 

[don_resqcapt19]

But the real goal here is that everyone just has just a dumb terminal and everything you do is pay per use.