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On The Horizon: Microsoft's Cloud Utility

Posted by khess on · 3 comments
Linux Magazine; By Ken Hess
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Could Microsoft become the next Consolidated Edison? It could happen.

Previously I asserted that resistance to Cloud Computing is pointless. With Microsoft’s unveiling of The Azure Services Platform last week, it certainly seems to lend support to position. Ordinarily, I might find myself railing against anything Microsoft does but here I find I’m trying to hide my conspicuous grin on this one. Microsoft’s entry into Cloud Computing means that there’s more than hype to it — there’s gold in that Cloud — in fact, there’s so much potential gold that Cloud-based providers, like Microsoft, have a very good chance of becoming a utility.

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Comments (3)

At a time when cloud computing is becoming a buzzword, with promises of unrestricted access to your data anytime and anywhere, the largest ISPs in the land are beginning to regulate the amount of bandwidth one uses.

Comcast recently imposed a monthly cap of 250GB per account and AT&T is considering bandwidth caps as well.

Until and unless these caps become a thing of the past, the cloud computing methodology is doomed. Nobody in their right mind would cede all of their information and privacy to a third party and then have an ISP "middleman" tell you how much of that data you can access per month--with the threat of being cut off should you go over their limit enough times.

Secondly, as Richard Stallman has pointed out, there are privacy issues as well as freedom issues with the cloud computing paradigm. It would almost be a certainty that although the infrastructure would be composed of open source, the service providers themselves would become proprietary in nature.

Call me old fashioned but there are no data caps on my personal computer; I can access all of the my data securely and as many times as I want. No restrictions.

Cloud computing may be good in some cases but it is not a replacement for the current personal computer. There is a reason for calling it a "personal" computer after all.
This Help Desk comic gets my vote for best and most concise assessment of what the "cloud" really is: http://ubersoft.net/files/comics/hd/hd20081103.png
@carla: Yep, that's cloud computing.

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