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Cloudy future for the cloud

Story: On The Horizon: Microsoft's Cloud UtilityTotal Replies: 2
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garymax

Nov 06, 2008
1:04 PM EST 		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.
tuxchick

Nov 06, 2008
2:15 PM EST 		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
tracyanne

Nov 06, 2008
3:40 PM EST 		@carla: Yep, that's cloud computing.

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