Keep Your Cloud, I'm a Customer Not a Consumer

For the simple reason that the telcos are required by law to provide the choice of Lock in (thier "wonderful" plans) or not Plan plans, which means you can switch when you like.

That said, yes crappy service is a watch word in almost every large corporate business I've come across.

Coming soon! Corporations will replace their employees' troublesome desktop PCs with text-only dumb terminals connected to fast, secure, centralized mainframes!

> dumb terminals connected to fast, secure, centralized mainframes!

I dropped one of the IBM 3472 "dumb" color terminals onto a carpeted concrete floor once, face down. The 1/2" plate leaded glass blew inwards, shattering the vacuum tube. What a mess!

Going "back" to those days of coax cable-connected individual "dumb" terminals, to individual ports on cluster controllers, would be a step so far backwards as to be insane. I don't want it, no no no! SNA is evil! Jes2 is EVIL!

Now if we're talking diskless "thin" clients booting off ethernet (wired or wireless), to run little more than a browser working directly with the data stored on a central machine, that's great by me. But that intranet is going to be locked down like Fort Knox, no panzy-butt "cloud".

Points above taken. Assuming I have the concepts right, I am a "work from home" user of the internet and thus far, the only "cloud" application I have utilised is "gmail", and even then in the most limited way possible.....I prefer to use my own computer(s) thank you, because in my simplistic mind this gives me more control over my property. As for what I perceive to be "cloud computing", in 1978 I was on a high level staff course which introduced me to the dumb terminal (they were old "thump hard" typewriter keyboards with continuous fanpaper as a display) and the distantly located mainframe with connection made via an acoustic coupler........Things today might be prettier, but the cloud concept back then was still the same, and pretty expensive too as I recall. The way I see it, there will always be "new" discoveries that one or the other of individual and networked computers or terminals with mainframes are the latest, cheapest, swingiest, etc. way to go. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: "The more things change, the more they stay the same"

> the only "cloud" application I have utilised is "gmail"

I only got a Gmail account when they enabled POP so I could bring my mail to my local machine.

The "cloud" function, of accessing my mail "from anywhere", I use only when away from my home machine and only as long as that condition continues.

I also use FireGPG front end Firefox plug-in, for encryption of Gmail. But I think the automatic saving of "work in progress" makes FireGPG's value somewhat limited.