Well, mangled Paul Simon a bit there, but this tid bit (via O'Reilly) from one Carl Hewitt set off the "The Thought Leaders Have Finally Figured Out the Obvious" bell:
As Jim Gray noted in "Distributed Computing Economics" (MSR-TR-2003-24) there is a growing imbalance between the computation power of billions of cores in aggregator datacenters and the relatively feeble fiber optic communications coming out of aggregator datacenters. This problem has now become so severe that Amazon has been forced to introduce a commercial service that lets users of their cloud import and export data through the post--as in, put it on storage devices and ship it by land, sea, or air.
For those who haven't been following along, I am among those who've been calling bullshit on the whole "we'll put our data in the (Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Grace L. Ferguson) cloud, save lots of money, and not have to worry about the annoying data any more" crowd. One needs to consider the bait and switch tactic of hucksters. Just because Google's motto is "don't be evil" doesn't mean they aren't. They are young and naive, and quite greedy. Their corporate clients are just greedy, and generally stupid. Witness the meltdown they have caused.
It used to be that business schools taught from a prime directive: don't buy (or outsource, same difference) your core competence. The same is true of your data. It is the life blood of your business (or life, if you are just a person). The dumbest thing you can do is hand it over to "the others". There will be hell to pay for those that do.
Read the article, and the comments. Some are intelligent, others very much less so.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Kathy Knechtges
BOKO
emma peel
skewz
old new lefty
Traveller1
Salon.com
Comments
Cloud computing is a mixture of vaporware and Big Brother. Some of the comments on your link are particularly useful. Data stalkers always mine for personal information on the internet. Think of those fun-loving Nigerian scamsters. Now, to sabotage data mining
AND THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT
it is recommended that you deliberately put in false information into your data stream. How do you do this? By going to websites you ordinarily would loathe (like the Republican National Committee, astroturf "we hate health care" sites, etc.). Put in your real name, but bad phone numbers and nonexistent addresses.
Voila! The data miners go around in circles chasing their tales. Brilliant!
Thank you very much for telling us (obliquely) how to defeat Big Brother. rated.