Never did like this "cloud" idea

[patrick013]

emails and private clouds

These news stories keep cropping up.

[melodie]

Here's how bad it's become: Yesterday, two "secure" email service providers decided they'd rather close up shop than cooperate with the United Spooks of America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooks

Very good start for this article… Not having read the rest yet, just starting.

[djohnston]

I never liked it, either. Even the name sounds hokey. "Your data is in 'the cloud'." Will it get wet?

It's the ages old client-server model. Sun Microsystems created java in the hopes that all our data would "live" on their servers and we wouldn't "need" a huge cumbersome computer in our homes. (Wishful thinking with very little foresight and a blatant disregard of Moore's law.)

There's a video somewhere of Scott McNealey demonstarting to an audience the "enormous" size PCs would have to become in order to hold all of a user's data. I think he was over influenced by the original mainframe (server) and dumb terminal (client) model that preceeded the birth of home computers.

[melodie]

I never liked it, either. Even the name sounds hokey. "Your data is in 'the cloud'." Will it get wet?

or will it get down from there? 

[mimas]

> "Your data is in 'the cloud'." Will it get wet?

No, the could is electricity and hates water. It's probably the main difference between water cloud and data cloud. Data runs through pipes, it is collected by private companies, it is used for various things and is eventually recycled. Moreover, a few are making big money with it.

[patrick013]

Yeah, nothing better than online storage.