Cloud Computing

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Is it just me, or does cloud computing sound like an absolutely terrible idea?

With cloud computing, you don’t have anything actually stored on your computer, it’s all on the internet. You’ll also have to pay a fee to use and access your own stuff, not to mention how any valuable data that is stored on the cloud is HIGHLY more susceptible to being hacked and/or modified.

I’m talking about the future of this coming trend, not it’s present state.

Good idea? Bad Idea? What are your thoughts? The only pro I see in a sea of cons is that you can access all your info anywhere, which honestly can be a con in and of it’s self.

2

I could be totaly wrong, but I believe you may be misusing the term cloud computing. When I hear the term cloud computing, I think of a renderfarm. A renderfarm is a few hundred computers all working together to render the same scene or image. What you are talking about sounds more like cloud data storage.

Cloud data storage over the internet sounds like a very bad idea to me. I am the only person I want to handle my data. If my backup system fails, the only person I have to blame is my self.

3

I thought that rendering with a render farm was called cloud rendering ???

4

Try Cloud Thinking, it’s more fun and a lot less sinister.

5

That would depend on the service provider, obviously, but in general, I think companies like Google would be quite capable of providing better security services for a vast majority of users (the people who only know how to surf the web, and use social networking sites - you are fooling yourself if you think that such people are any better at securing their own data than <insert cloud services provider here>).

Anyway, “cloud computing” is definitely the future for businesses who would like nothing better than to drop their IT department -> they want to buy IT just like water on tap, with a nice, predictable bill.

For individuals, it’s a different story, but some might choose to “jump into the cloud”, because they simply don’t want to think about technology, and this would be a nice way for them to remain dumb, with their dumb terminals, in relative safety.

Overall, I don’t consider cloud computing to be inherently “bad”, even though I think it’s silly that people are in such a rush to give their private information away to a third party -> it’s a choice, and therefore something that you don’t have to participate in, even if “everyone else is doing it” (facebook anyone?).