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Digital Slob
Curt Brandao
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‘Clouds’ of data in tech forecast sound airy-fairy
Close your eyes for a moment (be sure to reopen them so you can read the rest of the column) and think about all the data you have stored inside your computer. ... What did you see?
Family photos. Passwords. Spreadsheets. Home movies. Bookmarks for Web sites that haven't worked since 2005. Bank account numbers. Unfinished "Firefly" fan fiction. Plans for world domination.
Now, close your eyes again (then open, same drill) and think about clouds. ... You know, clouds. The white puffy cumulus ones. The high-altitude quiltlike ones. The dark, cyclonic ones that come down and rip your farmhouse to smithereens.
Now imagine letting all that first stuff float inside all that second stuff.
How would you feel about that? Or rather, how will you feel about it, since we're all being corralled toward it by major information technology-backbone providers as we speak?
Welcome to "cloud computing."
The basic idea: All software applications will exist solely as online services that store your work in distant "cloud" databases, rather than programs individually installed on, worked in and saved to our computers.
There are many upsides. For one, never mind where we're working from or what operating system we have, because everything is done within a browser. Also, when our computers inevitably bite the dust, they would die alone, without taking all our precious - though inexplicably un-backed-up - data with them.
That's why I already write solely within the Web with Google Docs. It auto-saves to the cloud every few minutes. If a meteorite were to smash this terminal, I could just move to the next one and keep going - I'd be too freaked out and wailing like a newborn, but the point is, I could.
Still, if jumping head first into the deep end of all this gives you the privacy/reliability chills, it might help to know that many of us already have at least a toe or two in the water.
Ever uploaded anything to YouTube? Written a blog entry? Put a photo on Flickr? Then, "come on in," Big Tech is preparing to say, "the water's fine."
Only so far, the water isn't really that fine.
Apple unveiled its new MobileMe service on July 9 and almost instantly left 1 percent of its users without access to their e-mail for days. Google Docs was down for about an hour on July 8, and a similar outage cost Amazon.com millions of dollars in revenue on July 20.
Still, in the end, trust issues for cloud computing might be a bigger hurdle than any set of technical ones.
Well into the last century, many were still putting their life savings into un-networked gadgets called "tin cans" and burying them in back yards because banks were not secure. Now, thanks to federal safety nets, I would let almost any member of the FDIC fondle my 10s and 20s (except that bank I saw in rural Louisiana made out of a double-wide mobile home - never deposit payroll checks into any institution with a hitch in front).
Clearly, the future is not now, as Apple, Google and Amazon are learning the hard way.
The Internet is still way too murky for all-Web-all-the-time computing. And, to be frank, a "cloud" hardly seems the apt metaphor to clear things up.