Explain "cloud" to me, and how it applys to win 7 / 8

[Compman55]

What is bad about a cloud based OS. What makes it not secure and will any fees apply later on just to be able to use your computer?

 

[bruceb]

Odds are, yes, you will pay a monthly or yearly lease fee for the OS and any Apps you want to run. As to file storage, I would prefer to keep my Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other files locally, on my computer. As it is right now, most, if not all, email is a web based system. The only exceptions being Lotus Notes and Outlook (when used on an Exhange Server, which then hosts the actual messages). Your Yahoo, Gmail, MSN Mail, etc, is all stored on the providers servers.

 

[Compman55]

So I guess is this mandatory, or can we choose to keep apps on the computer locally?

 

[lxskllr]

It's all still early in the game. Anything said now is pure speculation. There's thousands of ways it could be setup, so it's hard tell to which way it'll finally ship.

 

[bruceb]

No reason why certain apps can't be run on a local, non-internet computer. Like Office or AutoCad .. But programs that need to update, like Quickbooks would need internet access.

 

[Nothinman]

The Cloud is just another name for the Internet, so anything Cloud based is just a fancy marketing name for something that's based around an Internet service. Anything more specific than that will depend on the individual service.

 

[corkyg]

The Cloud is just another name for the Internet, so anything Cloud based is just a fancy marketing name for something that's based around an Internet service. Anything more specific than that will depend on the individual service.

This. And, if we keep on the slippery slope, Microsoft will have achieved their lifelong dream of having millions of folks on line totally dependent on them.

 

[Nothinman]

This. And, if we keep on the slippery slope, Microsoft will have achieved their lifelong dream of having millions of folks on line totally dependent on them.

Millions are already dependent on their crap, that would just be a change of venue and a slightly more predictable revenue stream.

 

[Cogman]

I, personally, don't ever see a totally cloud OS being feasible. The concept is nice, but it seams to be doomed to the same fate as multix. The two biggest problems with a cloud operating system are connectivity and the speed of light issue.

Have you ever had the internet go down? Could you imagine how frustrating it would be to not be capable of doing basic work just because of a fault internet connection or router?

The other problem, the speed of light, is one that can't really be fixed (that we know of). It is simply impossible to send information faster than the speed of light, this translates into lag for rural areas.

Not only that, but lost packets would also cause irritating lag issues. When everything is on the cloud, lag plays a big problem.

That is why, in my opinion, a totally cloud based operating system will never be possible. However, a hybrid model would be. It could be argued that current operating systems are hybrid cloud operating systems as some services are only available online. (its a bit of a stretch, but not much).

 

[jasonjas]

I, personally, don't ever see a totally cloud OS being feasible. The concept is nice, but it seams to be doomed to the same fate as multix. The two biggest problems with a cloud operating system are connectivity and the speed of light issue.

I completely agree.

Also, a cloud-based OS for users would almost never be feasible for many businesses since in the cloud, upgrading the software would almost be necessary where as in businesses they still run software that's 10 years old. Many patches/upgrades are not possible since the software was never updated to reflect those changes.

 

[Cogman]

I completely agree.

Also, a cloud-based OS for users would almost never be feasible for many businesses since in the cloud, upgrading the software would almost be necessary where as in businesses they still run software that's 10 years old. Many patches/upgrades are not possible since the software was never updated to reflect those changes.

Well, honestly that is viewed as one of the benefits of cloud computing. Businesses run the same software 24/7 because they are familiar with it, they don't want to break anything by upgrading, and they don't want to spend the money to constantly upgrade things.

Cloud computing eliminates the possibility of breaking something by taking software management out of the hands of business owners. It allows for incremental updates to increase familiarity. And it gives businesses "free" software upgrades for the cost of putting things on the clouds. This prevents such nasties as viruses etc.

These aren't bad things. After all, microsoft can run a large cluster of computers much more reliably than the high school drop out IT dude can run 100-200 different computers. You get high quality professional care and no need for a large IT department/budget. Those are the benefits of cloud computing.

For data reliability, cloud computing really does make sense. For everything? ehh, not so much.

 

[Nothinman]

I completely agree.

Also, a cloud-based OS for users would almost never be feasible for many businesses since in the cloud, upgrading the software would almost be necessary where as in businesses they still run software that's 10 years old. Many patches/upgrades are not possible since the software was never updated to reflect those changes.

Quite the opposite, it means businesses will be running newer versions much sooner because the provider will do the migration for them. For example, BPOS is currently Exchange 2k7 but MS already has plans to migrate to 2010 in the not too distant future and no one using the service will have a choice in the matter.

 

[Cogman]

Quite the opposite, it means businesses will be running newer versions much sooner because the provider will do the migration for them. For example, BPOS is currently Exchange 2k7 but MS already has plans to migrate to 2010 in the not too distant future and no one using the service will have a choice in the matter.

I think that is what he is saying, the cloud moves much faster on upgrades than businesses generally do. For example, I've worked for companies that still use windows 2000 based computers quite regularly (and fight to keep employees from installing any sort of updates...)

 

[RebateMonger]

For data reliability, cloud computing really does make sense. For everything? ehh, not so much.

Except my experience says that keeping on-site services is more reliable than web services. For instance, I've never had a client's office Exchange Server down. But a couple of clients who were using web-based mail servers had fairly frequent outages. GMail goes down a couple of times a year.

Yeah, I always figured that those big providers, with all sorts of redundancy and generators and such would be super-reliable. But, somehow, they, too, manage to go down.

 

[jasonjas]

I think that is what he is saying, the cloud moves much faster on upgrades than businesses generally do. For example, I've worked for companies that still use windows 2000 based computers quite regularly (and fight to keep employees from installing any sort of updates...)

Exactly. I work with some software that IS supported but upgrading certain software pieces will actually cause problems with the system.

Except my experience says that keeping on-site services is more reliable than web services. For instance, I've never had a client's office Exchange Server down. But a couple of clients who were using web-based mail servers had fairly frequent outages. GMail goes down a couple of times a year.

Yeah, I always figured that those big providers, with all sorts of redundancy and generators and such would be super-reliable. But, somehow, they, too, manage to go down.

This too. I work with both on-site and off-site and when the off-site servers go down, there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it.

But the servers connected in the LAN always worked. :biggrin:

 

[Modelworks]

The Cloud is just another name for the Internet, so anything Cloud based is just a fancy marketing name for something that's based around an Internet service. Anything more specific than that will depend on the individual service.

The two are different concepts and really not interchangeable. The internet is almost always used when talking about communication between computers. Cloud is usually used when you are talking about offloading something that a user pc would normally do but now want a computer on the other end to do for you.