Google's Evil Cloud Computing plan?

[Tarry Singh]

SF article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/24/EDV1134BDS.DTL

I say: gosh, we're looking at a generation who really don't care if you know everything about them, so who cares anyways. Right?

--
Kind Regards,

Tarry Singh
______________________________________________________________
Founder, Avastu: Research-Analysis-Ideation
"Do something with your ideas!"
http://www.avastu.com
Business Cell: +31630617633
Private Cell: +31629159400
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tarrysingh
Blogs: http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com

[Chitty]

Interesting writeup! Here is something that I shared on my blog when google came with their free email service.

 

http://blogs.sun.com/ananda/date/20050612

 

thanks,

Ananda

(www.metoolabs.com)

[wayne pauley]

and just for clarification - the X as in the unknown ... Cloud-X
 
since we're exploring the unknown on so many levels ...

---

Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:45:13 -0700
From: chitt...@gmail.com
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Google's Evil Cloud Computing plan?

<br

[JM]

the article is also on digg whoever wants to push the importance of
this issue.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_Google_Evil_4

JM

On Sep 25, 2:41 pm, "Tarry Singh" <tarry.si...@gmail.com> wrote:
> SF article:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/24/EDV1134BD...

[fzap...@gmail.com]

You might want to check out Google's announcement of "V-8".
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: JM <jason....@gmail.com>

Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:52:40
To: Cloud Computing<cloud-c...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: Google's Evil Cloud Computing plan?

[Jason N. Meiers]

I don't know what V8 has to do with Google's being evil, V8 looks innovative. Although it seems to only be included in Chrome and not in IE or Firefox.

 

To me data security and data privacy is more important than innovation, just my 2 cents.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_Google_Evil_4

[Ben Bloch]

I agree V8, from what I know, is not evil and that the biggest issues around “evil”-ness concern are about data – as discussed in this article.

 

I think “data in the cloud” raises issues that are more like banking issues - We trust them to hold our money, pay us interest for the right to use it and return it when we want it.  Same for google and data in the cloud – services instead of interest plus not misusing the data.

 

In this vain, I am more concerned about cloud providers accidentally misusing the data and even losing it if they, for example, go out of business.  The FDIC at least guarantees the money given to banks  (obviously very important now).

 

 

Ben Bloch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

<br

[Fred Zappert]

My point obviously was not about data per se, but the extension to generate machine code.

As long as we're on this Big Brother thread,  one should also note the fact that Google also launched it's own photo-reconnaissance satellite (yes for Google Maps and Google Earth) earlier this month.

But, even with all of that, we all have more to worry about from the databanks of the credit bureaus and the insurance companies.

Google is not evil in my humble opinion.

[Ben Bloch]

Nor mine.

 

---

[xd...@comcast.net]

The problem with this statement is that the current generation may not
care, but largely because they enjoy protections (perceived or real)
that make them believe that they are "safe" despite having that data
published to the world. How many would want that to be true if it was
suddenly a crime to be blue-eyed? A member of Sierra Club? A wind
surfer? Yeah, ok, silly examples, but the point is that privacy is
about protection from things that you can't go back and fix once it's
done. The current generation may not care, now. But I'd bet they
would care if this published data was being used against them in some
way.

So IMO it is the responsibility of those of us who create these
systems to build in security and privacy controls from the ground up.
We don't have to use them all or restrict data availability if the
customer doesn't care, but we need those controls in place for those
that do, and for times when those controls become more necessary.

On Sep 25, 2:41 pm, "Tarry Singh" <tarry.si...@gmail.com> wrote:
> SF article:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/24/EDV1134BD...
>

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

Isn't it the responsibility of the people using the systems not to put information/data up there that they don't want shared with the world?  That's the tradeoff for the expense shift.

 

Anyone putting information in FaceBook, for example, had better expect that it's now out there, forever, for everyone to see.  No matter what "privacy" settings they pick (as the privacy policy can be changed at-will by FaceBook).  People aren't seeing consequences to this yet, but I'll bet a diet coke that in a few years we'll have our first scandal in D.C. related to FaceBook/MySpace postings by an existing congressman or new candidate.  Until then, people aren't thinking about the consequences of what they're doing.

 

Same with any SaaS (or CC).  If you don't want the information public, ever, then keep it behind your firewall.  I can't imagine this will ever change.  It's the fundamental decision point about where to put your information.

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of xd...@comcast.net [xd...@comcast.net]
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 12:09 PM
To: Cloud Computing

Subject: Re: Google's Evil Cloud Computing plan?

[Chris Marino]

This reminds me of a presentation that Eben Moglen gave at mySQL a while back.  I wrote about it here. He concludes with this chilling image:

 

.....I concede that “Do No Evil” may be the motto of those who present the option to us, and they may be right. They may not be doing evil.

It wasn’t evil to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s evil not to notice that it has consequences, and to consider them before we drown our kid’s back yard.

 

So let us think about this. Let us bring all of our good collective intellect to bear. Let us see how this can be dealt with. Let us imagine our ways out of the problem in several different direction. Let’s do what we usually do. Let’s have proof of concepts. Lets have running code. Let a hundred flowers bloom. Let’s sort it out.

So that when the kids go thought the snapshots and the scrapbooks after we are gone, they don’t find themselves saying. “This. This is the snapshot of the day when privacy died”.

 

And the bitterness of that is in the photograph they took of themselves as they did it.

CM

[Paul Kamp]

While true most of the cloud computing companies would like to become your infrastructure provider.  They do not think you should be running your own data-center when you could get more bang for your buck from them. As such, most cloud providers are working to improve security of data and computing in the cloud.  For example, Amazon has published a white-paper on AWS security that says that some solutions are Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant.  Additionally some companies are specializing in adding security so you can use the cloud. If a platform shift is to be made, and I think it will, then all of these objections must be overcome.  Since I have seen a good amount of focus on that space I suspect it will happen. Regards, Paul Kamp --- On Mon, 9/29/08, Pietrasanta, Mark <Mark.Pie...@aquilent.com> wrote:

[Steve Palmer]

Paul, I'm in your camp on cloud computing companies.

Steve
www.opthome.com

--
Steve

[Venkatesh Dharmar]

Not sure what they are up to here ....  http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=278

[Alexis Richardson]

It would be better if people restricted 'cloud computing' to the more
recent platform/infra offerings eg EC2, Flexiscale, Google App Engine.
I think cloud is about 'your application' and not 'somebody else's
application'. The latter was called SaaS for several years and still
can be. Stallman's comments about lock in and privacy apply to SaaS
more than platform/infra clouds.

alexis

[Adwait Ullal]

 

Why are the comments (on lock-in & privacy) not relevant to platform/infra clouds?

 

- Adwait

[Alexis Richardson]

Because for clouds running virtual images and where you back up your
data, it should be easier to port to another platform.

[Adwait Ullal]

 

What if:

 

a. the API or some other aspect of say, hosting the virtual image changes or you need to move your VI from one provider to another

b. that your backup is compromised

 

Point is ... privacy is applicable, no matter where you host (though the facets may be different) and lock-in occurs the moment you start writing code.

 

- Adwait

[David Chua]

Speaking about moving VM from one provider to another, has anyone come
across this RFC that vaguely talks about how IP addresess should be
tagged to VMs instead of providers.

They were proposing that so that users don't have to keep changing ip
addresses when they change providers.

I'm interested in reading that again, but I can't find it anymore. Was
wondering if anyone here has came across it too.

PS: Hi everyone, I'm new :-)

Warmest regards,
David

[Alexis Richardson]

Adwait,

It doesn't sound like we are agreeing that violently. I think you see
my point about the Stallman objections being more about SaaS, hence my
moan about people who say SaaS=cloud.

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Adwait Ullal <adwait...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What if:
>
> a. the API or some other aspect of say, hosting the virtual image changes or
> you need to move your VI from one provider to another

What about it? Moving a VI from one VMM to another is far easier than
(for example) moving a JVM based app from one app server to another.
Even across VMM technologies it's not that painful.

Yes if you connect to specific APIs which you do not control then you
may have portability issues, but that also applies to the LAN-bound
non-cloud case. I don't believe Stallman can be asserting that
lock-in effects do not exist if you deploy and integrate all your apps
locally, even if they are all GPL.

I think Stallman is worried about things like this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/04/4th-amendment_email_privacy/

> b. that your backup is compromised

That does not imply lock-in, it implies a lack of security. Suppose I
run my email server on my laptop and back it up to servers that I own.
One or the other is compromised (laptop or servers). In neither case
am I locked in. Now replace 'servers' with S3 in the example.
Nothing has changed.

> Point is ... privacy is applicable, no matter where you host (though the
> facets may be different) and lock-in occurs the moment you start writing
> code.

So, you are saying that Stallman's arguments apply more or less
equally well to the non-cloud case. And, thus, agreeing with me.

alexis

[Oscar Koeroo]

Hi,

That's feature from IPv6 given that infrastructure at the location of
the hardware has means to enable the support. The tagging should be
nothing more then declaring the IP address in the VM.

Oscar

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[Oscar Koeroo]

Hi,

I mostly agree with your points, but what do you mean by lock-in occurs
the moment you start writing code? Shouldn't that be prefixed that your
writing your own application dependent code or something alike? I can
think of several pieces of code that prevents lock-in.

Oscar

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

You said: "hence my moan about people who say SaaS=cloud"

I agree with you, in theory at least, but could you clearly itemize the differences, in your opinion? We've been having this discussion internally, and I'm always fascinated (and I learn more) by what people call out.

[Alexis Richardson]

In my view SaaS is about reducing sales, management and deployment
costs for a certain class of applications, provided *by someone else*
(eg salesforce.com, Google Apps).

Cloud is a 'self service' (no sales guys) business model for
supporting 'elastic scale on demand' (pay for what you use, do not pay
once you stop using) for *your own applications*.

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

Okay, so you're saying the term "Cloud Computing", to you, is really just a new pricing model for hosting services? 

 

Technically, any hosting provider could offer a pay-as-you-use pricing model.

 

While technology certainly enables this pricing model (in particular, making it profitable), is there anything in "Cloud Computing" that is inherently tied to a specific technology framework or architecture, IYO?

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alexis Richardson [alexis.r...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:16 AM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Cloud computing is ¹stupidity¹ says GNU guru Richard Stallman

[Alexis Richardson]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Pietrasanta, Mark
<Mark.Pie...@aquilent.com> wrote:
> Okay, so you're saying the term "Cloud Computing", to you, is really just a
> new pricing model for hosting services?

It is a much more than a new way to price hosting.

I think four aspects are innovative:

1) pricing model - "utility" (pay by need) and "elastic" (fine grained
control of what you pay)
2) distribution model - "self service" - web APIs suffice, there are
no sales people, customers 'can pay by card'
3) deployment model - "container based" applications are collections
of portable containers (easy to move, boot, kill), and deployed to a
shared pool of servers (so good security is really important)
4) design center - "cloud operating systems" - scheduling and managing
applications, exposing services for storage and network access

Having spoken to cloud providers, I think they might add (5) supply
chain, because for a provider, managing an elastic pool of hardware is
non-trivial.

> Technically, any hosting provider could offer a pay-as-you-use pricing
> model.

Yes if they were willing to change how they do everything. At the
moment, that's pretty much a given. As cloud matures this will get
easier (eg vCloud).

> While technology certainly enables this pricing model (in particular, making
> it profitable), is there anything in "Cloud Computing" that is inherently
> tied to a specific technology framework or architecture, IYO?

I'm not sure what you are asking but in the above (3) tends to mean
virtualization or zones, and (4) is completely up for grabs.

alexis

[Ray Nugent]

How about time to market or Time to Deploy?

Ray

[Alexis Richardson]

Absolutely - but that comes from the combination of self-service and elasticity.

Of course in practice YMMV. You can't just deploy any old app and
expect it to work right first time. In that sense Ellison et al. are
correct "not that much has changed".

[Greg Pfister]

Regarding Stallman's comments, there's an interesting article on ars
technica against his position that also has a lot of links to open
source cloud efforts.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080930-why-stallman-is-wrong-when-he-calls-cloud-computing-stupid.html

I don't think I necessarily agree with (or even follow) all the
rebuttals there, but I do wonder if Stallman also services his own car
100%.

Greg Pfister

On Sep 30, 12:16 pm, "Alexis Richardson" <alexis.richard...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> It would be better if people restricted 'cloud computing' to the more
> recent platform/infra offerings eg EC2, Flexiscale, Google App Engine.
>  I think cloud is about 'your application' and not 'somebody else's
> application'.  The latter was called SaaS for several years and still

> can be.  Stallman'scomments about lock in and privacy apply to SaaS

> more than platform/infra clouds.
>
> alexis
>
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 6:08 PM, Venkatesh Dharmar
>

[Jean-Christophe Smith]

Individual Portable IPs would be a very tough concept and bring down the efficiency of the internet routing tables. However, if you were using a block of IPs larger than a /24 (255 ips), you could get your own block from ARIN/APNIC/RIPE and do your own BGP routing. This is already a common concept in the non-virtual internet services ecosystem. I don't think I have really seen any cloud providers talking about doing bgp so far however. This would take the complexity to a whole new level.

I think you could achieve the same level of automating portability by clever integration of dns, dhcp and virtual mac addresses.

--
Jean-Christophe Smith
VP Engineering
Deer Valley Ventures, LLC

[Ajeet Bagga]

On Oct 2, 2008, at 4:47 PM, Jean-Christophe Smith wrote:

Individual Portable IPs would be a very tough concept and bring down the efficiency of the internet routing tables.

Indeed, and neither would such offending adverts be transported across most inter-AS prefix-filters.

However, if you were using a block of IPs larger than a /24 (255 ips), you could get your own block from ARIN/APNIC/RIPE and do your own BGP routing.

For direct delegation, ARIN won't go longer than a /20 (/22 for multi-homed). Those looking for prefixes longer than /22, getting assignments from an upstream is the usual recourse.

This is already a common concept in the non-virtual internet services ecosystem. I don't think I have really seen any cloud providers talking about doing bgp so far however. This would take the complexity to a whole new level.

I think you could achieve the same level of automating portability by clever integration of dns, dhcp and virtual mac addresses.

Implementing redundancy and/or balancing, creeping ever into the app layer, falls, though not exclusively, in the cloud provider's domain. Unlike TCP/IP, the higher you climb up the hourglass, the implementation gets wider. Virtualization hugely benefits Clouds in that sense. But, the interoperability challenges with APIs isn't unique to the Cloud paradigm.

~

Ajeet Bagga

Sr. Network Engineer

Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Services

EMC

[Paul Renaud]

That's too narrow a definition for me. Clouds should really be about
scalable / elastic computing in the network.

VMs are just a tool for running your own apps but it shouldn't matter what
the apps are or whose they are.

SaaS is a hosted model for providing a single application service to someone
else over the net. The consumer of the service could be another service
(possibly running in a cloud or on a desktop or server on site). The SaaS
service could be hosted in a cloud or in a more traditional network data
center with pre-provisioned (fixed) capacity.

-----Original Message-----
From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alexis Richardson
Sent: October 1, 2008 10:17 AM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Cloud computing is ¹stupidity¹ says GNU guru Richard Stallman

[Alexis Richardson]

Paul,

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 3:00 AM, Paul Renaud <ren...@lanigangroup.ca> wrote:

> Clouds should really be about

> scalable / elastic computing in the network. [ snip ]
> ... it shouldn't matter what

> the apps are or whose they are.

> SaaS is a hosted model for providing a single application service to someone
> else over the net.

Yes, that is exactly the distinction that I just made: Cloud for 'your
apps' (ie. any app) and SaaS for 'someone else's apps'.

alexis

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

That's simply talking about the business/consumer side of it.  Surely cloud computing is more than a business model?

 

I think you'll have a hard time finding applications in the cloud that aren't SaaS (which can mean free).  Other than prototyping and academic work.  SaaS can certainly exist outside the cloud, but it would seem pointless to use the cloud for anything other than (mostly) SaaS.

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alexis Richardson [alexis.r...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 3:12 AM

[Alexis Richardson]

Mark,

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Pietrasanta, Mark
<Mark.Pie...@aquilent.com> wrote:
> That's simply talking about the business/consumer side of it.

All I was doing was pointing out that Paul was actually agreeing with
what I had said about Saas being 'someone else's app' and cloud being
'my app'.

Not sure what point you are making?

> Surely cloud
> computing is more than a business model?

Earlier in this thread I attempted to set out what 'cloud is a
business model' might mean and this led to a discussion about the
required technical innovations.

> I think you'll have a hard time finding applications in the cloud that
> aren't SaaS (which can mean free). Other than prototyping and academic
> work. SaaS can certainly exist outside the cloud, but it would seem
> pointless to use the cloud for anything other than (mostly) SaaS.

Three counterexamples to your claim are:
- using cloud for large compute farms (eg hedge funds risk analysis)
- storage and backup (eg twitter use of S3)
- hosting intranet/extranet applications with single sign on

alexis

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

1) Hedge funds apps are apps, and a service.  They don't have to be paid for. (This could fall into the academic use though)

2) S3 is exactly SaaS.  That's why EC2 is their Cloud, not S3.

3) Intranet is an app, as a service, in the cloud, ergo SaaS

 

The whole point of the cloud, ultimately, is to offer SaaS (with a few exceptions)

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alexis Richardson [alexis.r...@gmail.com]

Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 10:41 AM

[Alexis Richardson]

If I am a hedge fund and I deploy *my own* applications to someone
else's hardware, then I am not consuming *someone else's software* as
a service.

Mark, I don't mean to be rude but your view is reductionist - it makes
everything look like one thing (SaaS) - therefore has less value than
an analysis that makes distinctions.

alexis


On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Pietrasanta, Mark

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

You call it reductionist, I call it necessary simplification.  We keep coming up with new names for things that already exist, and then try to spout how everything has changed, and make it more complicated than it is.  Heck, what was the point of ASP -> SaaS?

 

I would bet there are 10 or more definitions of SaaS just in this group of people.  How can that be?

 

And if I asked whether SaaS is part of CC or not, I doubt there'd be a consistent answer, either in terms of yes/no,  or in terms of the details of what that yes/no meant.

 

The reality is that today, right now, we have SaaS/ASP, Virtualization, and cheaper hardware.  And the OS/App Server vendors are conveniently changing their pricing models.  And we have some big players who see this combination as profitable, and who already had a lot of hardware sitting around pre-virtualization that they'd like to make some money off of.

 

There is nothing new here.  It's just technology meeting business.

 

What likely will be revolutionary is the ideas that small startups can now develop with very little capital.  Instead of requiring millions in VC to get an idea going, you can now leverage this new "IaaS/Infrastructure as a Service" model to quickly prototype/proof-of-concept new ideas. 

 

As for everyone else?  It's basically just a new pricing model for managed hosting, with a new set of benefits and a new set of issues.  It won't replace anything (except Grid computing), it will just be another offering.

 

But for some (I'm not saying you), making things sound excessively complicated and drastically different is how they keep things interesting, I guess.  More power to them.  I prefer to distill things down to what they really are so we can determine if they are good for us, for our customers, and what the risks/mitigations are.

 

-Mark

 

 

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alexis Richardson [alexis.r...@gmail.com]

Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 11:17 AM

[Ron Leedy]

I think we need to clarify SaaS. Its Software as a Service; ie. http. This
means there is no client application loaded on the users machine. If a
large corporation runs a browser based application and does charge backs to
departments then its SaaS. Probably not the dot com, ASP, Salesforce model
most people think but in its purity is a service within the browser. I
include the browser as part of the desktop OS; which I guess makes me very
Microsoft-like :-(

Cloud computing is an architecture of infrastructure to deliver services.
Whether its EC2 or the server and storage group of a IT organization
delivering a cloud to the application people. In very large bureaucratic
corporations (insurance industry), this is how a lot are organized. Instead
of 1:1 hardware deployment, we are adding virtualization to the mix. Cloud
computing should relieve the application people from worrying about
hardware. Though we hardware types know the application people only care
about why the server made their application crash never about why their
application sucks unneeded processing resources :-)

I realize this might be a simplification of the issue but then I have been
accused of taking the juice out of marketing hype around new stuff. Having
been in the industry since there was tubes, punch cards and 4K user space, I
have seen a lot come and go and believe we need to think how its seen top
down very much like the OSI layers.

Though I participate in them social networks are over rated; particularly
the birdie. Why do my friends need to know what I am feeling every moment
of the day?

Ron

[Pietrasanta, Mark]

You said "I think we need to clarify SaaS.  Its Software as a Service; ie. http."

 

Thanks for helping make my point - so that's already 3 definitions of SaaS in just a couple of posts.

 

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ron Leedy [rf...@speakeasy.net]
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 1:07 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Cloud computing is ¹stupidity¹ says GNU guru Richard Stallman

[Paco NATHAN]

One note about the source of this remark, Richard Stallman -- cloud
pro's and con's aside:

A few years ago, I helped produce an event at a well-known tech
conference where RMS was also speaking. Our first sign of trouble with
Stallman was that he required acceptance of a FIVE PAGE TERM SHEET --
including line items about hosts taking him to local "folk dancing" --
as conditions of his appearance to speak. Things grew worse from that
point. I will never again have anything to do with the man.

I found the whole episode quite pathetic, callously uncivil, and
altogether too reminiscent of a kind of heroin-fueled narcissism
which, in comparison, could make Kim Jong-il worthy of a Nobel Peace
Prize.

Not to mention the elaborate and rather forced cult of personality
which surrounds both individuals.

Just saying.

[Chris Marino]

Folk dancing? Hadn't heard that before.... Anyone else have similar
experiences?

It's well known that editors would often have to commit to refer to
Linux as 'GNU/Linux'. But folk dancing is over the top!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy


CM

>-----Original Message-----
>From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
>[mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paco NATHAN
>Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 12:55 PM
>To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
>Subject: Re: Cloud computing is ¹stupidity¹ says GNU guru
>Richard Stallman
>
>
>

[Paco NATHAN]

Good point, Chris :)

"GNU/Linux" renaming was demanded for all events and panels; SXSW
staff might confirm it, or not. Our specific event was called "Linux
Top Gun", so we drew RMS wrath directly. Historicism prevailed over
synecdoche.

Watching Raul Castro jump to Stallman's defense on the cloud computing
criticism, that was way over the top:
http://websphere.sys-con.com/node/693641

If there's ever a "Team America II", I certainly hope Parker and Stone
include an RMS character in the cast.

[Ajay ohri]

Not sure of Mr Stallman, Mr Jong -il , Mr Castro et all.

But cloud computing actually opens up closed spaces of operating system etc which are all but closed on the desktop.


The GNu chaps might be better off creating tools and apps for clouds rather than indulge in stuff like this.

Ajay

--
Regards,

Ajay Ohri
http://tinyurl.com/liajayohri

[Tim Bass]

It would be good to stay on topic and debate the technical points of
Stallman's position and not attack the man personally. This is a
common form of logical fallacy, attack the person and not the actual
merits of the argument.

Let's try to avoid personal attacks. Thanks.

[Khazret Sapenov]

If I understood correctly, RS wants people switch from Gmail to Outlook Express/POP3/SMTP (not sure if IMAP qualifies) storing all messages on home PC. 

I'll let you figure out technical benefits and perspectives of such move. It reminds me of Great Leap Forward in China, when every peasant had to produce steel at their backyard. 

[Tim Bass]

Perhaps Stallman is concerned about security and privacy.

In that case, he has a very strong techincal argument against both
Gmail and cloud computing, LOL.

[Paul Renaud]

A big reason why you might use clouds for other than SaaS is to take advantage of a lot of computing power to run simulations.  I.E. a classical grid application running on rented cloud computers instead of in your own pool.  There are many commercial applications of this in digital media creation, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, pharma, geology, to name a few.

 

To your point: cloud computing is indeed more than a business model.  It is also hype on steroids. :)

 

Paul

---

From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Pietrasanta, Mark
Sent: October 4, 2008 9:30 AM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Cloud computing is ¹stupidity¹ says GNU guru Richard Stallman