

Living in the Cloud - My New Year's Resolution from 2011 - leahculver
http://blog.leahculver.com/2011/12/living-in-the-cloud-my-2011-new-years-resolution.html

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andyking
I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the
next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather
than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm
using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised
FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching
recorded and on-demand stuff online.

Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually _like_ going
out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports
local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could
easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but
it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the
cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999?

The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any
one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-
free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion,
who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town
that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical
bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room.
(Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.)

The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for
many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.)
But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC.
I couldn't transform my free time into that too.

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davej
> But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who
> provides the bits between the songs...

You can listen to pretty much any radio station (local/national/international)
online though.

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andyking
Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like
any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the
national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to
receive internet streams from all over the world.

It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community
station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also
connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.

I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live
radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot
of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM
is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.

This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget.
Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to
millions of people. It'll never go away.

[1]:
[http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558...](http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558&Category=)

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BillPosters
Someone should mention: this "cloud" is not actually a cloud, but relies on
physical things to exist. At both ends, loads of electric current is needed.
It relies on mining to bring the infrastructure, and it replaces your own
information management with facilities managed by people you'll never meet and
companies you'll barely know. But you have to trust them and agree to their
terms, and become their customer.

Living in the cloud could be the most you've ever sold out without knowing it.

My advice: keep a few books. Bookshelves can be left in standby mode for years
without needing a recharge. When people come over you can hand them a book,
maybe an art book, and they will enjoy flicking through the pages. The UX of a
book is top notch. Leave and rotate a few on the coffee table (if you have a
coffee table, or is that in the cloud too?).

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jordanmessina
Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects
living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.

~~~
gwillen
The problem is, most of the negative effects of the cloud are not immediate
downsides; rather they are future risks of catastrophe, which people are
generally very bad at measuring and accounting for. What's the probability
that Google accidentally flags you for abuse and eats your Gmail account
tomorrow, consuming your internet identity along with 5 years of email,
documents, blogposts, photos, videos, etc.? How do you rationally place an
expected value on that outcome?

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ratsbane
I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went
down. This (<http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png>) is all I've seen of it
since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are
unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me
reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off
trying to take back control.

I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in
some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had
84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with
such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.

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mahmoudimus
This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving
to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply
offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service.

Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.

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dicroce
I think this list is super cool, but I think it'd actually be pretty expensive
to live like this.

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overshard
As someone who lives in the cloud already, and has been for a few years, it's
very easy and efficient. I use Chrome's sync to have all my bookmarks
everywhere, lastpass to keep my passwords, pandora for my music, google reader
for my news, github for my code, gmail and google calendar, and dropbox with a
truecrypt blob for ssh keys, gpg keys and a few other things.

It's not hard to live in the cloud you just have to deal with a service
possibly going away or falling apart security wise. If you make the proper
precautions it's all good.

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dons
Interesting that this is mostly about lowering costs by exploiting, and
encouraging, the increase in liquidity of many goods and services, facilitated
by tech infrastructure.

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blago
I'm still stuck on the web :-(

