
Not every cloud has a silver lining by Cory Doctorow - fogus
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctorow-cloud-computing
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betageek
Doctorow appears to be warning 'punters' that someone giving them a service
may be trying to make some money (shock!) and that we should all just store
our 'encrypted bits of state information' - meanwhile I just thought we were
trying to provide a useful service to users. Doctorow's slide towards Troll
continues...

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teeja
As an 'average punter', I'd never never ever put anything I valued into a
'cloud'.

Why become dependent on a service that can walk away at any time? How many
times have people been screwed by net schemes that folded ... just for music
alone?

Then there's the security question. How many stores and banks have lost
millions of customer accounts to hackers? I can protect my stuff better than
you can ... simply because _it matters to me_ more than it will ever matter to
you ... but also because my storage is part of the _diffuse_ cloud of all
users, not the _concentrated_ cloud of a few giants with big bullseyes painted
on them.

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sh1mmer
To repost the comment I made on the article:

I think this is an unfair comparison and Cory is oversimplifying. For example:

 _"Rather than buying a hard-drive once and paying nothing – apart from the
electricity bill – to run it, you can buy cloud storage and pay for those
sectors every month."_

Files stored on services like Amazon are split among many hard-drives to
protect from data-loss should any single drive fail. Not only that, but data
is also replicated in multiple sites to protect from a geographic or network
disaster in a single location. More than that, the cloud-provider is assuming
the cost for any failed hardware in running this setup, the cost of paying
someone to physically replace the hard-drives.

That's just the part which keeps the data safe. What about the availability?
If you keep your data at home in a desk-drawer then you can't access it on the
road. With a cloud service you are getting always-on, always-available data
access, with guaranteed levels of speed which will be far in excess of the
capability of domestic broadband connections (in which the upstream connection
is throttled).

So while I agree that there is a definitely cost difference between cloud
services and buying and running your own hardware, the cost is associated with
real tangible value, it's up to you to decide if that value is worthwhile.
Personally, I value that my backup service in the cloud will not loose my
data. I can't say the same for the USB hard-drive on my desktop.

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3pt14159
In some countries depreciating a storage server takes multiple years, while
paying $50 for a service does not.

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wmf
He's talking about "the average punter", not businesses.

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electronslave
This is true. Some clouds have silver linings by talented writers.

