Posts with tag "cloud computing"

There’s Steam in that there Cloud

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  • Posted 1687 days ago

One of the cool things about being in this business for a long time is that it can give you some interesting back history to point to as new stuff is brought to the tech market. Such is the case with Valve Software’s announcement today about the upcoming roll-out of its Steam Cloud. Now I remember when Steam first came out as part of the Half-Life game and just about everyone expressed their displeasure over being forced into using Steam. Fast forward to today and we have Value rolling out its own version of cloud computing for Steam members and everyone thinks it is a great idea.

The idea is that the Steam Cloud; a free extension for users of the Steam platform, is that gamers will be able to save games and mouse and keyboard setups on the Steam Cloud and then be able to access those things across multiple PCs

The Steam Cloud will “just work,” meaning any user changes to their game options will propagate to the Cloud by default. Upon logging into Steam from another PC, these settings will be brought down from the Cloud and automatically leveraged by the game. Any configuration changes on this second machine are then synced to the Cloud for future sessions.

As cool as this might be I just discovered that they accept PayPal at the Steam Store – this could be dangerous :)

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Microsoft’s Cloud OS Has A Name – Maybe

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  • Posted 1715 days ago

I really appreciate those bloggers out there who have the infinite patience to go through screenshots, documentation, press releases and other such sundry items in order to dig up some tasty tidbits. It is because of this type of detective work from bloggers like Kit Org and Long Zhend that we find out the interesting, humourous or questionable things that are happening in the world of Microsoft and Windows.

The rest of the post can be found over at the WinExtra Blog

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Is It Time To Start Packing For The Cloud?

It would appear from what a few people are reporting on their blogs that Microsoft is going public with their first version of their implementation of the Windows Cloud OS. While that probably won’t be the actual name upon delivery the fact is that Steve Ballmer says it’s going to happen. This of course has – as usual – brought out the Microsoft naysayers hot on the trail of some new stuff to slap Microsoft around with.

Much of the current discussion right now is stemming out of a post by The Register where they quote Steve Ballmer from a speech he gave in London. It was there that he talked briefly about how they would be introducing Windows Cloud; its temporary name, at this year’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in about four weeks. The thing is as Joe Wilcox pointed out, this information was announced on an even earlier date (Sept. 8th) by Bob Muglia.

This fact though has largely been ignored by all the bloggers who have rushed to progosticate on how the world will end when Ballmer does make the announcement at the PDC. It hasn’t stopped any of them either from riffing on about how given Microsoft’s penchant for announcing stuff only to let it flounder the chances of anything substantive actually being presented is pretty slim. Such was the attitude of Stan Schroeder at Mashable this morning when he said

Microsoft is big and slow, they announce stuff like this months before it’s ready; so my guesstimate is that Ballmer’s four weeks will turn into months really soon.

Then we have Svetlana Gladkova at Profy.com that the whole exercise will prove whether Microsoft can actually do something right when it comes to the web or just another of its many failures

But anyway it will be interesting what Microsoft has to offer and how it will affect the internet industry – or if it will be yet another failure for the software giant online.

I realize that Microsoft has made more than a few blunders when it comes to the Internet, but there’s a few things that people are missing in their rush to jab Microsoft with some sharp sticks. The first thing not being considered by many of them is that Microsoft is no longer Bill Gates; and I would wager that for most of the last year it hasn’t been.

People are forgetting that Ray Ozzie is the driving force behind the company’s move into the Internet world ever since he was hired in 2005. This whole exercise is exactly why he was hired in the first place; and for the better part of the last three years he has been working on this with all the resources available to a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Folks seem to think that things like Windows Cloud is just something that Microsoft has thrown together. Well you can bet that this would be the wrong thing to be thinking, especially when you tie in the fact that the Windows platform; since the release of Vista, has been headed up by Steven Sinofsky. It is because of him that any word of what is going into this Windows Cloud, the Live platform and the Windows platform hasn’t made it out of a very tightly controlled circle of product teams.

We have only seen dribs and drabs of the possible pieces that will make up this Windows Cloud OS; and while people seem to be under the assumptions that it is going to be browser based it is obvious that they haven’t been paying attention to Live Mesh at all.

While Google is principally working from the browser as the interface to their interpretation of cloud computing they have recognized that it can’t all be online and this is why they came out with Google Gears. What they are doing is commonly referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS) which is very different from Microsoft’s approach. With them it is more of Software plus Services (S+S) which mean the seamless integration of desktop applications and their web based counterparts. In essence it won’t make any difference if you are using the web side or the desktop side when it comes to the applications or data.

It is this difference that some tech pundits are missing when they try and earn brownie points by putting down Microsoft’s efforts. This is also why we get questions like the one from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped when he asked

Why do they announce instead of deliver?

The answer to this one is as old as Microsoft itself and one of the earliest lessons the company ever learned. It’s all about the software. Without software that can run using the S+S philosophy then yes their move onto the web and cloud computing will be a failure just as Svetlana suggests. Anyone who seriously follows Microsoft should understand this very basic part about the company as it is something that they have done since their earliest days delivering operating systems. Get the developers involved as soon as is possible – get the software that can run in the new environment out there as soon as possible after shipping the OS. Windows Cloud is no different only more important.

This is why things like Windows Cloud are announced at the PDC conferences because that is where the developers are. This is where they can get the new tools and new operating systems into the hands of the leading software developers for Windows. It doesn’t matter what gets announced at this next PDC regarding Windows cloud because you can rest assured unless you are a developer there won’t be anything to really play with.

That won’t happen until after the release of the next version of Visual Studio and .NET 4 Framework. It will only be then that developer of all levels will be able to do any serious work developing stuff for this new OS. Some point after though we will probably start to see the beginnings of the OS making it’s way into our hands.

As much as it might give the know it all tech pundits plenty of fodder with which to write more negative posts about Microsoft this upcoming PDC announcement isn’t for us. It is for the developers to let them know that some big changes are coming and it is them that I will be listening to afterwords not the tech blogosphere.

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Call 911 I’m Almost Agreeing With Stallman

Let’s get this part out of the way right now. I don’t agree with Richard Stallman at all when it comes to his pronouncements about open source software. When he gets on his high horse about how OSS is going to save the world and is the cure for all our evilness I want to run screaming like a girl into the night.

In some ways I think he has caused as much damage to the software world as those people who he rails non-stop against. That isn’t to say that I am against open source software – I’m not. It has its place in our computing ecosphere just as commercial software does. I just think that his maddening self-righteousness about how all commercial software is evil and the only solution is for everyone to use OSS pisses me off.

That said, I read the piece today on the Guardian site by Bobbie Johnson where Richard came out swinging. In the interview he said that the idea of using web-based programs like Gmail was worse than stupidity

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

He was saying this stuff as part of his argument against cloud computing suggesting that by relying fully on the cloud concept we are only selecting yet another evil master to rule over us. Of course his answer for this is for us to keep using our own machines but with OSS alternatives. While I agree that much of this move to the cloud is nothing more than huge marketing hype by all the parties involved I believe it is inevitable that we do move to some form of cloud computing. Whether it be the pure cloud like Google would have us living in or more of the software plus services world Microsoft is advocating still remains to be seen.

Where he does get my total agreement though is in the closing paragraph of the interview where he says

“One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control,” he said. “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

I don’t agree with the cloak of OSS self-righteousness that he drapes his words in but I do when it comes to the idea that we are giving up control to who ever is holding our data in any of those clouds. In someways this is even worse than the control we might give up by using commercial software on our own machines.

Interesting enough Stan Schroeder from Mashable also found himself in partial agreement with Stallman but for different reasons than mine. In his post agrees that it isn’t wise to rely exclusively on cloud software but the problem is that many of the web apps we use aren’t replicable on the desktop

The problem, however, is that Stallman doesn’t realize that some web apps are not easily replicable as desktop open source applications. Give me an open source desktop version of Facebook, and I’ll use it, but it simply doesn’t exist. It’s a common error; many IT geeks and diehards are used to using a relatively limited set of applications and something along the lines of MySpace or perhaps Netvibes seems like a toy or a complete waste of time. Well, it isn’t: these apps are used by millions and most of them wouldn’t trade it for the world, and like it or not, there’s simply no open source alternative.

Like Stan points out as well at the end of his post, it all boils down to personal choice. Examine what your options are. Examine your reasons for using the available options whether they be desktop or cloud based and then decide. Unlike what Stallman would believe as long as you do the above then absolutely no choice you go with should render you as being stupid.

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Is Cloud Computing Just a New Flavour Of Kool-Aid?

Computing in the clouds There doesn’t seem to be a week; or even a day, that goes by when we aren’t bedazzled by some new terminology. Sometimes the new buzzwords really refer to something new and cool in the technology field and other times it’s no different than slapping a fresh coat of paint on the same old technology. In recent months one of the newest buzzwords that has been slowly creeping into common terminology has to be cloud computing; which I have written about here before on a few occasions. While I have looked at it from it’s basic nature as I tried to explain it to neophytes right through to questioning whether this was just going to be a new battle ground for existing operating systems there was always the question of just how new this idea really was.

More than a few times in the comments of my various posts on the matter it was pointed out that nothing that was being called cloud computing was anywhere near being new. Then today I came across a post by Mike Elgan over on IT Management who points out that this whole concept of cloud computing is nothing more than a misleading buzzword:

“Cloud computing” is misleading. As a marketing buzzword, it’s used to suggest that something new and better is going on, when in fact there may be nothing new about it. Yes, new technologies arise all the time. But assimilating new technologies into the “cloud computing” label doesn’t make all the old stuff under that umbrella new. It also “clouds” communication between technical people and non-technical people. The former usually understand that “cloud computing” is a largely meaningless catch-all phrase to describe just about everything that’s happening online nowadays. But the latter, I’ve found, tend to assume it’s something more specific than that.

Cloud computing” is redundant. Unlike other buzzwords such as, say “Web 2.0″ or “virtualization,” the word wasn’t coined out of necessity to describe something new, or to bring clarity to something vague. Just the opposite. It was coined to put a new coat of paint on something old, and to add vagueness to specific, well understood technologies.

As Cyndy Aleo-Carreira pointed out in a comment on one of my posts about cloud computing

The only difference now is in the transparency of what’s happening. It’s been the rare company who’s actually owned their own servers; how much has historically been outsourced to companies like IBM and EDS? EDS was running the servers for a good chunk of Blue Cross/Blue Shield as far back as what? The 70s? 80s? And they had your medical information. ;)

So not only are we dealing with an older technology that’s been given a new coat of paint; but we also are being asked to place too much of our trust and daily lives in the control of systems that are nothing more than black boxes. Black boxes that are in the control of corporations that tell you to just trust them – even as their systems go down. Again quoting Mike Elgan

In other words, the “cloud” in “cloud computing” represents ignorance. And this ignorance is touted as one of the benefits of “cloud computing.” When companies hawk “cloud computing,” they’re selling the idea that ignorance is bliss. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. We’ll take care of everything.

As companies get excited about, grow comfortable with and ultimately embrace what they think is the shiny new world of “cloud computing,” everything becomes less reliable. A single Web page, for example, might be built out of several “cloud” components — one company providing storage, another applications and still another site metering. If anything breaks, everything breaks. Cloud computing simply increases the number of things that can go wrong.

And go wrong they do. In the past few weeks, GoToMeeting, Amazon’s EC2 and S3, SiteMeter, Gmail, Netflix and MobileMe each experienced significant outages.

If you think outages of Internet-based services are increasing in both frequency and duration, you’re not crazy. The ever-increasing complexity of these multiple black-box components increases the chances that something will go south.

There isn’t a week that doesn’t go by when we don’t here of people not being able to access their GMail accounts for varying amounts of time. Granted these might be isolated cases and we shouldn’t read too much into all these little outages of services that rely on the cloud but one has to wonder if drinking too much of this new kool-aid will come back to haunt us.

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Those Clouds Are Getting Pretty Thick

Cloud Computing - the next minefield Back in July I did a Discussion Point podcast that talked about how the OS War could be heading into the clouds as all the major players stake their claim on this new computing platform that has everyone running around like crazy. I followed that up with a full post on the cost and the dominance factor in the cloud computing arena but it seems that there isn’t a week that goes by where someone else announces that they are jumping in as well.

I realize that competition can be a great thing however I wonder if in this case this everyone in the pool idea is such a good thing. First off lets take a look at the companies currently involved with cloud computing and those who have announced their intention to join the party. After a quick search this is some of the companies that I found to add to the ones I already knew of:

It is easy to tell from even this cursory list that this field is becoming the next Internet gold rush with everyone looking to get their slice of the proverbial pie in the sky. The problem is that all these different companies all have different ideas of how cloud computing should be implemented, how the platform should be structured and how it should be accessed. Potentially this could make the OS war that we are use to know seem like a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon.

Something that should in theory provide a level computing playing field for us the users could end up being just another minefield of protocols, access method and program interoperability – you know … those things that have been haunting our current computing life. I know I could be wrong about this worry and I hope I am – really I do – but history has shown us otherwise.

What do you think – will having all these companies (with more to come most assuredly) make the adoption of cloud computing easier or harder?

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Cloud Computing – Dominance and Cost

Is heading to the clouds worth the costs? One of the hottest terms out there these days appears to be cloud computing with everyone wanting to get in the act of setting up massive data centers to become the heart of these clouds. Right know probably the two biggest players in this rapidly emerging computing field has to be Google and Microsoft with Amazon not far behind given the popularity of their S3 and E3 services. This doesn’t even take into account players like IBM; who just announced a new data center project, EDS who is being bought up by HP or any number of other major data related corporations.

The Dominance

The other day I had a Discussion Point podcast where I talked about the idea of how the current operating system sectors were potentially being transplanted to this new cloud computing platform and the OS war along with them. Then today Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid.com suggests that rather than a war per se we could end up with a single global company being the major force in the Cloud much like Microsoft on the Desktop or Google on the Web:

But nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody’s saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn’t be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today’s Microsoft or Google. We’re talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

I imagine my friends who work for the aforementioned companies know all this, and know how VAST the stakes are.

Windows vs Apple? Who cares? Kid’s stuff. There’s a much bigger game going on… And for some reason, its utter enormity seems to be a very well-kept secret.

While Hugh might be considering it a secret for now one has to wonder if indeed one company could end up being the major force – and which company; if it even currently exist, will it be. If computing history is any guideline to go by chances are Hugh could be right. Now whether that will be a good thing or not still remains to be seen.

The Cost

The main component of all cloud computing offering regardless of the company making them is massive data centers all around the world. companies like Google and Microsoft are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year and there is no sign of them slowing down – if anything they will be increasing their spending. However there is another cost beyond the investments being made by the companies involved – one that could have far reaching effects in our changing world.

There is one common element that all data centers need that has nothing at all to do with storing data and that is the electrical power required to run these massive server farms. The folks over at Pingdom did some number crunching and the one usage example they gave and based on stats for 2005 the amount of power used by all US data centers at that time was enough to power five million houses. this figure doesn’t take into account either the other equipment involved – like the routers and such.

Since 2005; which really was only the early years of data centers being built on any huge scale, there has been an explosion of data center projects. It is this insatiable need for electricity that has Microsoft and Google building their data centers in remote areas that are close to current hydro electric installation and looking to even building their own. While this need for power not just to run the actual data centers but also to cool them has prompted these major player to also heavily invest in research about cooling these data monstrosities.

One has to wonder though with this increase desire to move us all to the cloud what is going to be the cost to our environment and is it worth the cost. Will this increasing push potentially endanger our power supply because of our dependency on computer? Have we really looked at the possible repercussions to our society if we hinge our future growth on clouds being propped up by a single source that could be vulnerable in so many different ways?

Conclusion

It is inevitable that cloud computing will become a primary platform in our computing world the questions that remain are who is going to control it and will our society be willing to pay for the possible ecological effects of our dependencies.

What do you think?

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From the Pipeline – 6.10.08

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  • Posted 1834 days ago

 

Well the warm afterglow of yesterday’s Apple event seems to be dissipating as people now turn to look at what this new deal is going to cost them at their local AT&T store. Luckily I don’t need to worry about such things because I’m having a hard enough paying my current phone and DSL bill. In the meantime here’s a few things that caught my eye in today’s FriendFeed pipeline.

 Free Edmonton Wireless :: Soliciting Fame – it’s nice to see some initiative coming from the people rather than telecom businesses or government to bring free WiFi to the city of Edmonton. Even though it’s not my most favorite Canadian city I have lived in free WiFi could make it a little more attractive.

Game On: Plurk To Release API Tomorrow :: the Inquisitr – apparently the newest Twitter clone on the street – Plurk – will be releasing a public API for developers tomorrow. Hopefully the first thing on the agenda will be a better desktop client for it.

My Blogging Burnout Experience :: SheGeeks – apparently Corvida suffered a bit of a blogger’s burnout but from what she tells me she’s back to normal with a lot of good stuff in the works.

Last.fm Re-design: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly :: ReadWriteWeb – according to Richard MacManus my favorite music recommendation service is in the middle of beta testing a new site design. Currently only those who have a paid subscription to the service are able to see the new look as it progresses forward.

I’m Thinking About Not Upgrading to the New iPhone When it Comes Out :: Thomas Hawk – apparently not everyone is enthralled with the new iPhone announced yesterday.

Why Cloud Computing Needs Security :: GigaOM – while everyone seems to being all enthused over the idea of cloud computing no-one is talking seriously about the security implications of doing this.

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