Notes by Luke Patmore
Here you will find
notes that I've taken. They should all have the date appended, the
most recent towards the top of the page. They will be about any sort
of thing, really. Reflective prose, like a weblog of sorts. I bit you
enjoy them. Send anything you have to say about this content to
lpatmore@gmx.se. I will try to
update them frequently but I can promise nothing.
Cloud Computing Rant
January 1, 2010
Where does your data belong? Does it belong across thousands of miles of cables and switches, through ISP computers, on the shiny silver disk platters of servers in racks in rooms under the abnormally large noses of butt-clenching, latte-slurping, MacBook-toting Google yuppies? Does it?! Do I want my computing to be happening in a far away land full of overpaid freaks, worth billions, but looking as though they have just pulled their sorry asses from bed? Mysterious, zeitgeist-inspired, web-based programs that fire my bytes over the network, spit them through a processor, do God-only-knows to them and print them back out on my display! This isn't computing, by Stallman's beard, this is pure madness! It's worse than madness, it's bullocks and a big steaming crock of stupid!
My data shall be in no hands but my own. Should a mother hand off her children to be watched by the nice old man who lives in a windowless Dodge Ram Van while she does her domestic tasks? Should a war veteran hand his piles of hand-written memoirs to a fire-fascinated six-year-old for safe keeping? My data equals storage on my disks. Disks that are beneath my desk, not thousands of miles away. Should I go mobile, disks that are millimeters below the palm of my hand are the disks where my bytes shall rest. A backup tape is in good measure, yes. “Cloud computing” is treating end users as if they shouldn't look after their own data.
Mobility?! You want freaking mobility?! Take your ThinkPad along. Not mobile enough for you? Let's all go and buy fancy-phones, and sit there and type our asses off on onscreen keyboards. “Dear blog, my life is so bitterly unfair!” There's an app for that. Walk your dog? There's an app for that. Wipe your bum? There's an app for that. If the software isn't free, the people aren't free. If we aren't given the source, then we can never know what a program does! Does a GPS program send a copy of our coordinates and fart it all over this magical cloud?! Does a mobile online documents program scan our work for key words? Are we being analyzed?! The only way to know for sure is to not put yourself at risk.
Pay
no attention to the hype. Do your own computing. Shun the cloud,
shun the stench.
