June 6, 2011
"We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud."
Said Steve Jobs today. (Funny to hear "PC" from him.)
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48 comments:
...because who DOESN'T trust a company like Apple or Google with your private information? They've earned your trust, after all...
Your iPhone can report where you are at all times (and, perhaps, where you've been). Your information is all in a cloud that belongs to a large corporation.
Freedom!
Yea Steve, come along. we're just up ahead a stretch. Can't wait for you. You're just gonna have to hurry up.
Jesus, I can't wait until I retire and I don't have to pay any attention to this shit.
Four and half more years!
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Nothing will end it faster. See previous post on dead media formats.
We keep buying (and voting for) what we hate. So we get more of it.
I like Steve Jobs. He's the closest thing we have to Howard Hughes these days.
Does information kill imagination? Just askin'.
I've used the same Yahoo email address through the dating, marriage and divorce of my wife (5 1/2 years). It's all in the cloud. Kinda creepy.
Yeah, becuse this is the hot news.
Steve Dead Jobs.
SevenMachos will be along shortly to declare: 10th!
All blog posts not Weiner-related today are relegated to the Kleenex repository of history.
Uh, from what we've seen of the cloud, I think we'll stay on solid ground.
As our blog hostess has learned (and some of us learned through her recent troubles), there is no substitute for hosting your own data.
That's Steve trying to stay relevant.
Because within no more than 2 years, Apple will be relegated back to their usual position of 14% of the market.
The handhelds and pads from Asia will, as usual, take over with better price and similar performance.
I can buy 3TB(7200rpm) for $165 from Hitachi right now.
That's a lot of cloud - my very own cloud.
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that cloud computing will have a substantially greater effect on politics, commerce, and daily life than cock shots that a member of Congress sent out to coeds.
I am a little bored with that story already, actually.
After which, only the really cool people, like Anthony Weiner, will have Apple products.
I am a little bored with that story already, actually.
How can you ever be bored of talking about a little Weiner?
Just like with any porn, it gets old after awhile.
The problem I'll have with the cloud is when Apple rolls out the Super Bowl ad with Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now playing in the background. I love that song. And I loved She's a Rainbow, until Apple ruined it for me by putting it in one of their Benneton-lite marketing ads
Those of us who use the dot mac service for e-mail have now been told we have a year to join the cloud. When I moved out of cox-dot-net area of service, I lost my e-mail address I had had for 15 years. I just moved over to the dot mac address that I hadn't used much. Now, I will have to move again. I don't like that. I have a web site and will probably set up an e-mail linked to my web site even though it is more work.
Some of us get tired of great new ideas and killer apps and just want to be left alone.
I'll believe Steve Jobs or the Google boys when they unconditionally promise to pay me $100,000 if their cloud loses my stuff.
It's allm done with flying dutchman email messages.
http://xkcd.com/908/
Seven Machos said...
Your iPhone can report where you are at all times (and, perhaps, where you've been). Your information is all in a cloud that belongs to a large corporation.
Freedom!
Actually if you upgrade to version 4.3.3 that problem goes away when you go to settings > location services and turn it off or you can turn on or off individual app specific location services.
Send in the clouds.
You guys in this forum have no idea how it does my soul good to see such skepticism of "Cloud Computing" from a non-IT industry audience.
I fight this battle routinely in the system integrator VAR forum I belong to.
I mean in the recent past MILLIONS of users have had their data compromised. You seen any explanations? I haven't.
Folks gotta realize that once your data's in the cloud, you have no legal recourse to get it back if the vendor goes belly up.
The thing is, your stuff is mostly in the cloud whether you want it there or not. It's a shame to not use it. It is convenient.
The alternative, which I also use a lot is to access my own computers via remote control services online which gives me access to my stuff from anywhere without actually uploading it to a any cloud server.
Cloud storage is, what, about $1 per gig per year.
So 1 Terabyte of cloud storage is $1000 per year.
Now, that is fully redundant and automatically backed up, and available from anywhere on the net.
But you can purchase a 1T USB drive for a lot, lot less than $1000.
2 Terabyte drives are now around $99.
So figure you are paying 10 times the low cost for the convenience of it being stored in the cloud, and the inconvenience of it not being totally within your control.
Add to that the fact that the media cloud drives like Amazon won't be actually storing your and everyone's instance of the media in duplicate, but will be storing for everyone a link to a single instance, meaning that they are going to shrink their own storage needs for media by about 99%.
They're getting you on both ends. The price, rather than being 10 times a home owned drive, should be 10% of the home price.
I love the idea of a "cloud" for things like ripped CDs. If somebody wants to break into my account and steal track three of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, well, somehow I'll soldier on. But there's no way I'm putting my tax records somewhere out in the ether.
Your iPhone can report where you are at all times (and, perhaps, where you've been).
Your cell phone has been able to figure out where you are to w/in a couple meters since the early 1990s. That stuff McGee does on NCIS, triangulating between cell towers? Not quite so point and click but that's about how it works. First applications were for better location info for 911 calls.
You cell company has retained and satisfied subpoenas on raw tower tracking records since well before 1990. They can place you w/in a single cell at any given time. In dense areas like cities, single cells get pretty small.
None of this takes GPS on the phone or the gizmo "phoning home" with your location. It's a feature of the network, based on how it operates. If you're connected, the network has this much, tagged to your phone's hardware serial #.
A *reasonable* cloud offer for clueful customers would be
- Cloud storage that includes automatic synch with a complete, local backup on your home node.
- Storage in standardized open formats not tied to any particular app or vendor (Opendoc, say.)
- Data stored & transmitted encrypted, with the decript in the client at the last step.
That would make it hard to index & mine, so advertising informed by this info would be worth less. So, you'll probably have to pay for a service like this. BUT, give HIPAA regulations, herds of small & medium sized businesses will have to meet these criteria shortly. A service industry will emerge to support the folks who can't afford all this sophistication by themselves. Then, it'll migrate down-market.
This is how it always happens.
Jim Bullock said...
Your iPhone can report where you are at all times (and, perhaps, where you've been).
Your cell phone has been able to figure out where you are to w/in a couple meters since the early 1990s. That stuff McGee does on NCIS, triangulating between cell towers? Not quite so point and click but that's about how it works. First applications were for better location info for 911 calls.
You cell company has retained and satisfied subpoenas on raw tower tracking records since well before 1990. They can place you w/in a single cell at any given time. In dense areas like cities, single cells get pretty small.
None of this takes GPS on the phone or the gizmo "phoning home" with your location. It's a feature of the network, based on how it operates. If you're connected, the network has this much, tagged to your phone's hardware serial #.
That's why nefarious types prefer Go type phones.
Steve is doing nothing with my information. Sorry, Apple.
There are only two things that can go wrong. You can lose something I want to keep, or keep something I want lost.
"Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,..."
An idea in search of an audience. It's just PR talk. I don't know anybody who actually tries to keep everything they have in sync.
Thank God. Apple is really behind the curve with the requirement to sync generally available content (why not just keep track of licenses for commercial content for instance). The idea of a hundred million people storing a beatles album on their computer when they could just own it and download it at their convenience is crazy and inefficient.
A cloud is so intangible, a mist, willed by the winds. No thanks.
Fine for music, but Pandora is easier still.
BTW can present day ipads get the cloud for just $29 then?
Screw Steve Jobs.... I'm not playing your silly games or buying into your BS.
I have never bought a song from iTunes, and I have 20,000 on my hard drive as we speak. I don't want to be in the cloud. I do not worship Steve Jobs or the products he makes. I don't even like going to the Apple store.
I know when I see cultish thinking, groupthink, the mob - whatever you want to call it - and I. Will. Not. Follow.
Not with my thoughts, not with my purchases, and not in my lifetime.
Find another patsy, Mr. Jobs. I ain't the one.
Yes, and goverments and companies willput their information in tha hands of companies that not respect privacy.
i had an apple ii.It was my last apple products
This is nothing new. Apple and Microsoft have been predicting the end of the PC and reliance on the cloud for at least a decade.
Sorry, but I have too much stuff that I don't trust with others, and too many times and places where internet service is slow or non-existent. I'll pass. Just like before.
So we buy our media from Apple and then pay a fee to access it in the cloud? And if their service goes offline, or if my internet connection goes down, I can't access my files? But I could also store it locally and have redundancy, but then the PC isn't quite demoted and is still the center of my digital life. And then presumably Apple'd cloud, like Sony's Playstation Network, will be a prized target for hackers and all my information and files might be compromised?
Gee, thanks Apple. You seem to have really thought this $1 billion data center through thoroughly.
From my cold, dead hand.
We've been over this ground before. Conceptually this is little different from the "thin client" paradigm sold by vendors like Citrix 15 years ago.
Then problem then as now is the capabilities on the desktop develop faster than bandwidth expands to meet new application demands. 15 years ago even then new 100Base-T LANs weren't fast enough to make a thin client model satisfactory. Fiber DSL is fast, but it ain't that fast. The same wall is going to hobble Apple's cloud application model, not to mention the absurd level of security this is going to entail.
Another thing that's going to cause Apple to regret not retiring Jobs permanently is application exclusivity. Apple still dominates in the field of non-linear audio and video editors. When Adobe or Avid roll out a feature package they generally make the Mac incarnation available first. Video renders are already too demanding, imagine what they'll be like in a cloud-enable version of Final Cut Pro.
Wasn't that the face of Steve Jobs on the huge media screen in the iconic 1984 Apple ad? If not, after today's announcement perhaps it should have been.
I am getting a little tired of people making tiny changes and announcing them as major improvements. I have been in this business since 1968. It started as all server, i.e a single machine you sent your card deck to. It progressed to very thin client (a terminal) that we used to interact with the server.
The PC came out and it was standalone. Then it was networked, peer to peer. Then we got, wait for it, a server and we had client/server again.
Now, we have the "cloud" which is nothing more than the server moved off premises, shared, and open to the internet.
There is nothing bad about this, but it is not new. It is not exciting. It is just a variation on the same themes. Meh.
The center of my digital life? I have a life, but what the fuck is this digital life? Get over yourself, Jobs.
"Your cell phone has been able to figure out where you are to w/in a couple meters since the early 1990s."
Not if you don't turn it on (I think).
mccullough said...
...And I loved She's a Rainbow, until Apple ruined it for me by putting it in one of their Benneton-lite marketing ads
This might unruin it for you
Or thisCrash Different
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