Cloud Computing
The latest technological buzzword, cloud computing, is designed to confuse. At the fundamental level, the idea is that a company will store all of a client’s information on a remote server, to which the client accesses it via the internet. Marketers have come up with the analogy that your information is being stored “somewhere in the cloud.” The benefit is that clients no longer have to worry about where their information is kept, nor do they need to worry about how to manage and maintain it. Soon, there won’t be any need to have a server room to house the databases for all of the important data that runs a business; customer information, transaction histories, payroll data, employee information, just about anything. This is already in practice with highly successful companies like Salesforce.com already taking over the duties of managing contact and sales information for thousands of client companies. Now, as a sales manager, you can simply fire up a web browser, connect to the host’s “cloud computing” server and retrieve, modify, and work with the data remotely. In the past, companies would have had to hire a whole IT team to design, construct, and manage endless databases. Then an administrator would have had to maintain that database. Want to add a new feature? Contact the IT team who would then run all sorts of research before hiring a programmer to build the new application. Now, using cloud computing companies, workers can simply take advantage of the millions of applications and innovations available within that host’s cloud.
Cloud computing has really been in practice for some time now. Amazon.com’s video rental system is an early example. Consumers no longer have to go to the store, purchase a blu-ray disc, bring it home, plug it into a blu-ray player to watch, and stick on their shelf for storage afterwards. Now you can simply rent and watch the video on your laptop, the actual video being stored on Amazon.com’s video “cloud.” It’s really the same idea behind using any of the online e-mail systems like gmail, hotmail, or yahoo. In the old days, you would have had to have a computer geek build the email server, its interface, and of course constantly maintain it. Now all your messages can be stored on Microsoft’s safe and secure cloud, which is always improving with new features. That is generally what can be considered as cloud computing services. But the problem is these offerings in no way resemble the clouds of nature, of which the analogy is borrowed.
If our information were actually stored in clouds, it would blend in with other clouds, growing and shrinking to some grand design (in this case the user’s preferences). Like clouds, our data would rise up to the sky, grow, and when called for, drop down to our laptops in little raindrops of data. What is the problem then? Well as it is currently, our data doesn’t move as easily as a cloud does. When you actually up load your information, pictures, stories, blogs, and videos, to companies like Facebook, Youtube, and… WordPress… that information stays on that companies system. The problem is that eventually companies start adding advertisements to your information. Have you seen how Youtube intersperses ads for irrelevant products into your videos? What about the annoying little advertisements alongside your friend’s posts on facebook? Inevitably, you may have to sit through 30 second video advertisement before being able to view your friend’s latest photo album. You might be reading a blog post and then all of a sudden a flash advertisement rolls across the screen. What results is a sort of data dominance, where the user is no longer in control of their information. The cloud suddenly gets dark and stormy. In this situation, if these systems really did act as as advertised, a user should be able to easily move their information to a less ominous cloud. But that option doesn’t exist, or if it does, is remarkably difficult to accomplish.
Look at this from a companies perspective. They already had a Microsoft database sitting in their server room housing all their information. An executive decides to move all of the data to one of the many cloud computing companies. A few years down the line, when they no longer want to use that company, they reach the startling decision that migrating their information to a different company is too difficult. The switching costs have become … stratospheric. Let’s say for example that I want to download all 500 of my movies that is currently on Amazon.com’s cloud. The reason for doing so is because perhaps there is a new company that let’s me watch these movies with additional features: friends can also watch it simultaneously, comment on it via a blog, or simply has less advertisements in the window. But there is no way of doing so. Have you ever wanted to move all of your hotmail messages to gmail? Practically impossible.
So before you jump on that latest company’s cloud,” realize what you’re really doing is putting yourself instead in their floating city. That’s a huge difference. Fans of Jonathan Swift will remember that many of the inhabitants of Laputa, lavishly adorned with the latest technologies, actually wanted to escape the floating city because of the dictatorship, but were not allowed to do so. Or equally trajic is when the company goes bankrupt or out of fashion. That’s what happened to Friendster, MySpace, and Yahoo’s Geocities. All of their users information is lost. It’s just something to keep in mind as our lives are uploaded and sent streaming into the digital ether.
I like technology. Wait a second, let me rephrase that. I like the promise that technology makes about how it is going to improve our lives, make us all more connected, more efficient, more entertained, happier, fitter, that sort of thing. I also like all the funny words that erupt out of the technological fountain, “google,” “fuzzing,” “spoofing,” “tweeting,” and even “technobabble” has a nice ring to it. And the greatest thing? The products. As soon as you buy a new gadget, learn how to use it, develop for it, and then eventually get bored and are no longer mystified by it, a brand new thing comes down the exponentially growing product pipeline. And guess what’s in stores now… Windows 7. Windows mutha f!@#$ing 7. Count ‘em. 7. 7 iterations of Windows. I can hardly believe it.
The book covers Python version 2.5, which is both good and bad. On the plus side it is the most widely used version of the language. However, Python recently underwent a major upgrade to 3.1.1 and that will cause problems if the reader simply downloads the most recent version from the Python website. Minor details aside, this is a great book that in this digital age belongs on just about every kid’s bookshelf.