[LINK] 'Cloud Computing doesn't fly'

[Fernando Cassia]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 4:31 AM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at creative.net.au>wrote:

>
> Two important things:
>
> Cloud computing? VMS clusters had transparent clustering inside a company
> offered for years. Not at the scale it's seen today but enough for
> some rather complicated and efficient use of resources - right up to
> running VMS desktops as nodes.
>
> For me the most important thing about Cloud Computing (or FogComputing) is
that it takes away ANY RIGHTS the end user might have had. Basically the
right to choose what version you run of a given application, and what you do
with it.

Take Google Docs for instance. They add features, move things around, add
features, without asking you.

-The upside: you always run "the latest version"..

-The downside: you better get used to the new interface, because it´s
automagically deployed to you without asking, and often you end up noticing
changes and new features as you go along.

Google has even gone further and extended this "we know better" philosophy
to its desktop (PC) software, and it does it all the time. I´m sick of
restarting the Chrome browser and being notified by the personal firewall
software (on windows XP on my netbook) that "the aplication executable has
changed" then go to About and notice the build number has increased.

Somehow it seems to default to downloading updates in the background and
auto-upgrading it. Of course this is good for security, but consider my
surprise to find when I launched the application that the "star" button was
moved from one side of the screen to the other, just because someone at the
"mothership" thought it was better that way.

See the complaints here
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=223dcd4a5ccb16f1&hl=en&fid=223dcd4a5ccb16f100048fa120cfcf08&hltp=2

I´m going back to Firefox and it´s older brother, SeaMonkey...

FC