roddierod said:
I'm old and feisty so people well probably say there is more to it and it the greatest thing since air, but all it is is mainframe, client server technology over the internet.
But instead of having the big steel to help protect you, you have lots of script kiddies and disgruntled employees trying to crack your data...
This cloud computing thing is (at least the one M$ wants to impose on us) even bigger than the mainframe/dumb terminal affair from your golden days. M$ is secretly planning to make a new "on the cloud/diskless" computing platform that will have two components. The computers themselves are custom made non-x86 compatible diskless boxes (by diskless I mean it, no HD, no floppy, no optical drive, no WLAN and the USB/FW/LAN chipsets have been modded so that you can't boot off anyone of them and so you can't rewire the netboot to your own hidden "old-school" PC) which will carry midori (an in-development lightweight OS whose sole function will be to POST/BOOT/start up the NIC) in ROM (read: old-school non-flashable read-only memory) and will be hardwired to boot off midori and automatically connect to the M$ servers where the applications you use and data you produce in these applications (note that I don't refer to them by your apps or your data, this is intentional since the apps and data stored there are not yours, are property of M$) reside. The twist in this is that they'll offer this for free (both equipment and access to the cloud-apps) to "unprivileged" schools and institutions in 3rd-party countries and when they're happy about it, M$ will "expand" this to enterprises (equipment cheap/access free), then when all the corporate world is into this, home users are likelly gonna take the bait and get into this "cloud computing", and finally when all but us BSD/Linux/Mac users are left in the "old-school" PC's. They're gonna do all sort of their dirty tricks to fool the gov into thinking that some cybercriminal/cracker/terrorist group is using "old-school" computers to try and take down the M$ "cloud computing platform" so that the gov pass a bill making it illegal to make/own/use "old-school (a.k.a: normal desktop/laptop/netbooks)" computers, which the gov is likelly to do. The moment this happens M$ will starting charging subscription fees for access to the cloud-apps/data and raise the prices of the equipment, they'll also start aggresivelly monitoring/censoring data (read: the apps will refuse to save if M$ instruct them to do so, data previously present will just vanish, or become modified without your knowledge/consent, and new data you never produced might appear "out of thin air") all in the name of "capturing the cybercriminals (just like bush used the "war-on-terror" as a smoke screen to invade whichever country he so wished, and monitor/censor anyone he desired)". In fact this is not new. They have launched already several trial-ballons for this stuff. The XP activation/WGA, the Xbox (their first aptempt at making a computer), their "live" services (to see how people adapt to having apps and data "online"), skydrive (they wanted to see how well people get used to replacing thier physical HD's with "BIG" cloud-based storage), minwin (they wanted to see how small they could get a kernel, and if it would be fittable in ROM), midori (this will be the core of this stuff) among others. Most of this trial-ballons have proven succesful, which means that perhaps we might be nearing a terrible end, that is unless either linux or BSD (OSX doesn't count b/c the price of apple's hardware is a major showstopper for them) get's as likable (they're already usable and friendly, but there's something more that needs to be done to get people switching in
BIG numbers) as windoze so that we get at least 70% on our side b4 they even have time to actually launch that thing. If we miss it, is likelly they'll win this one and royally screw us bad (how you run BSD, if the thing won't allow you to boot it off anything but it's ROM).
