Monday, February 13, 2012

Head in the Clouds

by Drew Martin
I like this encyclopedic image of different kinds of clouds: altocumulus, altostratus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, cumulus, nimbostratus and stratocumulus. My favorite bit is the disclaimer down in the grass which reads: "It is unlikely that all these kinds of clouds would be in one area of the sky at the same time." How unfortunate - I would like to see that. Cloud computing is the in term now but the idea has been around for decades and came from telecommunications companies. I thought Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, was promoting this a decade ago but when I searched for information about it, what I found were his comments about it being "complete gibberish."

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it?"