What is Digg?33 Comments
- OstrakonX, on 08/26/2008, -1/+19"Using someone else's infrastructure for your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency."
I weep at the truth of this statement. - headzoo, on 08/26/2008, -1/+17I don't buy the author's reasoning for the existence of these services. For example, Amazon actually uses their own services, and those services were actually created to serve them. At some point in time someone decided their tech was pretty solid, so why not sell it?
Plus these services have been a God-send for startups. Look at Pownce... Those files you're allowed to attach to your messages are stored on Amazon S3. It's probably the only way that Kevin could afford the feature. - megaton, on 08/26/2008, -14/+26How the ***** did this ***** article get onto the front page?
I waited for it to ask me to represent my long-lost Nigerian Prince/brother, but the climax never came...
EDIT: ooooh, i get it. some ***** brit was unhappy with his E2 service and wrote about it, tugging on the strings of future technologies as an excuse for his ignorance. "I don't GET 'cloud computing', and it ***** on me, so I hate it."
640K, baby. - fakestef, on 08/25/2008, -1/+12you had me at "green technology" - lol
- RealJimShady, on 08/26/2008, -4/+13Cloud computing: creating *****-storms near you...
- RevEng, on 08/26/2008, -0/+8I agree, this just sounds like a Luddite bitching about not being able to abuse his service provider's customer service department.
Distributed computing has a lot to offer in certain areas, especially research. If you need to run thousands of hour long simulations, you could buy a couple of computers for the office and wait until next year, or you could pay $X to rent as much processing power as you want. This is a company's dream -- I get to choose my preferred balance between monetary cost and time. Couple that with not having to invest in my own quickly-depreciating equipment and I'll be there faster than you can say Elastic Compute Cloud.
The environmental implications are equally as useful. How many companies have computers that sit idle 99.9% of their lives? Again, rather than buying boatloads of processing power that never gets used, rent it when you need it. Just like your internet connection, compute clusters average out the very spikey nature of individual usage, such that those computers are actually doing something an appreciable percentage of the time.
And the conjecture that Google doens't even use Python? You may want to ask them, because they gloat about it constantly. Wild guesses don't make for much of an argument.
The only good point he makes is that outsourcing your computing resources is a logistical liability, especially if you need guaranteed availability. In that case, renting a cluster probably isn't for you. However, if you're doing research that needs to be completed before the sun swallows the Earth, you can probably afford a bit of delay here and there and save yourself the cost of your own personal computing cluster.
This guy is full of bile and venom, but he's really lacking some good points. - geoff1210, on 08/26/2008, -0/+61. Create a product
2. Find a way to make it "Green"
3. ???
4. PROFIT! - mahler, on 08/26/2008, -1/+7It's like the famous Gartner Hype Cycle Curve: http://hmestrum.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/gar ...
I think the term "Cloud computing" is nearing it's peak of inflated expectations... - KidKenosha, on 08/26/2008, -2/+7This whole article is basically a detailed proof that the author has no ***** idea whereof he speaks.
- bradleyland, on 08/26/2008, -1/+6"Plus these services have been a God-send for startups. Look at Pownce... Those files you're allowed to attach to your messages are stored on Amazon S3. It's probably the only way that Kevin could afford the feature."
Exactly. Every one of these articles that are critical of cloud computing boil down to the same tired points that are as old as the technology he purports to make fun of.
Folks in IT love to solve problems that you don't have. Business people worry about problems when they arise. Most people are reading this thinking, "You idiot, proactive is better than reactive, and my boss says so." Next time your boss yells at you for not being proactive, don't listen to what he says, look at what he does. Most people (managers in particular) aren't self-aware enough to realize that they create their own problems. If you came to the boss at the outset of the project with a double-size budget so you could have redundant everything, he/she'd shoot you down in an instant. Why spend that money on an unproven product?
These cloud products lower the threshold of entry for developing web apps on infrastructure that easily outpaces a couple of 1U servers in a colo somewhere in California. This doesn't mean that programmers don't have to do their jobs any more -- data sync on EC2, for example -- it just means that they have more flexible resources within their reach, and they don't have to pay for them until they need them.
The only people upset by this are the commodities of the IT personnel ecosystem; the server babysitters who are pissed that they are being marginalized for not having any unique or interesting thoughts. Suck it up, software developers dealt with it when our jobs were sent to India, and sysadmins will deal with it when their jobs are consolidated. - inactive, on 08/26/2008, -3/+6"Cloud computing": revealing noobs all over the Web.
Just like "Web 2.0". Whenever someone used it, you knew they didn't know *****. - jcanci, on 08/26/2008, -4/+6catchphrase in puberty.... sounds like a load of horse-***** to me.
- vidalsasoon, on 08/26/2008, -0/+2wut
- greydonkey, on 08/26/2008, -3/+5The article is a puerile joke. How it got on the front page I will never know. ***** hell Digg!
- uselessexpert, on 08/26/2008, -2/+4Regardless how good the article or the writer may be, to me he sounds like uneducated douche bag cussing every other paragraph.
To me, the article became worthless to read after the "***** me" on the first paragraph. - logic, on 08/26/2008, -1/+2That's the worst explanation of cloud computing I've ever heard. And I have yet to hear anyone confuse it with distributed computing.
- inactive, on 08/26/2008, -1/+2Absolute *****. Another re-branding of distributed processing that has been around just about forever. And the noobs are going to lap it up for a few months and then forget about it.
Remember the "thin client" *****? "Pen computing" *****? Dead for a good reason.
But people just never learn. - peterinjapan, on 08/27/2008, -0/+1I'm the owner of J-List, an anime store based in Japan. When my bandwidth hit $30,000 a year, I moved our image hosting over to Amazon S3. The change isn't complete yet, but so far it's looking like it may cost me $8000 a year for the same bandwidth -- that's pretty awesome. Downside is the outage they had a month ago, which made my images not show up, but we've put in an automatic switchover program that moves my images back to our normal server if and when their service goes down. This is what I called Pretty Awesome.
- Damionlecroix, on 08/26/2008, -1/+2For the majority of people on digg cloud computing = playing wow stoned out of their damn mind.. This is probably why they wanted to invest in E2, they thought Amazon was going to mail them their stuff so they didn't have to leave the house since they already get their funyuns and mellow yellow mailed in.
- mscman, on 08/28/2008, -0/+1Exactly. We use cloud computing internally in our research arm so that developers can get their own environment for testing web portals and such. Just because it's new and doesn't fit his needs doesn't mean its bad...
- inactive, on 08/26/2008, -2/+3Cloud = Smoke.
- synchronize, on 12/14/2008, -0/+1I prefer the term "distributed computing".
http://leetcomputing.wordpress.com/ - infiniphunk, on 08/26/2008, -1/+1I knew that sooner or later we'd run lut.
- morpheus69, on 08/26/2008, -1/+1Seriously, I work in the tech industry and it's rare to meet a CTO of a large company who really knows technology. The only way you advance to that kind of position is to be good at schmoozing and office politics. So, of course CTOs will go for this kind of slick marketing.
Having said that, outsourcing most or all of your computing infrastructure and applications to centralized data centers that are run by professional, experienced organizations actually is a good decision in most cases. If I'm a bank, do I really want to be in the business of building and maintaining data centers, writing applications, etc.? Why not just pay the experts to do it for me?
Sure, security is a risk but I'd be surprised if the security risk is that much greater than the risk of internal fraud today. - syariscrewz, on 06/20/2009, -0/+0nice . love it
free music downloads
http://www.hotsmusic.com/ - doesitexplode, on 02/10/2009, -0/+0I don't agree with this article directly equating cloud technology to utility computing. They are similar, but at least somewhat different.
Check out this article instead:
http://digg.com/software/Into_the_cloud_a_conversa ...
It explains the difference and is really goddamn informative. - BasharTeg, on 08/26/2008, -2/+1Excellent article. You want to make your entire business depend on ONE other business? Did you see the gmail downtime? Can your business handle 24 hours plus downtime?
- inactive, on 08/26/2008, -2/+1Absolute *****. Another re-branding of distributed processing that has been around just about forever. And the noobs are going to lap it up for a few months and then forget about it.
Remember the "thin client" *****? "Pen computing" *****? Dead for a good reason.
But people just never learn. - inactive, on 08/26/2008, -3/+2We are out of new computer programs?!?!?!?
wat? - Elranzer, on 08/26/2008, -2/+1Seems like a lot of people are confusing "cloud computing" with "distributed computing".
Distributed Computing is like Folding@home or SETI@home, where people all "donate" and share their processing power to create a global supercomputer.
"Cloud Computing" is similar to thin clients, where all of the processing is done on the server-side, except it's over the Internet (e.g. Google Docs) instead of over Remote Desktop or Citrix. In both cases, the cloud computer or thin client needs only be powerful enough to run the client program (Citrix, Remote Desktop or the web browser). - depro9, on 08/26/2008, -4/+2Just a scam to get more money out of our pockets.
- infiniphunk, on 08/26/2008, -6/+11. Invent computers.
2. Get everyone hooked on cool computer programs.
3. Get everyone hooked on cool computer programs that use the internet.
4. Turn all these programs into web-based services a-la 'cloud-computing'.
5. Out-source all the required data-centers overseas.
6. ???
7. PROFIT! - infiniphunk, on 08/26/2008, -10/+4Cloud-computing. Sounds like a lot of horse-***** to me.
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is 