Now, there are a lot of WiFi in London, that’s true. There is The Cloud, BTOpen, T-Mobile, etc., and yes, if you are on a business trip you probably can afford the prices – 2p per minute for BTOpen, or 5 pounds for 30 minutes at T-Mobile, or you can you register with them and get a regular subscription – however there is still one problem left.

The quality of the WiFi is incredibly low. I paid for the WiFi at the hotel, and in theory I had internet access, but it was so slow that it took about 40-70 seconds to load one simple page, so I gave up.
I went to several Starbucks, and I went to Wetherspoon – I heard they have free WiFi access, that day they did not have -, and I tried, and spend actual money on the internet, but I had limited resources so to speak, so after it turned out that even the paid WiFi is uselessly slow I gave up, and sent the mail after I got home.

So, yes, theoretically I could keep all my stuff on the net. I could compute in the Cloud.
And when I am not at home or in the office with a broadband, I can rest without any worry that I will be e-mailed to work in the Cloud.
Because there is a good chance that I will not have any way to fly that high.

]]> http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/08/23/cloud-computing-in-a-bunker/feed/ 0 http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/07/23/cloud-computing-brings-us-rain/ http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/07/23/cloud-computing-brings-us-rain/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:15:00 +0000 Roland Hesz http://fracturedbloughts.heszroland.hu/?p=165 So cloud computing. Moving on the web, who needs desktop application, lets head back to the golden age, when a server was a server, and a terminal was a terminal.

I don’t know, I’ve never been the fan of the put everything in the browser and “fly me to the clouds” movement, for several reasons. First, in my opinion the web browser is called browser and not “advanced data manipulation and browsing and knitting interface” for a reason.

The second is that well, if you put everything in the cloud, what do you do when it starts to rain? Dare Obasanjo certainly has a point that a 99.9% uptime means almost 9 hours of downtime a year. Some posts are not really using the same math as I do, they calculate with a worse service level, and that completely undermines the complaint (99% uptime means almost 88 hours of downtime a year, so 6 hours is not that bad). And if you are here, go and read Om Malik’s opinion, he has a long post on the topic.

So, Amazon is promising almost 9 hours of downtime. If that 9 hours happen to arrive on a quiet Sunday – or over several quiet Sundays – then it’s no problem really.

But what do you do if that 9 hours drive accross the last day of a critical project phase?
I like the idea of cloud computing, and I don’t want to say that you should not use Amazon S3, or Zoho or GoogleDoc, or whatever service you are using. I just would like to know what will happen to your service when the cloud gets dark?

On LinkedIn there was a question on why people want technical documentation in PDF, on paper, in Word, when all information can be put on internal wikis, blogs, etc. Most of the answers pointed to the neccessity to reach the things offline.

And not only when the server goes down. Interesting thing I read on JibberJobber, LinkedIn for example does not have a backup of your profile. If it disappears for whatever reason, you are toast. Have to start from scratch. That’s a good reason to save all your contacts, and your profile on your PC regularly – i.e. whenever there is a change.

Internet access is not 100% around the world, and the internet does not have 100% uptime. Bits go down regularly. I bet there are a couple intranets down even right now. Also there are 3 things in life that are certain: death, taxes and data loss.

I don’t talk against cloud computing – who am I to talk against it anyway -, I just want to point out that when you go near the clouds, you better have an umbrella, just in case.