Survey Reveals a Majority Believe "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather 261
SmartAboutThings writes "In a recent survey performed by Wakefield Research, it has been discovered that the majority of the surveyed Americans are quite confused about the notion of Cloud, when it relates to Cloud Storage/Computing. The most interesting fact is that 51% of the surveyed persons thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing!"
It does (Score:5, Informative)
When that stormy weather takes out power supplies to the data centres.
or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / cab (Score:5, Insightful)
or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / cable lines.
Also stormy weather can take down your cable line even if you still have power in your area the cables from your place to the headend may have areas with no power and dead battery (they don't have the number of needed portable generators to cover all of them) in the nodes.
DSL works better and the phone RT's (Remote Terminals) and central offices have a better power backup system.
Satellite rain fade (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Satellite rain fade (Score:5, Funny)
Or when the rain provides enough interference that you can no longer poorly piggy-back on your neighbor's WiFi.
Re:Satellite rain fade (Score:5, Insightful)
Or when people find stupid survey questions amusing and deliberately answer them incorrectly.
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:4, Informative)
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:4, Funny)
I was told once by the cable crew who came to fix my cable, that because of squirrels eating at the cable, water had leaked in. As it was a 3 pole run,, some stupid amount of *gallons* of water poured out of the cable.
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:5, Funny)
I was told once by the cable crew who came to fix my cable, that because of squirrels eating at the cable, water had leaked in. As it was a 3 pole run,, some stupid amount of *gallons* of water poured out of the cable.
I had a cable guy try to tell me that the plasma in a plasma TV was the same as the plasma in human blood. I gave up trying to explain it to him as he was pretty adamant about it. I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:5, Informative)
I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.
It's what's left over after they make Soylent Green. By-product.
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:5, Informative)
Had I mod points, I'd mod this informative just to see people's reaction.
Re: (Score:3)
Surely they need plasma from Soylent Red and Blue too.
Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone / (Score:4, Funny)
I worked in a Fortune 115 company where the VOIP went down, and along with it all incoming calls. Root cause was Squirrel. Yes, the cute furry toothy bitches.
Official explanation was: squirrels had gnawed off the insulation. One particularly unlucky squirrel had successfully penetrated the insulation, fried itself, and everything around it.
Traditional squirrel fry was held, a good time was had by all. Also, 2/3 of this post is true.
Re:It does (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It isn't? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Informative)
"An Amazon Web Services data center in northern Virginia lost power Friday night during an electrical storm, causing downtime for numerous customers â" including Netflix"
So the east coast has a big storm, power goes out, and the cloud goes down, and somehow people are drawing the conclusion that stormy weather can have an adverse effect on the cloud? It's possible they're confused about how big a storm is required, the article doesn't address that point, but clearly the idea isn't crazy.
Re:It isn't? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't trust the clowd clowns with your data!
Re:It isn't? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't trust the clowd clowns with your data!
I certainly won't. Thanks for the tip. One other thing, how do I distinguish clowd clowns from regular clowns?
Re: (Score:2)
They have vertical development and moderate turbulence.
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't trust the clowd clowns with your data!
I certainly won't. Thanks for the tip. One other thing, how do I distinguish clowd clowns from regular clowns?
Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Funny)
Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?
Eating at McDonalds?
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?
Eating at McDonalds?
And you think that's a good idea in the first place?
Dan Aris
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Funny)
Elections?
Re: (Score:3)
That doesn't require trust, that requires suspension of disbelief.
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Funny)
*headdesk* Dammit both are evil. Let me think.
Ah
Clown: promises you candy and sunshine and dishes out horror and pain.
Clowd clown: promises you a magic sky bag where you can keep all your important stuff but it fails when it gets ....
wet
'too full'
a warrant is issued
they're having a bad hair day
snorted to much meth
spend the money you paid them on too many hookers
forget to pay their electric bill
can't pay their electric bill
piss off the employees who didn't get any hookers or meth
just don't like you anymore.
Re:It isn't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. The people who believe storms may disrupt cloud computing are 100% correct. Not only can they, but there is a history of it.
As for not knowing what the cloud is, I'd argue that they're in the same boat as marketing and the media that pumps out the breathless cloud stories 24/7.
Key European Computing Hub in Ireland Outage 2011 (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, a huge data center in Ireland was knocked out by a severe storm last year, causing major disruptions. Why people seem to think Cloud computing = distributed computing I have no idea. See http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/07/lightning-in-dublin-knocks-amazon-microsoft-data-centers-offline/
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly... I'm more worried about the ones who think cloud computing is NOT impacted by weather. If some random person walked up to me on the street and asked me this, I'd say, "sure, it can", and I'm quite technical.
This seems much like the hand-writing shocked headlines announcing that most Americans think humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time... the only problem being that we DID exist at the same time. Paleontologists consider modern birds to be dinosaurs, so most people are quite correct.
Pale [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but in the second instance, the correct follow up would be, "Do you think birds are dinosaurs", and if a majority answered no, than the original implication of ignorance on a large part of America would be correct.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd say a large part of America simultaneously believes birds aren't dinosaurs, and that birds didn't evolve from them, since they feel in their gut that life as we know it today is the exact same as it was when created by god 6000 years ago when the earth wasn't around, but the ocean was.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes but in the second instance, the correct follow up would be, "Do you think birds are dinosaurs", and if a majority answered no, than the original implication of ignorance on a large part of America would be correct.
Birds are not dinosaurs, any more than humans are single cell protozoans. If you truly believe in macroevolution, of the kind that can create new species and animals from existing ones, then you must believe that things CHANGE over time. That is, they aren't the same anymore. You must answer "no" to that question if you are to be honest.
And if you don't believe in macroevolution, just microevolution (the kind that causes birds to develop different beaks to deal with different environments, but they are st
Re: (Score:3)
There is a reasonably hard point at which we can define the distinction between two creatures: the last common ancestor.
Yes it only works in hindsight.
Yes it is still a bit fuzzy (many populations cross breed slightly whilst diverging).
But it's a hell of a lot better than this stupidity.
You just draw monophyletic boundaries, rather than 'I'm including this, but not that because I think it looks funny'. Subsets of subsets and suddenly
Re: (Score:3)
And once upon a time light was defined as a wave propagating through the lumiferous aether.
The dictionary is not evidence of ANYTHING (other than what the people who wrote the dictionary decided to write down). Dictionaries are descriptive. If the understanding of a concept has changed, and/or the term is used differently now then it is the dictionary that is wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It isn't? (Score:4, Informative)
Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma ago
Methinks somebody didn't understand (nor look up) what the word clade [wikipedia.org] means.
Basically, a clade is a group consisting of a species (extinct or extant) and all its descendants.
So the sentence "Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma ago." is just a fancy way of saying that birds are the only living things to have descended from dinosaurs (as opposed to also reptiles). Indeed, the reptile species living today are not descendant from the dinosaurs, but are different lineage [wikipedia.org]. However the birds are.
Weather does affect it (Score:5, Informative)
Recent outages of AWS and other providers demonstrate that weather does affect the "Cloud" platforms.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Weather does affect it (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no, it sounds like it WAS a completely useless question. Most people did NOT realize what the question being asked was about.
"54% of Americans do not know what the cloud is and claim to never have used it. ... also, another alarming number is that 51% of the surveyed Americans think that stormy weather can interfere with the functionality of the cloud."
So, if 54% surveyed had never heard the term, and and almost identical 51% surveyed who don't know it refers to computing services over the Internet, then it doesn't mean people are stupid, just uninformed, and the second number means nothing (of course, the survey doesn't mention how these numbers overlap, which makes it all the more useless).
And honestly, I would bet over 50% of those who BUILD network-based services that could be considered "in the Cloud" think the whole "Cloud" terminology is one of the stupidest things pseudo-technology journalists and marketers have foisted on the public in years. Based on the over-saturation of "the Cloud", I'm surprised everyone isn't starting to call the Internet "the Tubes"...
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Actually, no, it sounds like it WAS a completely useless question. Most people did NOT realize what the question being asked was about.
"54% of Americans do not know what the cloud is and claim to never have used it. ... also, another alarming number is that 51% of the surveyed Americans think that stormy weather can interfere with the functionality of the cloud."
So, if 54% surveyed had never heard the term, and and almost identical 51% surveyed who don't know it refers to computing services over the Internet, then it doesn't mean people are stupid, just uninformed, and the second number means nothing (of course, the survey doesn't mention how these numbers overlap, which makes it all the more useless).
And honestly, I would bet over 50% of those who BUILD network-based services that could be considered "in the Cloud" think the whole "Cloud" terminology is one of the stupidest things pseudo-technology journalists and marketers have foisted on the public in years. Based on the over-saturation of "the Cloud", I'm surprised everyone isn't starting to call the Internet "the Tubes"...
People have different definitions about what it means to know what something is, if you ask me if I know what a guava I'm aware that it's a fruit, and I know it's supposed to be nutritious, but if you asked me to pick out one from a set of unfamiliar fruits my odds would be no better than chance. Should I say I know what it is or not?
We know that 54% of people feel like they don't know what cloud computing is, we also know that 51% of people are so uniformed that they think cloud computing has something to
Re: (Score:2)
Should I say I know what it is or not?
Since you've just admitted that you know what it is, the honest answer would be 'yes'. Now, if the question was "do you know what it looks like?", you'd have to say "no".
You can ask someone if they know what a Pontiac Grand Pre is (it is a CAR), but they might have no idea how to pick one out of a used-car lot.
We know that 54% of people feel like they don't know what cloud computing is, we also know that 51% of people are so uniformed that they think cloud computing has something to do with weather.
No, we don't know that. The question was whether is was affected by the weather. A Pontiac Grand Pre doesn't have "something to do with the weather", but it certainly can be affected by the weather
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"Nutritious fruit" isn't a particularly descriptive label,
And the question wasn't "can you describe a guava", it was "do you know what one is". "A fruit" is the correct answer, nutritious or not. The answer to the question that was asked is "yes".
if I had the idea the other person knew anything about gauvas my answer to the question "Do you know what a guava is?" would probably be "not really".
Do you judge your knowledge of something against what you think the other person knows all the time? Would you tell Mario Andretti, were he to ask you "do you know how to drive?" that "no, I don't"? Poor guy, if everyone did that, he'd never be able to use a cab or hire a limo.
Questions are defined by their context, if Mario Andretti was drunk at a party, and looking for a ride home, I'd say yes, if we were at a race track I'd probably say no since he was probably really asking "Do you know how to drive a race car?"
Re:Weather does affect it (Score:5, Insightful)
By that metric weather affects everything, and you'd be asking a completely useless question.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
Most people realize the actual question being asked is whether cloud computing is affected by weather more than other generic things, to which the answer is no, in fact it's less affected by weather than other generic things. What do you prove by deliberately misinterpreting the survey question?
Rank the following in terms of likelihood:
1.) A person thinks cloud computing involves actual clouds.
2.) The people running the survey deliberately asked ridiculous or trick questions in order to get a sensational response that would drive readership and therefore profits.
3.) A person genuinely gave an over-literal response due to the weather's actual ability to take out a data center despite the question being intended to gauge whether a person thinks cloud computing involves actual clouds.
Re: (Score:3)
A ground fault can certainly be a danger...
It's absolutely shocking how often they turn up.
I'll be here all week, try the waitress
I am more worried about the 49%... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that believes that the cloud is this magical place disconnected from the utility grid, immune to lightning strikes, floods, storm surges, etc. etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Marketing can be blamed for that 49%.
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Re: (Score:3)
Fuck the cloud. All my data is in Heaven administered by God! Nothing can go wrong. Everything is where it should be. Simply perfect.
"Heaven. Are you good enough?"
I've heard that God doesn't take care of data for people with such foul mouths....
Re: (Score:3)
Fuck the cloud. All my data is in Heaven administered by God! Nothing can go wrong. Everything is where it should be. Simply perfect.
Rationalizing disk failure won't bring your data back.
Re:I am more worried about the 49%... (Score:4, Funny)
Fuck the cloud. All my data is in Heaven administered by God! Nothing can go wrong. Everything is where it should be. Simply perfect.
Rationalizing disk failure won't bring your data back.
Just wait three days.
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Exactly... At first blush, as someone in IT, my gut would be a resounding "yes".
One of the big "risk factors" I attach to cloud and any offsite solutions is that they are by definition only accessible when internet connectivity is established.
Generally the ONLY time my office internet access goes down is during bad weather. Snow, wind, lightning can take down internet. My choices here are satellite, ADSL, and fixed point-to-point wireless. And all 3 are disrupted by enough snow, wind, rain, and lightning. A
Also in the news (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Statistics show otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
Per the newspaper of record, it does. (Score:2, Informative)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/amazon-web-services-knocked-offline-by-storms/
Ironically (Score:3)
Ironically, one of the bigger outages we had where our AWS instances went down was due to ..... weather.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Bad Title (Score:3)
Survey Reveals a Majority Know "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather, Along With Pretty Much Everything Else
Obligatory Onion story... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-on-that-cloud-thing-that-everyone-else-is-talki,28789/ [theonion.com]
85% of the so-called (Score:2)
professionals don't know what cloud computing is either, so all-in-all things are about the same as the always were..
Packet storms (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny they list facebook, twitter, online photo sharing, online banking and shopping as "the cloud". It would be interesting to hear from TFA what on the Internet does not count as "the cloud" ?
Had noticed TFA is making fun of people who think stormy weather can "interfere with the functionality of the cloud" when just a few weeks ago an electrical storm triggered a massive outage in the Amazon "cloud".
For icing on my cloud cake we have marketeers commenting about how everyone has a favorable view of the cloud when the only thing that seems clear is too many people including the author does not seem to have a coherent grasp of what it is their talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely nothing. "The Cloud" is the in, new buzzword, and thus Marketing is making sure that whatever they're selling, it's part of The Cloud. Coming your way, Cloud-enabled galoshes! You can order them over the Internet!
But they are not entirely wrong. (Score:3)
Bad weather can knock "the cloud" offline or make access unreliable, Bad weather can knock down suspended power and data lines, interrupting access between you and the cloud. It can flood service tunnels, basement and first floor switches and short out improperly sealed equipment.
And if you access the cloud over wireless (Score:2)
Rain... (Score:2)
To be fair, when it rains, the internet at my house goes out when it rains. Maybe all of these 51% of people surveyed live in the ghetto too?
I'm all metaPHOR it (Score:2)
Not only is The Cloud impacted by weather (lightning strikes, electrical failures, overheating Data Centres etc) but it also has a non-trivial impact on Global Climate.
Scientists are still debating whether it's a net INCREASE or DECREASE in global temperature (DCs can be MUCH more power efficient than individual businesses running their own serv
Make sense. (Score:2)
I play EQ2, quite often someone will say, we are having thunderstorms, might lose power.
So, all those people who lose power to storms might just think that the cloud can lose power in storms.
I know better, but I also live in a city, and don't tend to lose power.
Re: (Score:2)
So, all those people who lose power to storms might just think that the cloud can lose power in storms.
Anything that interferes with the internet between you and the service disrupts your ability to use the service. Weather impacts on internet links both big and small all the time. Are the actual computers running the service likely to go down? No... but a lightning strike on their internet connection... or yours... or any link between you will make them as good as down.
"On Somebody Else's Computer". (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said it before [linguisticmystic.com], and I'll say it again. Every instance of "In the Cloud", facing a naive end user, should be replaced with "On somebody else's computer". This study shows that people have absolutely no idea what The Cloud is, and that might, just maybe, be affecting their choice of what to upload to it. "I keep our business records in the cloud" sounds sane, but “Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer” doesn't.
Re:"On Somebody Else's Computer". (Score:4, Informative)
Private Cloud is when the hardware is yours. It lives inside your firewall and is subject to your security practices. Public Cloud, conversely, is not yours.
Having cleared up that detail, we can talk about what makes it a "cloud" and not just a bunch of services running who-really-cares-where. Essentially, it comes about as a consequence of virtualization. There's a qualitative difference between saying, "I need to buy a server with X capacity in order to run my application," and creating an instance of your application in a cloud. Yes, they both ultimately depend on hardware capacity, but there is a separation of concerns between the abstract resources that your app needs and how they are physically provided. You tend not to think about servers any more but about instances of things. It encourages a more modular, more fluid way of solving problems.
For example, I've been talking with one of my colleagues this week about setting up a package repository. That's a server which delivers software packages for clients to install. New packages have to be added to the repository automatically, and they have to be signed. Now, this raises the awkward question of where to maintain the private key used for signing each change to the repository. We found ourselves having to rule out all of the possible algorithmic options. The essential requirement is that the signing has to be encapsulated inside something that can peform computations. What we really need is a specially hardened server that does nothing but sign changes to the repo. But who can afford to buy a whole server just for that one narrow purpose? If the server is virtual, the resource issue goes away.
Of course, other issues remain. Just as there is an inherent security risk in having unrestricted access to a physical server, there is risk in having comparable access to a virtual server. In principle, disaster recovery in a virtualized environment ought to be more robust than in a physical one, because you can maintain a perfect digital record of everything that went into creating that environment. But even if you keep that record offsite in multiple bank vaults, if you have never tried to actually bring up and test a virtual environment with it, you may be in for a big surprise.
So I don't want to do what the marketing people do and say that cloud solutions are magically wonderful. There's a useful separation of concerns in a cloud solution that, I believe, leads to a more elegant way of approaching design problems. And there's a big difference between private and public cloud that the people selling public cloud services don't really like to talk about. As to whether a cloud solution has specific advantages for you, I think one of the most surprising results is that it comes with a change of thinking.
Kim Dot Com says.. (Score:3)
The Root Cause of This Belief... (Score:3)
Pretty Stupid, but... (Score:2)
Yeah, most people are clueless about the Internet. But that said, it's also true that polls are easily skewed by the wording of a poll question, or the way it is asked.
So what... (Score:3)
ahahah let's all laugh at the ignorance of the masses... I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers/doctors/plumbers that laugh at the /. crowd for their lack of knowledge...
Most people in IT can't agree on the same definition of cloud, or what it is and what it is not. Is cloud an application, infrastructure, platform, API? It can be.
In other news...
Most Americans think RAID is a bug spray.
It does mine (Score:2)
As weather effects my cable connection ..
Random binary distribution FTW! (Score:2)
Weather Schmether; What about Wilhelm Riech? (Score:2)
Half the population (Score:2)
Half the population also believes in all sorts of things when they shouldn't.
I wonder how much overlap there is between the various stupid halves? Anyone have a venn diagram?
Why shouldn't they? (Score:2)
"Cloud" computing was always rooted in meaningless sales jargon created by the same kind of non-tech people in the tech industry who gave us all the other pundit phrases you read at VentureBeat et al. It's a snappy one-syllable name, so all the marketing monkeys at other tech companies soon caught on, then Apple introduced iCloud, and now we're stuck with this bullshit for a good five years. Until "Coconut" or something else catches on.
Expecting an average person to know that "Cloud" doesn't actually mean t
Stormy Weather affects the Cloud? (Score:3)
No way! I don't know if Stormy Weather is alive but if she is she must be in her 70s. Bump, grind, BUMP - there goes another server off line! More bumps, grinds, etc and whoops there goes her top. What a rack! STACK OVERFLOW.
That's not the only worry (Score:3)
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Insightful)
I asked him what he knew about 'The Cloud' the other day; his response?
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"
You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."
Stop it. Stop it right now.
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Interesting)
I asked him what he knew about 'The Cloud' the other day; his response?
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"
Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject. At least he didn't go and form a strong opinion and start arguing about a subject he knows nothing about.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'." -- Isaac Asimov
This Slashdot article may as well have said "average public school-educated Americans unable to distinguish their own (obese) ass from a hole in the ground."
Sure that may sound like I am being negative. But it's so hard not to be negative about this. Without even considering its finances, there is good reason to question the long-term viability of my nation. You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous. It's not even just anti-intellectualism, as though that were not bad enough. Emotional intelligence is on the decline as well, and it manifests as a bunch of people who generally mean well, but are far too self-absorbed to understand things so basic as "needlessly blocking a doorway in a public place is rude".
They do mean well but they tend to be childish, indulgent, and haven't the maturity to overcome their own thoughts and their own worries. That's why when I say "self-absorbed" I don't mean it in terms of narcissism, I mean it in terms of having become so thoroughly alienated from their fellow humans that they are unable to consider how their actions affect others. Generally the USA is becoming decadent like every other great nation just before its collapse.
I am seriously wondering just how hard it is for an American to immigrate to a small Western European nation and become a naturalized citizen.
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have a severely myopic view of what is important in the world. Until very recently, even cloud providers could not define cloud computing beyond whatever their implementation was. Not knowing what "the cloud" is does not exemplify in any way anti-intellectualism. I think your rant is a generalized one, way off topic, and pretty much a knee-jerk response to any sign that someone doesn't know about something you consider important.
Reading your post history, you realize that you are part of a small minority of people who are aware of the business behind service offerings, whether it is data mining of social networking or broad categories such as cloud offerings. Based on that reading, it should not surprise you to find that people don't care how their phone works, or what powers their website. And they don't want to know. Not because of anti-intellectualism. They just have no need to know, or don't have any connection to people who do know.
Sure they lack curiosity, but we can only say that about this subject, where they may have interests in mechanics or art or cuisine instead.
So you have rated your opinion of the nation on people who don't need to know about something, being asked about that thing, and making a guess based on the information they already have at hand. Or, you used this as an excuse to jump up on your soapbox.
Either way, you are my example of why someone should pity a culture, not the people who were busy minding their own business when a surveyor gave them a pop quiz.
The actual study has a much less exaggerated title, and as far as I can tell from the actual survey, it was a true random sampling. Ask a random person what "the could" is, given no context, and I'm surprised that only 29% said it related to weather. "51%" is described as "most", and as posted above that bunch of people are technically correct that weather can cause problems, including damage from lightning and flooding or just plain power outage.
The margin of error was +/- 3% meaning it could have been as low as 48%. You can't even claim "majority" with those numbers. And this was an e-mail invitation to an online survey. Automatically, anyone who clicked on an unexpected mail to answer questions is an idiot, but my opinion aside this is self-selection. There is no description of what measure they took to ensure the sample was anything other than "too stupid not to click."
So now you got your panties in a bunch over "People who think it's okay to click on e-mail links don't care how technology works." Which everyone here already knew.
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject. At least he didn't go and form a strong opinion and start arguing about a subject he knows nothing about.
And, from reading TFA, neither did those 51% who thought that weather would interfere with the cloud. They were asked about it and they answered. They weren't protesting on the streets demanding something be done about the weather to protect their access to the cloud.
You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous.
So you think that people who don't know what the rather nebulous concept of "the cloud" (which is quite appropriate since "clouds" are already nebulous and consist of many different kinds) is "hate thinking" etc. etc.? Quite a leap, I'd say.
They do mean well but they tend to be childish, indulgent, and haven't the maturity to overcome their own thoughts and their own worries.
And people who rant about others who simply don't care about technical things are grown up, mature individuals who are fastidious? By the way, I think you want to call them "self-indulgent", because most people are indugent of others.
I am seriously wondering just how hard it is for an American to immigrate to a small Western European nation and become a naturalized citizen.
I sense that this statement is much like the random movie or TV star who tries to influence voting trends by claiming that "if X wins, I'm moving to England" or similar. It's not hard to move to Europe, but why you'd want to become a citizen there is a mystery. You'd just be stuck in the same kind of situation where you'd threaten to "move to the US" if politics didn't go the way you wanted.
Re: (Score:3)
>>>Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject.
Which is actually the OPPOSITE of what modern schooling teaches. The current method taught in education is that admitting you don't know will get scolded by the teacher ("Shame on you! Should have read the chapters!"). Plus it is better to GUESS on the typical mutliple choice test than leave it blank because you don't know.
So more of this government schooling would just lead to MORE of these types of answers fr
Re:I weep for my country (Score:4, Insightful)
> You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."
You are my favorite person for this week. And it's only Wednesday.
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Funny)
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"
Is his last name "McCoy" by any chance?
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Insightful)
In a saner world we wouldn't let hypsters foist stupid names on an entire industry for things as simple to explain as "remote storage".
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Funny)
In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I weep for my country (Score:5, Funny)
No, we'd nuke it from the cloud.
Re: (Score:3)
> In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
I just now had a fantasy of a town without hipsters... Of being able to go into a coffee shop and not have to stand behind a skinny guy in a long leather jacket with a shaved head ordering a drink so complicated that the clerk has to take notes. ...and then demand in a screechy voice that she check "in the back" for whatever esoteric food item he wants that they don't have.
John Pinette voice: Get out of the liiiiine.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, strictly speaking the cloud is 'remote storage and remote processing', which is a bit of a mouthful. Cloud is one syllable in place of several, which is more of a practicality than marketing hype IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Well strictly speaking remote processing isn't necessary nor is it always present. Remote storage with redundancy and backup managed by others (Skydrive, dropbox) is really what most people see. If you get any remote processing (aka amazon, Azure) its probably more akin to scalable hosting.
Lumping all those different capabilities under one name helps no-one.
Re: (Score:3)
So how is it different from client-server? Other than "It's HIP, it's NEW, give me the mooola!".
Re: (Score:3)
>>>strictly speaking the cloud is 'remote storage and remote processing', which is a bit of a mouthful
"Mainframe computing"
Term invented in the 1960s or 70s (not sure which). Why do people think it's necessary to come up with new terms for old concepts? The other day I read about something called a "plugin hybrid" that is supposed to be revolutionary leap forward in automobiles. Then I realized it's the same concept as the old 1920s Electric Cars that were sold with add-on generators. New term;
Re: (Score:3)
This particular problem with the US is not with technology education, it's with antiquated power and communications grids. Though fortunate not to be exposed to any wars on home soil in the last century, it means many of these systems consist of 100 year old wires strung up on wooden poles rather than buried underground like much of Europe, etc. Weather thus *significantly* affects Cloud computing in many areas of the country...