What do you think of cloud computing?

For buying stock in those companies that are at the leading edge of the technology. I hear it could make Computers as we know it disappear and just be a little more then a monitor hooked up to the internet. While others say it will be a bust.What do you think of cloud computing?
The concept of light weight access workstations that did little more than present the graphics and provided the means of user input is an old one. We've gone through several cycles of centralization and decentralization of compute resources. In the past, the problem was two fold, the supposedly inexpensive workstation was still expensive (X-terminals) and centralized resources are easily overwhelmed when managed for cost savings instead of availability.



There are two interesting facets in this go round. The inexpensive workstations are now in the $300 range and there is a growing market for web services that can be provided remotely, mostly as server farms.



This also means that this most recent incarnation of centralized compute resources are mostly not what one thinks of when they think of cloud computing. People think of cloud computing as replacing the office functionality of a PC by centralizing them in a server farm and some of that is happening but that's not where the primary market seems to be. The primary market that's served by Amazon and Google has been renting time on server farms in the form of virtual machines. The idea is that you only pay for the computer when you need one. This allows small operations to scale their server farms very quickly without the cost of procurement and infrastructure and without the carrying costs of depreciating equipment and utilities when the clusters are no longer needed. If you have a sustained and constant workload, it's still more cost effective to buy your own but if you just need a hundred webservers with decent Internet connections for the Christmas rush then perhaps the cloud would be a good deal except for the fact that everyone has Christmas at the same time and perhaps the resources on the cloud would be insufficient for such a peak. If your peak demand is statistically independent of other people's peak demand then cloud computing would be the hybrid vehicle of the computing would.



The challenges that this latest incarnation faces are data locality, data transfer, data preservation, and security of intellectual property. The last concern isn't as much security of data because if it was just data, you can encrypt it before putting it out on the cloud. The problem is that if you want machines in the cloud to work with the data, they have to have access to the keys to decrypt and have access to your intellectual property in the way of the programs themselves.



Ultimately, as with previous centralization efforts, it'll be up to how the cloud resources are managed for availability. If it's managed merely for cost reduction as it was in the past, then the service will always be substandard and merely used as a bridge till internal resources can be made available. Some may be well managed for availability but some won't. The question is will the poorly managed services give the industry a bad reputation.
Who cares? All I know is well over 2 years now I've been in %26amp; out of these companies and doing well in them.

The cloud will eventually hurt the server market... but there should be no immediate "pain" to the PC market. I have no clue who thinks it's going to be a "bust". For business this makes a lot of sense, especially the small %26amp; medium size companies. I haven't read any article insinuating it would be a "bust". The real key for these companies is overvaluation. The P/E's are very high. So they tend to have high volatility.

The key here is to make money investing. Ride these companies up. Trail your stops. Watch the price action. Get out when they correct %26amp; get back in after they've shown a clear return to the trend.
Position sizing is key. Don't be greedy.What do you think of cloud computing?
The cloud allows companies to control their software. If you can't log in, you can't use their stuff. Great for computer intensive operations as well. So the real winners will be things like Maya, 3DO, other modeling programs, huge data base operations and such.



The problem is the ever marching capacity of the desktop unit and the decreasing cost. I built one for $500 that out does most commercial models. If I add in a CUDA graphics coprocessor, I'd have a supercomputer level system...on my desktop.



http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_n鈥?/a>
Cloud computing is the future of computing, but it's kind of like solar energy in that it's more of a long term investment. Plus it'll get set back the first few times somebody manages to breach a network and steal data. I would wait until the technology matures before investing in it.What do you think of cloud computing?
It's a Back Door for Crooks to spy on the competition, or by the government Patriot act, or almost legal watergate...Then get ready for the Hackers.

It's supposed to be safe storage area for your computer, that's all .."safe memory".

A corporation takes all of their most important Information, and sends it through the open airways to a company that puts it on a half dozen companies with routers, Bloody Stupid.

Now if you see an opportunity to make gains in any way knock your self out, no doubt were blindly headed in that direction.

You really believe "encryption" is safe?...From anyone?

"but not Trades",..Yeah..Sure...You would Know.. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/busine鈥?/a>