cloud computing (and python)?

[Terry Reedy]

"PatrickMinnesota" <PatrickMinnesota at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:4715e05f-456b-4274-9718-b6c009af7698 at 1g2000hsl.googlegroups.com...
| I would say that the biggest difference between what people have been
| doing
| for decades and what is now being referred to as 'cloud computing' is
| the applications.

Having welcomed the shift from timeshare to desktop computing, I see two 
important differences:

1. 100% availability.  The University mainframe had daily and weekly 
scheduled downtime (early morning) and rather frequent unscheduled crashes 
(midday).  PCs were more reliable hardware and faster to reboot when the OS 
crashed.  And spares or borrowed machines not too hard to come by.

Web (cloud) services run on highly redundant PC servers farms.  The main 
point of failure (for me, at least) is the ISP.

| The idea of the cloud is that the application, like a word processor
| for instance, is
| not running or installed on your computer.

That was true decades ago, when there was no 'your computer'.  So nothing 
new here.

|  Your data is also stored on their servers.

ditto.

  So
| yeah, it's kind of
| like the old diskless X-Terminal setup and is totally contrary to how
| companies like
| Microsoft would like the world to work.  The other main difference
| seems to be that
| 'cloud computing' runs under a different revenue model than
| traditional applications
| like Microsoft Office.  Google Apps, in it's most basic form is free
| and so are most
| of the others.  They are monetizing in a different way than Microsoft
| does when it
| sells you Office for $500 or whatever.

2. yes, cost.  University mainframes cost $s/minute.  I remember blowing 
about  $200 due to a misplaced comma or something in a statistical analysis 
setup.  So it was cost-effective (and rather liberating) to spend $10000 on 
a desktop Unix system for both statistics and text work.

tjr