On 01/06/2013 08:48 AM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> today it's all about clouds... a model from the 1950 era: renting the
> remote computing power (and no control about update/upgrade at the
> customer side).

I notice that the computing field seems to be cyclical in this manner.

Once upon a time it was all about having a huge mainframe in the middle 
and lots of dumb terminals dangling off it. That was the way to go. You 
could have a team of experts maintaining the mainframe, and each user 
only has to worry about their own work.

Then came the rise of the personal computer (which, I'm told, the 
establishment regarded as little more than a cute toy). Now you can 
incrementally add more computer power by incrementally adding more 
computers. One person's work can't affect anybody else, different people 
can have different applications installed, and so forth.

Then with the invention of the network [or rather, the financial 
feasibility of ubiquitous networking], it was all about the servers 
again. File servers, print servers, email servers, database servers, 
source control servers. Some folks even wanted to install all their 
applications on a sever and have the desktops run them over the network.

Then people started with virtualisation. Can't install two versions of 
the same application on one desktop? Run two virtual machines. With 
guest tools, you can make it nearly painless to swap files between the 
multiple VMs. You only need one PC.

But then VMs became portable. You can move a VM from one physical 
machine to another, and the VM doesn't need to know or care. Run it on 
the server, run it on the desktop, run it on a different desktop, 
whatever. Add in VNC or RDP and you can run everything remotely, on 
infinity virtual servers and get maximum utilisation out of your 
physical server investments.

And now it's iCloud. Amazon EC2. Rack Serve. SkyDrive. If it's not 
cloud-based, it's old hat.

Really, it seems to be that there are two models: centralised and 
decentralised. Both have advantages and disadvantages. And "the 
industry" goes through cycles of singing the virtues and wailing the 
vices of the two in cycles. It's kind of amusing to watch...

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