| Digital Devices & Clouds |
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| May 2012 | |
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We are entering the 3rd generation of digital devices and the 2nd generation of digital clouds (2012). If we look at cars and trucks for transportation and what each category does for our lives, we can visualize where smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, workstations, and servers position accordingly. The first generation of cloud is the fabric that enables us to send emails and browse websites. The fabric consists of trunk lines, Domain Name Servers, IP address registrars, and Internet Service Providers. Apart from our own ISP, we do not know or care where they are. We control what we want to send and to receive and we are happy. During this period, email and website are the killing applications and they have propelled the Internet to use up 4 billion addresses. The 2nd generation is a suggestion that we let big scale operators do computation and storage for us and we simply behave like a consumer. The fabric will include servers, hardware and software. All we need to retain is just simple devices for communicating with the fabric as in smart phones and tablets. Consumer clouds such as offered by Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail actually store our emails and spreadsheets etc. Apart from the names of these operators who do not charge us for their service, we do not know where our data are being kept nor do we care. There are more serious applications on the Internet and they promise to remove all computing hassles from us and to charge us on usage only. Should we take their offer? See the Rainforest Model, and decide which services and data are critical or not critical to us as a criterion. <click on picture to enlarge>:    Click to return |