Computers SUCK!!!

[Undertoad]

Answers! I got answers!

Where is this cloud exactly?

In data centers around the world, usually located where there is cheap reliable power, decent cooling, or both.

Who controls it?

The employees of major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple.

Who has access to my personal shit?

Nobody; it's entirely encrypted, even when it's stored.

If they break my personal shit, do they guarantee repairs or compensation?

It doesn't break. Famous last words, but everything's backed up and redundant.

The whole thing is, they do a better job at managing data than we do. If your personal shit breaks at home, you have no recourse either -- and because nobody manages their data well, everybody's shit breaks at home. Watch this:

Hands up, everyone with offsite backups and your data in a RAID?

Nobody's hand went up! Of course not, we're all just putting everything on our hard drive, and hoping for the best. That's not really working for us. Hard drives die at a rate of apx. 2% per year. That's terrible odds! But Google has offsite backups and RAIDs and professionals managing all of it. When their hard drives die, they hot-swap them and rebuild the data. Everything stays online and nobody even realizes it happened.

Big companies that use the cloud have data breaches all the freakin' time.
My computer/data has never been breached, as far as I can tell. And aren't there viruses roaming around out there in the ether?

I haven't heard of a cloud breach yet.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Hard drives die at a rate of apx. 2% per year. That's terrible odds! But Google has offsite backups and RAIDs and professionals managing all of it. When their hard drives die, they hot-swap them and rebuild the data.

Can confirm. Mr. Clod has worked at two different "cloud"-sized companies, though personal data storage didn't happen to be their business model. They had so many hard drives that one died roughly once a week. He says it's a little better now with solid state drives, but still--sending someone out to the data center to replace a dead drive is a standard maintenance chore, not an emergency.

[Undertoad]

(nods) Where places have really serious storage needs, big IT uses refrigerator-sized units with many many hard drives in them. The biggest HP unit can hold 15 Petabytes.

A Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes. (A Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes.) So one of these babies can hold like a couple thousand of our datas. It's configured by top pros and managed by top technicians. Connected with 10GB Ethernet across fiber switches.

When a hard drive dies, a notification goes out and someone just pulls out the bad drive and puts a new one in there, and the system senses the new drive and rebuilds the storage array automatically.

I'm pretty sure at least 10% of usage of this type of storage is for porn. When I worked for a company that used them (for audio), the sales guys from HP said their biggest customer was the big porn website in town.

[slang]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Who controls it?

The employees of major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple.

Who has access to my personal shit?

Nobody; it's entirely encrypted, even when it's stored.

It's difficult for some doo-mass like me to be credibly skeptical compared all your skills and experience.

I don't trust them though. Sure, I don't know how the system works. As we move forward and learn through leaks what's actually happening behind the curtain, it seems to me that even the pros don't completely understand the technical limits and capabilities.

Or maybe the limits and capabilities of those who desire to have access to all this "personal" info.


Having said that, didja miss me?

[fargon]

Originally Posted by slang

Having said that, didja miss me?

I did.

[slang]

Ha. Thanks Fargon.