So much for "The Cloud" ...

Apparently Google had a big outage today ...

Google Suffers First Gmail Outage of 2011

... perhaps not big by Google standards (they spin it as only effecting 0.08% of their users), of course with 150 Million users, that's about 120,000 impacted. Not that big a deal unless your one of those 120,000.

I don't have an Android phone, but I'm told that you can activate one without creating or already having a GMail account. So, not sure what kind of impact that has on the phones? Can make/receive calls, but maybe no contact list available to work from?

Of course, this is no worse/better than Apple requiring iPhone users to have an iTunes account.

I'm not a big believer in "Cloud" services being the primary means of doing things. There great as a backup, but I don't wont to depend on them to get any work done.

IMH(f)O anyway.

reply to post by EnhancedInterrogator


I second that opinion. Don't like the cloud too much.
Sure there are heaps of instances where the cloud (didn't we use to call it ASP before?) can come in handy. I'm using it to sync my calendar between couple of macs and the iStuff.
I would never use it to store documents, unless encrypted and only as a backup.
Nowadays there are RAID systems for dummies (i know, i'm one of the biggest) at a fair price. Why on earth would one want to move those same piles of data over a network when you can pump it on a disk.
Of course Cloud providers and telco's want you to get in their cloud, another way to make a buck. Not as cheap as the disks, however, and less safe.
But than again, all indicators point in the same direction: in due time all content will be in the cloud. You'll get it streamed when you want to consume it (and pay for that graceful service, of course).
ANd as soon as we won't be able to run applications installed on our machines, we're back to the mainframe. Much safer.

Yeah, I love how some of the Cloud providers make claims about your data being "secure and encrypted", but forget to mention that because they have the encryption keys - they would have to hand those over to any agency that subpoena's them (probably without even a warrant, just a request or at most a subpoena). Of course, the encryption keys could be leaked also - for profit, or or revenge against the provider, or hacked from the outside.