Just about any technology website, blog, or news outlet has mention somewhere of the ‘Cloud’. Usually in reference to Google’s services such as Gmail or Google Docs, or Amazon’s AWS, or Microsoft’s Azure services or somewhere in between. But what exactly is the cloud, and why is it good or bad? Is it really anything new? Is it secure?

The cloud certainly isn’t bad per se, nor is it necessarily good. Just like the Web 2.0 marketing hype, it really isn’t completely clear what exactly it encompasses scope-wise. I think most can agree it entails SaaS, or Software as a Service. Not a bad thing, and not a really new thing either. If you’ve used Google Docs, you’ve used SaaS. Some would even say Email is stored in the cloud. Email certainly isn’t new in relative terms.

The general idea of the cloud is that you relinquish your desktop’s local files and processing to a server somewhere out on the Internet. You gain the aspect of convenience by storing your files on a company’s server and don’t have to worry about how those files are stored and secured, or on what device. You can whip up a marketing presentation at home using Google’s presentation software, save it, and when you get to work you can simply download it or open it up in your web browser on any machine. No need to save a PPTX to a USB drive and lug it to work and hope you have Office 2010 on the machine in the conference room where you’re presenting. Another common example is music. Simply store all your music in the cloud and download it to whatever device you want to listen to the music on. No worries about burning disks and ripping them later.

You’ve probably even heard of Google Chromebooks, or netbooks that pretty much only run a web browser (Google Chrome right now) that limit the user to entirely working in the cloud. They’re light, store everything remotely so you can easily get to your files and apps from desktops or tablets, and are energy and cost effective. Look at the Samsung Chromebook as an example.

This sounds all great and nice, and these are but a couple of very small examples of where you can use the cloud. But is this anything new?

No, it’s very 1970s. Except it’s not as good.

This entire paradigm mimics what was a traditional client / server setup many years back. You had what was known as a dumb terminal which the user interacted with, and that dumb terminal stored everything on the server. The server was usually a mainframe, which was very powerful. The mainframe did all of the processing the terminal requested. It stored files and served them up as requested. Starting to sound familiar? It’s exactly what the way the cloud operates, but on a wider scale.

With the adoption of personal computers, capable of storing their own files and doing their own processing, users gained a large degree of freedom. A large effort was undertaken to write good client based software, giving the users the ability to do multiple tasks on their own. Rich GUIs were designed to enable users to get their work done more effectively than the mainly text-only screens served up by the mainframes. Users didn’t need to compete for mainframe processor time to get their work done. If the mainframe was down for maintenance, no productivity was lost in the desktop world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking mainframes. They’re still used effectively today, and most PCs can’t hold a candle to the sheer power of these machines. But there is one thing that mainframes couldn’t deliver that desktops could, and do. It’s freedom. Your desktop is your own, and you can store anything you want on it. You can use up your processor time any way you wish. You can put any operating system you want on it. Assuming you have some level of acceptable security, your files are visible only to you.

So the cloud is nothing new and you lose some measure of freedom. It’s still convenient, so why not embrace it wholeheartedly like Google tells you to?

If the image above doesn’t look familiar, it should. It’s the logo of the infamous hacker group LulzSec. They’re a pretty funny bunch of guys. They hacked Sony, the CIA, FBI, a couple Brazilian government websites, leaked 62,000 usernames and passwords, and that’s just to name a few of their exploits. If you read their tweets, they seem pretty lighthearted given the criminality and severity of their exploits. They seem to have some really small, minute amount of code of ethics. The next group that comes around may not be as funny.

So in considering whether to jump on board the Cloud hype train, consider that you’re giving up control of many things, not the least of which is privacy and security. You’re not getting anything really shiny and new beyond marketing hype, and it may not always end up being cheaper than hosting your own services.

Would the person who says you can’t game on Linux please stand up and be shamed into a corner? With absolute minimal effort, I got World of Warcraft up and running on my Ubuntu install (10.04). Not only that, it runs extremely well. Even through Wine. Even through Wubi. Max settings.

Don’t believe me?

WoWbuntu

Nice eh? One of the cool things about using Wubi is it gives you full read/write access to your Windows file system (since, technically, Wubi runs Ubuntu on your Windows file system).  So how does this really help matters?  Well if you have WoW installed already on your Windows side of the world, all you need to do is run the Warcraft launcher on your Windows space right from Wine and it runs fine out of the box (definitely add the -opengl argument though).  No need to install!

You can do it, too! Just check out this wiki entry. Total time to be up and bashing scourge? About 20 minutes if you don’t already have Wine installed.