The Cloud Fails Again

Posted by Mike on Tuesday, August 24, 2010

We’ve become too reliant on the cloud. The Internet is down, and I can’t do a thing.

The cloud has failed me. Again. There is a serious power outage in the Berkley area, and now I am writing my column when I should be doing my No Agenda podcast. I’m not sure if a squirrel ate through an important cable or a car hit a telephone pole, but hours and hours have gone by without resolution.

This is a Comcast connection, but all the ISPs have these problems. With Comcast, one of my readers coined the term “Comcastrated” when it goes down, since you lose more than just the Internet. I’d hate to go to 100 percent redundancy for a situation that occurs probably twice a year, but I may have to if this sort of thing becomes more routine. I cannot see how it won’t, with everyone cutting back on everything in this economy.

There’s a reason that desktop computing evolved the way it did. The evolution of the PC stemmed from Mainframe computing and batch processing to distributed computing running off of a main computer—the minicomputer era—to stand-alone systems destined to become more powerful than the early mainframes. The difference was that these stand-alone microcomputing machines were controlled by one person. They were not shared by many and restricted by some guy in charge.

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