What is cloud?

[Hungry Man]

There are two types of cloud: Cloud computing and cloud storage. I'll explain both.

Cloud computer: Cloud computing is really the future of computers. Imagine you have two computers, a netbook (say the CR-48) and an incredibly powerful desktop (i7 8 cores all that stuff.) Obviously the desktop can do things much much faster than your netbook. Let's say my netbook wants to make a huge calculation that'll take one hour but it only takes 15 seconds on my desktop. It's faster for me to send the "question" to the desktop from my netbook and then have the desktop send the "Answer" back. Essentially your netbook has just answered a question in the time it took the desktop to recieve, process, and return the answer.

The bottleneck here is your internet speed. If the desktop can "instantly" answer the "question" than the only thing that's slowing you down is the internet.

This means that your CR-48 netbook connected to a server is virtually as fast as that server (or at least when internet speeds are high enough)



Next is cloud storage, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Cloud storage just means that you keep information on another computer. Email is a perfect example.

You probably have many many megabytes of data in your gmail account... but it takes no space on your computer. That's because the information is out there on a server somewhere.

Cloud storage is very easy to understand, moreso than cloud computer.

I hope that clears things up.

[Hungry Man]

Just to be clear... cloud processing/computing is really undeveloped. Mostly because you need large amounts of bandwidth and high upload/download speeds to use it. Cloud computing is actually best seen in games where you can play intense games on a netbook by having a server play the game and essentially stream back the game (you send the server input like mouse clicks and the server responds with streaming the response).

[conor]

This is what I love about the CR-48 and by extension Google and Chrome . I have always used Chrome and loved it for the minimalist approach , it does require people that are not used to the concept to think in a different way. I find I rarely use my desktop now since getting the CR-48.