We have been hearing about clouds, but When will it rain?

The frank answer is: i don't know.

But it did give me something to fantasize about. let me consider just one possibility of cloud computing. Online data storage. And how it can affect your life.

Consider your hard drive, there are very few files that are private in nature, and in quantity very small compared to the rest of your files, most of which are music , movies , pictures, e-books and executables. Most of these are commonly found files. All files have a unique MD5 hash or some other specific and unique characteristic. And these can be easily used to uniquely describe this file from a purely computational point of view.

Now just think about your public data being indexed and then pushed onto the cloud. Changes in this index will correspond with the changes on the hard-disk drive, versioned CVS like.

Now suppose you loose all the data, maybe by an accidental format, or hard drive crash, you can easily get at this index and by using a connected p2p system like bit torrent, you can restore your data to the latest date of index upload ( or to any other date), the only block being your ISP bandwidth.

One more aspect is file availability or synchronization. All the files indexed can be looked up or downloaded by a person using the same p2p system after authentication. Also the computer can be controlled in a non direct way in the same method. Non direct, because the person will control not the computer, but its application status in the cloud. This way has the advantage of added security because all the work is done by the cloud after instructions from you. Hence intrusions can be prevented, both by the cloud and the person, because of the hands-on nature of the cloud.

There is no sense in any technology if there is no money-making involved. The services of the cloud can be free for data restoration for public data. The online storage of private data can be a paid service, like amazon. Also corporate subscriptions can be added to the paid services.

This is one of the ways that the internet can be meshed into our life to make it more comfortable. I agree that this method can also be brought about into action using the traditional server method, but the awesomeness of the cloud seems to be ( to me ) optimistic sharing of all the computational resources.