Steve Wozniak: Cloud Computing Will Cause 'Horrible Problems In The Next Five Years'

I totally concur with him, I'd never trust the likes of Google, Amazon or whomever with my files.

Steve Wozniak really, really doesn't like the cloud.

The Apple cofounder slammed cloud computing during a Q&A after a recent performance of The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the controversial play by Mike Daisy.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," Wozniak told the audience, according to a transcript from Agence France-Presse. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

Wozniak didn't offer much in the way of specifics about what these "horrible problems" would be, but he did hint at concerns about signing away rights to digital property stored in the cloud and generally losing ownership of that property.

"I want to feel that I own things," Wozniak said at the event. "A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

We're sure Apple's PR department must be just thrilled about his thoughts on the cloud, as well as his very attendance at the play, which criticizes the company's labor practices in China. Then again, Woz has been opening his mouth a lot lately - criticizing Siri, praising the Microsoft Surface tablet - so perhaps Apple is used to it by now.

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http://www.businessinsider.com/stev...s-in-the-next-five-years-2012-8#ixzz22mxx1s53

SAAS does not always make sense. If you put your data in a internet connected database, you have no control over it.

I'm not a fan of the cloud either, except for certain things I couldn't do otherwise - say compute some really hard/big problem - weather, training neural networks, stuff like that.

You lose security - check.
You lose control - check.
They sell your data (or some employee steals it and sells it, no matter) - check.
They know all your stats for access if it's shared with anyone else (website) - check.
They can lose your data and fail to have backed it up - it's happened a few times, even to microsoft on their own doggone cloud - lost their own data!

But worst - by delegating all that IT work to someone else, who does not and cannot care as much as yourself - it's not as reliable as it could be, and you lose your skills by not using them anymore. We create ever more generations of people who don't know how things work, then wonder why we are surrounded by stupid people. Should be obvious. There's even a pretty big trend away from doing any programming, much less "on the metal" stuff. Just like no one can fix their own new car anymore.

I've been watching this with some interest. The advent of drag-drop "a monkey can do this" programming tools has created a lot of very nasty-bad code in the ecosystem for example - because they do in fact hire what amounts to monkeys to do it! You can't replace design skills with those tools, now or in the foreseeable future. And you can rarely make up for it with faster/better hardware to run a bad design on...

I couldn't out-type line-ed on my Kaypro - a 4 mhz Z 80. Yet I can easily out type any of the current word processors on a quad core CPU with a great graphics card.
Is that progress? Yes, I know it's harder to render pictures of characters than plain old ascii - but it's not THAT much harder - it's lousy code.

I was talking to a help desk guy on G+ last night, who was on a call from a woman whose computer wouldn't light up, but her phone worked. He asked her to check if it was plugged in, and she responded she couldn't see because the power was out.
Errr, after the call he said he was really tempted to tell her to ship the computer to him as she was clearly too stupid to deserve to own one...but that's not untypical these days.

Ha ha! Great anecdote re the help desk guy and the poor clueless gal....

People as a whole seem to have a tendency to be sheeples, in every regard - that includes all the tech-fads, that I've witnessed during my (moderately long) IT career.

Every new technology/paradigm has it's place, but it never is a silver bullet. Will I trust any cloud service as the only copy of my important data? No. Would I use it as a backup? Yes. Would I trust 3rd party security, if my data to be stored was potentially worth millions? No. Would I trust their security, to ensure the level of privacy that I can comfortably accept, for things that I plan to store in the cloud (family photos, mostly, and some documents that are not very sensitive, but handy to have access to from anywhere)? Yes.

List goes on. There's no simple yes/no answer in my case, however, in case of the company I work for, there is simple answer: NO . That's the case of "data being potentially worth millions"

Its the assumption that you will always have an internet connection and that its good enough for the speed of transfer you 'need' that bothers me about the cloud.

Losing all your work / words / data is a big issue too.

At least with my old desk top, with separate hard drive backup, theres a sporting chance.
Oh yeah and its in an aluminium covered building (-;

My personal view of the cloud is geographically-distributed backup (with addedd benefit of easy access/sharing possibility, as in my family photos case).

I do have few synchronized copies of my important data on every computer I have, + NAS drive. But they can all go up in flames, potentially, or are subjected to theft - if it is a single location. Thus having a different location to back it up, is a cool thing to have.

I wouldn't mind access to application server platform in the cloud, as a developer, I think it is pretty cool to be able to try things out, without investing into your own test infrastructure. But production environment? Hmmm, not necessarily, not for what I am doing for a living (enterprise IT systems).

God I miss my IBM 486.





JK

Bushi, you know your shit, eh? I do roughly the same, but simply use my web-host isp for remote backups, it's very handy. There are some directories up there normal people can't get to, and I use them - lots of space, theoretically unlimited. I locked in some awesome terms with a long term contract back in the .bust when they were desperate. They do backups and have real humans in tech support, not some guy in India named "Steve" with a dropdown list.

I've only lost data once, ever. We had bought a bunch of IBM deskstar drives for all the guys here, and one hot day, one failed. Since we were cross backed on the other two machines, we didn't sweat too much (well, it was hot and we did, but not over that). Due to a deadline, we didn't drop everything to fix that. The next day, the other two died - they became famous for that. We wound up rewriting some code before we found those drives were readable on a cooler day...fixed things then and took them out of the systems. IBM sold that division to Fujitsu shortly after.

Other than that, things have gone stale and don't-care before any issue arose. They might not have been copied over to new machines, no loss there - I still have the drives. Means I have to keep a machine around that still has an IDE interface if I want to fish through it all.

I operate on a small business server and we have dual back-ups that leave teh building with us each night. I will NEVER trust anyone but me with my data. Anyone who thinks cloud computing is a great idea needs to have their head examined.

DCFusor said:

Other than that, things have gone stale and don't-care before any issue arose. They might not have been copied over to new machines, no loss there - I still have the drives. Means I have to keep a machine around that still has an IDE interface if I want to fish through it all.

Click to expand...

...yeah, I find myself hard drives most reliable long-term data storage - I remember CD/DVDs, being touted as "forever" data stores, I don't know, maybe it is true for the ones that were pressed in music company, not burned in my DVD burner - they get read errors in the matter of year-few years, which is ridiculous - even when using good quality burners & discs.

Although what I do, when I buy newer and bigger disk(s), I just sanitize my old data (ie getting rid of unwanted space-wasters, or duplicates), and copy everything onto the new one (s). This way I do not need to put up with "ancient" interfaces (like, the five-years-old ones - it is quite insane the speed at which high tech becomes obsolete), and my ancient backups are always there. Usually, when I upgrade, my new disk is an order of magnitude bigger than the older one, and I only need to backup a small fraction of the old volume - other stuff is mostly rubbish, anyway

More worthwhile discussion here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/yet_another_ris.html