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Old 06-11-2011, 03:54 AM
bryantm3
It's Written In The Book!
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: alpharetta
Posts: 1,101
Re: crapple whycloud
i think the apple service is, of course, a rip off, because you have to pay $20 a year to listen to music you've already bought.

but here's the whole point of the cloud:

-for the most part, everyone has basically the same versions of tracks on their iTunes... if they have "Underworld — Kittens — Beaucoup Fish (1998)", you've got like a million different mp3 copies of the same track floating around out there. hard drive space is limited. so the cloud was developed so you can have one copy of the song in a hard drive somewhere and everyone can access it, freeing up hard drive space for everyone and not having to worry about the file being lost or corrupted if you transfer the disc wrong, lose the CD, your computer gets dropped in a pitcher of beer, etc. in addition, when higher internet speeds become available, they'll switch to a lossless version of the track, and nobody will have to download anything— it'll just automatically be in your library.

the same thing goes for all cloud computing in general— all applications, etc. will be hosted on remote servers, and you'll never have to download another update, because they'll just update the application on that one server and everyone automatically gets it. the only thing that stays on your computer are the personal files you make with the applications.

the reason this is just coming out now is because we actually have internet speeds high enough to pull it off. they've been thinking about it since the internet got going in the mid 90s.

the only downsides are this: first, if your internet goes out you're screwed. second, privacy rights. you don't have any choice in whether to update or not, so using an older version is out, and also and you're kind of at the whims of the cloud when it comes to whether they want to copy down those files you're making with those applications, your keystrokes, etc. the privacy issue is kind of scary and i'm curious to see how and if they're going to pull this off without taking everyone's privacy and tossing it out the window.