I’ve also got my father and brother using the cloud, after they have lost all their data due to hard drive failure.

Virtualization is not new, external storage is not new, running apps from a network is not new, hire somebody to manage your computers or network is not new etc. The only thing that is new is total interdependency (it is like leasing something but with one major difference), when there is no internet connection you cannot do anything! When you forgot to pay your bills (or you cannot pay it any longer) you can loose al your data. The difference with this ‘lease construction’ is your data, most important of all. When you loose your car, you can buy a new one or go to a railway station and take the train, data can be unique, valuable.

It is stupid to rely on just one organisation that holds all your data, your infrastructure. When it is not there for some reason, you are unarmed. Cloud is stupid lease construction to generate continues income for companies at less costs. Not new, just a commercial joke.

You see, some of us, like you, and like me, we like our shit, we care for our shit, and we think back daily about the shit we lost when we were careless about backups or whatnot.

But I also look at the kids, who grew up in this magical world where you carry a genie in your pocket, where your have two computers of your very own at home, with computing power which would have been classified as munitions around the time of their birth.

They lose data and photographs and shit all the time. Sometimes they have a geek around the house, who can restore some of the shit, sometimes they don’t, and they get told “shit happens”.

And they, hell, they don’t get used to it, they’ve been used to it forever.

And strangely enough, it’s not only the kids. I have letters dating back to when one put pen to paper and entrusted the envelope to some form of ground transport to bridge a 100 kilometer gap. I have also seen people open a letter or a hallmark type card, read it, say “oh, that’s so sweet”, and then tear it up and throw it away.

But yes, you are right, and I want my incomplete, very first game I wrote back, damn fool tape recorder that ate it!

In the 1980′s the whole strategy of the PC and the MAC workstation manufacturers was to offload processing power from the big mainframes to a local workstation, have some local storage, AND ALLOW YOU TO SAVE DATA LOCALLY! (remember those 8″ floppies?).

Why go back to the stone-age? Give me my workstations and servers here in my office where I can control all of my data locally. Some of my servers are over 10 years old (P3′s) and they still chug along just fine thank you very much. I amortized them years ago. Sure I have some quad 4 CPU screamers, but most important is that all my resources are here next to me. I control them, not someone else.