[be] Re: [LinuxUser] Cloud Computing and Bible Translation

[Neil Mayhew]

On 2010-02-18 10:09, Oreo Warpok wrote:
> I thought that people on this list might be interested in my short 
> musings ...

Thanks, an interesting read. Good to hear of real experiences with these 
things, not just theorizing.

My reservation about cloud computing is that use of the browser and 
JavaScript as a platform for applications is incredibly wasteful of 
machine resources. In my experience, it takes at least an order of 
magnitude (10x) more powerful hardware to provide the same functionality 
as a native application. This is fine for people with big laptops or 
desktops, but it's a real problem on low-power machines such as the 
OLPC. Just watch how the Sugar Browse activity bogs down on a complex 
web site such as GMail.

I think the DVCS concept that Paratext, Bibledit, WeSay and others are 
following gives most of the benefits without the costs of browser-based 
cloud computing using Gears. It has the befit of "redundancy", too, 
which means that if one copy of the data goes down there are multiple 
other copies around to recover from, on your own and other people's 
machines as well as on the server.

However, if you are doing cloud computing, check out eyeOS 
<http://eyeos.org/> sometime. It's kind of a desktop system in the 
cloud. Pretty cool, and open-source too. You can run your own eyeOS 
server on your own secure system in a vault somewhere and access it 
using https.

--Neil