Virtualization. Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud - ReadWriteWeb. Dave Winer yesterday announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon's EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this fairly uninteresting page is sitting out there somewhere, but for this writer, it was an amazing coup.
"It's time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas," Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined. We went through Winer's HowTo: EC2 for Poets, and within 20 minutes had set most of it up. In step 12 of launch your server, Winer explains "You should see a single entry whose status is "starting. "
Google Expands the Cloud. This year's 100 top companies -- plus 35 to watch -- are transforming the digital media paradigm into a vital new distribution pathway for forward-thinking, technology-minded product developers and their consumers. The seventh annual AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 represents a bold list of the top emerging companies creating new business opportunities in the world of media, advertising, marketing, social commerce, branding, and public relations. Google plugs PC power into cloud computing | Webware.
Even at the cutting edge of cloud computing, Web-based applications can be frustrating to write and to use. Spreadsheets can't sort data well, there are lags between mouse clicks and the program's response, graphics look Mickey Mouse rather than lavish. But Google, among the most aggressive cloud computing advocates, is trying to address some of those shortcomings. The company has released experimental but still very much real software that brings in some of the power of the PC, where people often use Web applications. Google Native Client --first released in 2008 but updated with a new version Thursday--is a browser plug-in for securely running computationally intense software downloaded from a Web site. The projects are rough around the edges, to say the least.
"There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can't do in Web apps. So what actually could be done with the technology if it matures enough for mainstream use? "It's easy to run native code on computers. Lex / Technology, media & telecoms - Cloud computing. Cold reality has a habit of intruding. The latest fad to feel its chill is the concept of “the cloud”, one embraced by the technology sector. On Monday IBM listed cloud computing as one of its three key initiatives for growth. Cisco, which dominates networking equipment, has been tempted by the prospects to move into making servers. Struggling PC maker Dell, meanwhile, aims to join Amazon in providing cloud-based services.
Nailing down the cloud is difficult because its definition has been expanded to include everything companies wish to sell. But broadly, it entails a business outsourcing technology hardware to a third party and then paying according to usage. Outsourcing may be too expensive for most large corporations, however. That may miss the point. To e-mail the Lex team confidentially click hereORTo post public comments click here. Cloud computing.