IT IS ENGLISH BLOG

This post is about mCloud, the Morph Cloud,  not McLoud, the noisy Scotsman!

Seriously – the mCloud On-Demand Community from Morphlabs is a cloud management platform that works with Amazon’s EC2 cloud service:

I discovered this site because MJ Dianne Camilon from Morph Labs kindly linked to my Cloud post:   This generated lots of nice traffic to my blog, and all bloggers know links like that are like gold.  So thanks Dianne!  I remember really enjoying writing my Cloud post though I know I am definitely a Beginner to Cloud Computing and classified myself as such in the mCloud community.

My introduction to the community has been very friendly with Dianne and also Ruel Masalta, both from Morph Labs, befriending me.  Ruel has a very interesting post on Cloud Terminology which I recommend readers of the IT IS ENGLISH blog to check out:   (However, to get into the community and also to this link you will have to sign up, which involves the usual divulgence of details.)

Ruel attributes much of the work on this terminology to Margaret Rouse, a technical writer and published author of Techtarget.com.    I notice she picks up the Rolling Stones theme that I featured in my original Cloud post: “Have you ever wanted to make up a word? Now’s the time. Just make sure it has something to do with a cloud. Play a little Rolling Stones and get those neurons firing (Hey, hey, hey, hey — get off of my cloud).”

A Morph Cloud could be a cloud for elastic computing, or it could be a cloud for an Avatar morph to rest on.   Look at the Avatar Neytiri Morph from the movie Avatar.  It’s absolutely amazing.  You really see how a real actress morphs into a strange hybrid creature, as wonderful as any from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

A noisy Scotsman can be demanding, especially at Hogmanay, and especially if there is whisky in his breath; he might even imagine his shortbread was elastic or morphing into a black bun!  But then I suppose his brain would be clouded too.   ”Hey, hey, hey, hey — get off”, he might say, or he might just float away on cloud nine.

ETYM

Cloud – see previous post

Morph is from the Greek morphe meaning shape or form

Morpheus – Ovid’s name for the God of dreams, the son of sleep (OED)

“The Web as a Dictionary”

http://www.linguee.com/

Another step on the route towards the redundant translator, I fear.  However, I can’t avoid being impressed by the clever software behind this site.  Check it out!

It will not automate your translation, nor even a normally complex sentence, but it will give you in context translations on the web for many of the words or phrase you are interested in.  You can check out the context too by clicking on a link.

Must rush – I have a translation waiting!

ETYM

Lingo – language, jargon etc.

Possibly elements of “Guess” or “gee” being implied here too.

The New Scientist has an article entitled “Blingtronics: Diamonds are a geek’s best friend”.  There you will enter a “nano-world” where everything is reduced to a “nanoscale“.  We are told that ultrathin diamond is capable of thermionic emission, and “nano-diamonds” could offer an alternative to the silicon circuitry used in microchips.  However, it will be years before “nano-bling” will be used to build an optical computer.  In the meantime there are moves to make “blingtronics wearable”, by embedding electronics systems within clothing. We are told that “there’s a bright future for electronics made using gold, silver and diamonds”.”  

There is lots of interest in this article on the web, but most of it just links to or quotes the article.  As I was browsing these links I came across one that referred to a Chinese website called Blingblingtronics.

Wikipedia has an article on the word Bling-bling, which it says refers to flashy or elaborate jewelry etc. that may be “carried, worn or installed”.  It says that “in linguistic terms, bling is an ideophone  intended to evoke the “sound” of light hitting silver, platinum, or diamonds”.

The Urban Dictionary gives some colorful definitions of  ”Bling bling“, which is seen as either a noun or a verb.  As a verb it can be “ the act of sporting jewelry of a highly extravagant gaudy nature”.  It is often associated with hip-hop artists and ghetto culture.

ETYM

Blingtronics = Bling plus (elec) tronics.

Electric bling, as in flash electronic jewelry.

Computing Cloud

Cloud Computing

Internet Cloud

The Cloud is the name that is given to the amorphous entity of binary digits, not rain drops, that hovers in the global atmosphere, that our economies and social interactions are increasingly dependent on, and that touches down from time to time to earth at industrial sized server farms that are starting to pose a threat to the global climate.

This week the Economist has both a full article and a leader on the subject of the energy guzzling Computing Cloud: Down on the Server Farm These global entities are run by large internet companies in huge warehouses, some as big as several football pitches. “These data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.” The article refers to the place “where the cloud touches down”. The servers on these farms are so numerous and powerful that as much power may be required for cooling the computers as for the actual data crunching. It concludes: ‘In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.’ For the Economist Leader on the topic see: Buy our stuff, save the planet

Wikipedia tells us that the term “cloud computing” “derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustration of a cloud”. “The architecture behind cloud computing is a massive network of “cloud servers” interconnected as if in a grid running in parallel, sometimes using the technique of virtualization to maximize the utilization of the computing power available per server.” It states that it is not the same as the business model of “Software as a Service”.

Alex Barnett in his blog gives some rather more people friendly explanations, as for instance the tentative, “maybe it’s more like one giant thought-bubble in the sky?”, along with pretty pictures and some interesting links.

One of these links leads to an article called The Internet Cloud by Jessie Holliday Scanlon and Brad Wieners from Wired magazine. They use wonderful phrases like “the great cloud of unknowing has many disciples” and they discuss the reasons for the cloud being the main icon for representing the net, seemingly because it hides a lack of understanding about, or ability to explain, the inner workings, and it has no clear boundaries: ‘We always drew networks as amoeba-like things because they had no fixed topology and typically covered varying geographic areas,” says Vint Cerf, cocreator of TCP/IP, the language of networked computers. In short, no one needs to know the exact route their data will take to get from point to point. Everything is fine as long as it comes out of the cloud at the correct address.’

Creative Conclusion:
The Cloud is a giant thought bubble in the sky, with more thoughts even than Dilbert.
The Cloud is a vast grid of server farms that are themselves vast collections of data centres.
The Cloud is Software as a Service on the net as well as Software that is not a Service on the net.
The Cloud is trillions of millions of billions of bits zooming around like an infinite swarm of bees in the great bit dump in the sky.
The Cloud is like a traditional cloud – it has an impact on the environment. It may serve us well, with gentle rain, or it may cause a deluge that may drown us all.
The Cloud is the internet energy guzzler that far from being a green technology may cause climate change by the vast amounts of power it consumes.

My mind Clouds over and I ask these Questions:
Does Humanity have its head in the Clouds?
Is this the new the Cloud on the Horizon?

ETYM

Traditional Cloud (water vapor)
Mushroom Cloud (nuclear explosions)
Electron Cloud (the atom)
Information Cloud, Info Cloud (mobile communications)
Tag Cloud (social software)

As the the Rolling Stones sang way back in the sixties:
“Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.”

Apologies for absence – I’ve been off on my own cloud!