Hey guys, it's been awhile since you've heard from the Angry Old Fat Man Mid-Week Update (AOFM-MWU), so I decided to talk some nerd-talk for y'all. That doesn't mean you should expect more from me, though, got it? I'm not the big-shot writer here with all them thar fancy deegrees and money-makin' books and whatnot, aight?

So the big talk in nerd circles is THE CLOUD. Whoopty-damn-do, THE CLOUD. Microsoft started talking about it first, with their stupid advertisements making it look like THE CLOUD was some kinda Bat Cave that could turn you into a multitasking genius with godlike superpowers.

Yeah, right. This is the same Microsoft that decided the best way to get everybody to buy their crappy Vista operating system was to pay Jerry Seinfeld several dumptrucks full of money to goof around on camera with Bill Gates.

But now some real tech companies (read: Apple) are starting to talk about THE CLOUD, and people of course are taking notice and asking really tough questions, like...

WHAT THE %@$# IS THE CLOUD?

Here's the funny thing - THE CLOUD comes from the same place "then a miracle occurs" came from in the following cartoon:

Basically, it's a place on a network diagram where the Internet is supposed to go. You can't really draw the Internet, so network dweebs took to drawing a cloud where your network connection went into a fuzzy, mysterious blank nowhere and possibly connected (albeit in a strange, fluffy way) to other portions of a known network.

So allow me to show you the essence of THE CLOUD using my formidable MS Paint skizzles:

THE CLOUD is essentially the Internet. So "cloud computing" is essentially using computers on the Internet (IOW, servers) to do what you used to do on your own computer.

The companies touting the wonders of THE CLOUD will tell you all the wonderful things it can do for you, like allow you to have access to your data (like spreadsheets, e-books, music, videos, and pictures of your sweet little Mr. Whiskers) from any computer in the world and keep your data safeguarded from hardware failures, and things like that.

They don't tell you that they're just going back to a very old model of computing to safeguard their products from piracy.

This computing model is straight from the 70s and 80s - centralized, "dumb terminal" computing. It's the way computer mainframes do things. You have a screen and a keyboard, but all the computer brains are actually far away and all you're seeing on your screen is what's being sent down the wire to it.

The only differences are the size of the wire, the prettiness of the pictures on the screen, sounds, and a mouse that Mr. Whiskers doesn't care about. And one more difference: you're now paying for it all instead of the greedy megacorporation you happened to have worked for in the 60s or 70s.

Welcome to the 21st Century. The more things change, the more they stay exactly the damned same.