Here is my best explanation:
Traditionally, all of your data and programs and games are on your hard drive. The speed of your PC is determined by the types of components in it. The speed of the internet is a separate entity, and is determined by your internet service provider. A website is made with traditional web languages, and isn’t really dependent on your components for speed, more so your service provider. All of the website’s data is stored on a “server” which sends data to any computer that asks. So when you go to Facebook, your computer requests the home page picture and data, and the server responds with the logo, picture, login box, etc.
With cloud computing, everything is stored on the server. There are varying degrees. I will group these into three: basic, midsize, and fullscale. With basic cloud computing, your programs/games are still on your computer locally but you have the option to put your files somewhere else: on another company’s servers. With midsize cloud computing, your system software is on your computer, but all of your application software for movies and basic games is on the server, and streamed in. This is becoming more common with the advent of WebGL. Fullscale is when your computer is not a computer, just a screen with an internet connection. The screen connects to the server, and you use its hardware, it connects to websites for you, and you don’t have to worry about anything, because you have an account. This will be bad for several reasons, but I’ll put that soapbox on a blog somewhere, not add 100 lines to an already complex answer.
I hope I answered your question. This is the EXACT same with phones. I bet I just raised your IQ by a point.
EDIT: Thank you Cronin, but I was not insulting their intelligence. I should have rather said increased their pool of knowledge by 1 mana. And me calling myself a PC builder is not a “badge of honor” as you put it, but rather me saying that computers in general are a hobby of mine, so I am answering the question to the best of my ability.
Cronin January 20, 2013
Yosemite … there’s no need to insult the poster’s intelligence. “PC builder”… really, what a badge of honor,.
Cloud computing is just internet based services (both free and paid)… it’s that simple.
Meklar January 20, 2013
Traditionally, a computational task would be done by the specific machine that was told to do it. However, in recent times our machines and communication networks have become so powerful, we find we can sometimes do tasks more efficiently by abandoning that traditional idea. Cloud computing is when the computational task is put in a more abstract form that can be understood by software on multiple machines, and those machines automatically find a machine that isn’t doing very much work and give the task to it, or they split the task up into small chunks and give different chunks to different machines and then connect all the parts of the result back together. So rather than giving a task to a specific machine, we can just send the task ‘into the cloud’ and the network of machines figure out an efficient way to get it done and send the result back to us.
With the traditional model, a corporation that needed computational tasks done would have to own all its own machines and specifically give them the tasks. This is inefficient because, although you need enough machines to fairly quickly finish even the biggest task you might have to do, at times when you have no big task the machines just sit around doing nothing, which represents a waste of money. With cloud computing, a corporation can send all their tasks to a cloud owned by somebody else who specializes in maintaining clouds, and the cloud owner can charge them only for the time they actually use on those machines, and the rest of the time those same machines can be doing another task for another customer. This means that all the tasks are being done with less machine time (and thus, less money) being wasted.
Here is my best explanation:
Traditionally, all of your data and programs and games are on your hard drive. The speed of your PC is determined by the types of components in it. The speed of the internet is a separate entity, and is determined by your internet service provider. A website is made with traditional web languages, and isn’t really dependent on your components for speed, more so your service provider. All of the website’s data is stored on a “server” which sends data to any computer that asks. So when you go to Facebook, your computer requests the home page picture and data, and the server responds with the logo, picture, login box, etc.
With cloud computing, everything is stored on the server. There are varying degrees. I will group these into three: basic, midsize, and fullscale. With basic cloud computing, your programs/games are still on your computer locally but you have the option to put your files somewhere else: on another company’s servers. With midsize cloud computing, your system software is on your computer, but all of your application software for movies and basic games is on the server, and streamed in. This is becoming more common with the advent of WebGL. Fullscale is when your computer is not a computer, just a screen with an internet connection. The screen connects to the server, and you use its hardware, it connects to websites for you, and you don’t have to worry about anything, because you have an account. This will be bad for several reasons, but I’ll put that soapbox on a blog somewhere, not add 100 lines to an already complex answer.
I hope I answered your question. This is the EXACT same with phones. I bet I just raised your IQ by a point.
EDIT: Thank you Cronin, but I was not insulting their intelligence. I should have rather said increased their pool of knowledge by 1 mana. And me calling myself a PC builder is not a “badge of honor” as you put it, but rather me saying that computers in general are a hobby of mine, so I am answering the question to the best of my ability.
Yosemite … there’s no need to insult the poster’s intelligence. “PC builder”… really, what a badge of honor,.
Cloud computing is just internet based services (both free and paid)… it’s that simple.
Traditionally, a computational task would be done by the specific machine that was told to do it. However, in recent times our machines and communication networks have become so powerful, we find we can sometimes do tasks more efficiently by abandoning that traditional idea. Cloud computing is when the computational task is put in a more abstract form that can be understood by software on multiple machines, and those machines automatically find a machine that isn’t doing very much work and give the task to it, or they split the task up into small chunks and give different chunks to different machines and then connect all the parts of the result back together. So rather than giving a task to a specific machine, we can just send the task ‘into the cloud’ and the network of machines figure out an efficient way to get it done and send the result back to us.
With the traditional model, a corporation that needed computational tasks done would have to own all its own machines and specifically give them the tasks. This is inefficient because, although you need enough machines to fairly quickly finish even the biggest task you might have to do, at times when you have no big task the machines just sit around doing nothing, which represents a waste of money. With cloud computing, a corporation can send all their tasks to a cloud owned by somebody else who specializes in maintaining clouds, and the cloud owner can charge them only for the time they actually use on those machines, and the rest of the time those same machines can be doing another task for another customer. This means that all the tasks are being done with less machine time (and thus, less money) being wasted.