cloud computing clarified

after a vigorous discussion at a retreat in the castle yesterday, experts from Xensource (now Citrix) were able to help me understand what Cloud Computing is all about.

Basically, high up in the earth's atmosphere, there are these grey or white amorphous blobs of droplets of water and ice - there are officially ten types of these objects,in the now classic Hamblyn scale, ranging from Linux Nimbus, through Windows 7 Stratus and on to OSX Cumulus and finally down to TinyOS Pryoumulus. Some of these condense on
small intel ice particles, while others appear to be dropets of pure AMD.

The presence of very small particles of silicon in these droplets was made possible by the UC Berkeley research into so-called "smart" "dust", and followon work in Scotland on "speckled" "computing". Originally, it had been envisaged that these arrays would be used for weather prediction - indeed, one large storm grid was run for a while to detect or predict the weather, but then it became clear that self-fulfilling prophesy was the way to go, and the systems were used to control and pre-set ratehr than predict Internet weather.

However, early cloud computing was confusing and difficult to programme - much like the weather, it had a mind of its own, and was prone to chaotic, and even catastrophic
outcomes.

So then along came virtualisation. Now instead of a vast array of different clouds, we can now report that every cloud is controlled via its silver lining.

The wisdom of the Cloud is now commonplace. The layered architecture, with
clouds at ground level providing isolation through fog, while cloud 9 at the highest level presents an ecstatic API to the user, is complete. Many users are no longer at sea when the use the Cloud to access Ocean store services.