Hi Guys, I must be some kind of backward computer user because I have no idea what this "cloud" is and what a "photobucket" is!
I just have a local network with Tb's of hard drives and archive all my writings and photos onto that.
I only use the internet to log onto sites like this and walk stuff between the "net" and my local networks via a mass storage device like a thumb drive or disc..
Nobody tells me if I can or cant have my photos or asks me for any money to store them.
Does anybody else work like this or am I stuck in the 1990's?

Fred.

Never mind Fred, your bloody Genius with electronics!
Clever man !
Pete

Here you go Fred, the whole history of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

In order to easily share photos online via their personal and private 'albums' and also within forums, etc, millions of people use various photo sharing services out there on the web (i.e. "in the cloud"). Some people use them also for permanent storage of their photos and images (I never do, just to share).

Photobucket was one of the earliest such service providers and may also be the largest. These have been free (but you do cop their advertising). And, until now, those services have never charged anyone to share their photos and images outside of their albums, but Photobucket did that essentially without warning and any such shared images now show up as:

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/IfRvRbm.tsYP1_3mDIrOEQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9...

Some of the biggest users are businesses, so their own adverts now suddenly display that crap instead of their product images.

To say that PB scored an massive own goal is an understatement. It's fair enough to charge businesses for providing them with a service, but there are far better ways to go about implementing such things.

Thanks GTC I must crawl out of the cave more often!

After reading the Wiki entry on 'cloud' I cant help but be struck by the disparity between the 'users' creating little universes of their own and the reality; that all of those universes run from MACHINES that are created and tended by a sub class of scientists and technicians.
Remove the science and the techs and the energy to run them and your whole world goes "poof" and disappears.

I see it now with most of our species staring at a tablet or I-thing for half the day doing wonderful things mostly useless ( think facebook twitter ect) without a clue as to the technology in that tablet and when the battery goes flat or a chip dies they are lost!
This cloud concept sounds like a Shangri-La or kibbutz where all is for one and one is for all and that works so well until one entity decides it will be the master of it and take control and you shall all bow before and pay!

I'm old enough to have spanned the 1940's to now and have seen so may dictators and psychotics do this on a small scale, remember the slogan 'first we take the country, next the world', well now its possible via the cloud! Computers were first invented to help the dreamers at universitys work on stuff like getting into space and working out the size of the universe now we cant take a piss without needing an I-phone!

Just look at the state we are in with all manner of systems in our society now controlled by things understood by so few. Check out Melbourne where the trains all grind to a halt because some chip somewhere or worse still some program (probably on the cloud!) hiccups. Have we gone mad?

Welcome to the 'Brave New World'.

Cheers, Fred.

Having been involved with computers, starting on the inside, when an acquaintance blew up its PSU. At a point in time where Switch Mode was rare. (underrated components). And being involved with selling them for a while; It was pretty obvious from day one that leaving data on these things & some of their peripherals like Floppy disks were as equally unreliable.

On that basis I store my stuff on site. Before decent back-ups, in the early day's, any work I did for running a Car Club event, was emailed to another set of computers offsite: They did not need to open them. That was similar to the Cloud etc.concept, in that this is a bush fire vulnerable area, that meant that most data could not be lost, if the computer died, or was destroyed.

Having said that, I do wonder at the reliability and security (vulnerability) of these systems like cloud, especially in the light of the recent events.

The other thing that I see time and a gain and rural NBN & phones are a prime example: Is redundancy. The wireless NBN here is about as reliable as a "two bob watch"; About every six weeks is has a "hissy fit" & dies and that can be for hours.

Naturally with the landline it has a UPS / No break, but they have a time out proportional to load & the size & condition of the batteries. They have replaced ours recently, but that & serious maintenance, was only after someone died during a period of around six weeks, when it operated occasionally.

With NBN here, there is no backup power that has been evident, so in a crisis where the base station looses power, any telephone connected to it is dead.

Some Genius was promoting putting in a UPS / No break in at the customer end? Well I have one of each, one home built. That will keep the radio's (even that they have batteries) going and the computer. A brilliant concept by them, that fails to realise that if the base station, or exchange is dead through no supply, you just have a bunch of non functioning "Shelf Queens" at your end.

There is a big picture here.

The big picture that I can see is lots of time with no Internet connection if last summer is anything to go by. With some state governments closing down coal-fired power stations to impress the Greens and the failing European Union we are going to be in a bit of a conundrum soon.

Of course, with politicians running around pretending they are engineers and the saviours of a planet that isn't in any danger, it is difficult to expect anything else.

The Latte set is not the only problem, had it not been for the Luddite's in the other mob with their anti-nuclear, in the face of us having acres of the stuff needed. We could have Nuclear power like large parts of Europe & all the power we need.

The big picture that I can see is lots of time with no Internet connection if last summer is anything to go by.

The future?

http://www.bikesatwork.com/blog/static/images/pedal-powered-office.jpg

remember the slogan 'first we take the country, next the world', well now its possible via the cloud!

Until quite recently, Google's company motto was "Don't be evil", but that's just what was written on the wall in the foyer. Meanwhile its propeller heads have been surreptitiously reeling us all in like fish on a long line.

Check out Melbourne where the trains all grind to a halt because some chip somewhere or worse still some program (probably on the cloud!) hiccups

It beggars belief that such a system could have a single point of failure. Some people should be made to walk the plank over that debacle.

Has anybody lost their photos on this site yet? That were stored on photobucket,meaning from your posts here on VR

Pete

As I mentioned earlier, my PB-stored avatar image on another forum was replaced with the ransom demand. Let's see how this image goes here:

Image Link

Note that on V-R this is just a link. On other forums such links are automatically rendered as the photo itself.

Hi G,
Gone already!, my photos on this site are still there, but I now have them over at imgur for when they pull the plug. The post I put up today was using only imgur
Pete

Pete, it seems that PB must be working its way through member accounts on some basis (alphabetically?, number of shared links?), as mine were OK until just before I raised the issue here.

Yes , I think you may be right G!
Its a pain in the butt really and a lot of posts will suffer .Most people want bother to upload photos to an old existing post
Pete

I see over night photo bucket has taken all my photos off this site.
Well, I will put them all back on again with Imgur soon as I have the time.

Pete