computoman

Many people will disagree with me when I say the cloud is just a server. Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid, but that is what it really boils down to it is a machine or set of machines providing services over the web. Certainly you can argue that cloud can provide infrastructure, platform, and the traditional application services. Talked about some of these services in earlier articles. However the internet is a network of systems that can be clearly defined. In the systems on the network can be described sort of like a road map or a set of telephone lines connected like below. It may not be important exactly how they are put together, except that we know they are there. To know who is where either by what is known as a web address or an ipaddress (sort of phone number) allows you to access part of the cloud that you wish to connect to. It is impossible to know every phone number or ipaddress by heart, so the internet has a built in phonebook known as a Domain name s...

Many people will disagree with me when I say the cloud is just a server. Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid, but that is what it really boils down to it is a machine or set of machines providing services over the web. Certainly you can argue that cloud can provide infrastructure, platform, and the traditional application services. Talked about some of these services in earlier articles. However the internet is a network of systems that can be clearly defined. In the systems on the network can be described sort of like a road map or a set of telephone lines connected like below. It may not be important exactly how they are put together, except that we know they are there. To know who is where either by what is known as a web address or an ipaddress (sort of phone number) allows you to access part of the cloud that you wish to connect to. It is impossible to know every phone number or ipaddress by heart, so the internet has a built in phonebook known as...

Handhelds are really nice, but you get away from the traditional desktop we are all familiar with.  Some people have coined the icon based tablet interfaces as being made by Fisher-Price (a toy manufacturer).  Also too, people are wanting to lower the system requirements for computers being used primarily as terminals. One way to do that is to only have the basic operating system on the machine with just the browser as a single application. How useful is that?  You can use a web server to dole out applications as I  indicated in a previous article. You now have operating systems that work from the web. You can push out desktop operating systems  based on the traditional commercial software, but that gets into to some real heavy use. That requires a lot of heavy lifting (i.e. system resources). Now people are trending towards native web based operating systems that can be doled out with just a web server. Traditional virtual machine servers become less a neces...

One of my special projects is to help keep older computer equipment viable. This can be especially important for those who are less privileged.  Most people have heard of the "Iron Chef" TV shows where chefs are challenged with ingredients and limited equipment to prepare a meal for the guests. Thinking in that vein, why not sort of combine the two, but without a time limit per se. Your goal is to make a networkable pentium one computer act as a home automation controller. You will be using and Intel Pentium I system that has a floppy drive, 3com network interface card, and a two gig hard drive. You will get to use a monitor just long enough to set up the system. You also get a bootable dos disk with the system plus, bootable dos wattcp disk (with the tcpip stack), and two blank floppies.. You will also have free access to the internet from another system (using Linux of course or another os if you must). You get no other software. (Hint. Hint. internet access.) We nee...