Bournemouth — Jun 18th 2013

Not to pre-empt the Q&A session scheduled for later, Alan opened the meeting with an answer to an unasked question, explaining the reasoning behind Apple's choice of name for the next incarnation of OSX, "Mavericks" - it involves a Californian beach and a dog apparently.

Mick then took the floor with a talk explaining the principles behind Cloud Computing, starting with a bit of history about how the needs for personal file sharing have developed with the increased use of portable devices such as laptops, iPhones and iPads and the consequent difficulties of keeping information in step.

Although the various cloud services differ in exactly how they work, they all effectively involve the client renting some space on a remote server or servers. Mick pointed out that any imap email service is effectively using the same principle since your messages are kept on the server for you to access from any of your devices. However, whereas e-mail servers often 'push' messages to your devices to alert you to their arrival, other file types stored on cloud servers are generally served by request rather than pushed.

Mick then gave a summary of the workings of several of the cloud services such as Google Drive, Amazon, Dropbox and iCloud. The iCloud service has the additional facility to synchronise not only Apple Mail but also Contacts, Calendars, Notes, Photos and Documents.

The subsequent discussion focussed on both the benefits and pitfalls of Cloud computing. The latter included the potential for generating multiple copies of files, the limitation of ADSL upload speeds (much slower than download) and the uncertainties about security and ownership of data entrusted to the cloud, particularly since the laws governing this will depend on where the servers are, which can be hard to ascertain. It was also noted that, whilst it may be tempting to use free ISP-provided webspace as a 'personal cloud', webspace by its very nature is generally open to the search engine crawlers so should not be regarded as secure, even if you need to login with a password to put anything there.

The meeting closed with a more general Q&A session covering such topics as preferred formats for video clips, the use of FileChute for transfer of movies via Dropbox, the difficulty of carrying over App Store purchases through a change of Apple ID necessitated by switching ISP and even whether it was possible to acquire a domain name accidentally?!

Comments

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Roy Rainford said…

I found it an enlightening session on Cloud Computing followed by interesting discussion. Many thanks Mick for this timely presentation. Also appreciated is the report above giving the main points.

John Surtees said…

Another interesting and enjoyable meeting. On the subject of FileChute, it's not only for the transfer of movies. I use it for transferring any file that is too large to attach to an e-mail. However I have found on occasions, that the recipient may have trouble opening certain file types. But if you put the file into a folder first, then drop that into FileChute, this overcomes the problem.

Trevor Hewson said…

Thanks for the clarification John. The meeting notes are inevitably incomplete, being limited by how much the note taker (in this case Mary and me) can take in, and simultaneously write down, so it would be great to see more people effectively adding to the notes with this type of response.
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