which makes it a .......... ? Yes David, a verb not a noun. Now everyone lay their heads on their desks and we'll have sleepy time.

Actually, "computing" is a gerund in the sense that the author uses it in the opening sentence of the article, so "cloud computing" is a noun and a gerund.

-- David the Amusingly Pedantic

like Pissing into the Wind is to Urination?

Interesting that someone capable of using FTP and updating a web site is today called a "non-technical" person.

Those are "skills" any 10-year-old can do today. If that's your profession, you might want to get in line behind the buggy whip makers.

Would Gerund Computing be any better? HPC code to take the load off of all of those marketing folks (who brought us the term "inputting") usually tasked with creating new technical terms.

Good grief, that code sample looks awful! And that's even before you realise it's PHP...

Can I suggest that "computing" is a pedund - a special class apt to cause pedantic grammarian arguments over what kind of word it is?

Use the webservers log... or anything that doesn't make it damn near impossible to automate the downloading easily...

EPIC FAIL

I recently started using S3 to backup important files from the dedicated server I administer.

I searched around for a while before deciding the most straightforward method was using some open source software called s3fs. This enables you to have an s3 account mounted as just another directory under Linux. Making backups is now as simple as copying the files to that directory. For added security I also encrypt them before copying.

Your PHP is horrible!

You don't get clouds on the gerund, they're in the air.

Already on.

Misty computing? Fogging the issue?

Too hot for a coat especially for running away.

Sorry lads, the code got a little screwy. I will get Ashlee to fix it. I can also post the full PHP if anyone wants it

I assume that, in future articles, the author will talk about the full scope of Amazon's cloud computing, but in the meantime, my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, is meowing quite discontentedly at the above comments. "Computing", regardless of what English language labels and rules apply to it, is definitely a part of the "cloud", although it's not obvious from this story, which covers only S3, the storage portion of the cloud computing services Amazon provides. You can also use EC2, the computing portion, which allows you to do pretty much anything you can do with your own systems. I don't really understand why the author even continues to use his own.

As an example of pure computing, you could create a virtual machine to calculate the digits of pi, provision one of Amazon's EC2 machines to run it, and just let it go, without storing the digits, or even serving them up to anyone. Amazon will charge you for every hour the machine is assigned to you. S3 is billed by how much data you store, and how much you transfer, in and out. EC2 is connected to S3, such that S3 stores all of your virtual machines, which are booted and executed, by EC2, only when necessary. Data transfer between S3 and EC2 is free. Basically, except maybe for backups, you can run your entire business from Amazon, which is the promise that "cloud computing" delivers, today.

Paris, because she's also clueless about the cloud.

With Apple's recent ME generation product rollout going a bit slow I am sure they could spare a few clouds.

Jim