Mr. Bezos Goes To Washington 27
theodp writes "TechFlash takes a look at Amazon's evolving government cloud strategy, reporting that the company is quietly building an operation in the D.C. area ('Amazon Government Solutions') as it aims to become a key technology provider to federal and state governments and the US military. According to Input, the federal government market for cloud services is projected to grow to $800 million by 2013, and the state and local cloud market is expected to reach $635 million by that year."
Just what government spending needs (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't forget the infinitely deep credit card known as the Federal Reserve -- that just keeps 'printing' more money by entering numbers with more zeros after them into a computer terminal deep in the bowls of the Eccles building.
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I was under the impression that they had to make a virgin sacrifice or something? (female virgin)
All they gotta do is enter some more zeros at a terminal? They don't even need any one's just some crummy Zero's?? DAMN I'm really surprised they don't do it more often... in fact.. i wonder if I can do this at my local bank....
anyone know?
ae
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One click pwnage?
It is criminally incompetent for government to depend on a private entity for computing needs. Even for the 'unclassified' data that still allows to much access to the internal workings of government. It allows too much access to citizens private data. It allows too much dependence on a single source supplier and we have too damn many of those where there is zero competition and massive amounts of fraud and abuse. Single source suppliers are companies that have a product no one else can mak
Recession (Score:1)
Yes I just made that number up.
So... What happens when they outsource to China? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all just a cloud, and it'd be cheaper to host the servers and development teams in China.
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and it's faster, because they don't have to go through China's firewall to access the data...
Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China (Score:2)
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Ellison is vidicated 20 years later (Score:5, Informative)
Larry Ellison used to spout off that PCs were ultimately doomed. That the Internet would allow for hosted services and remote computing power and our local computers would merely be thin clients hosting the view portion of the application.
Yet this concept never truly took off. Instead of personal computers getting lighter and thinner, they got bigger and more featureful. The exact opposite of Ellison's prognostications.
Businessweek had an article in 1996 describing the move we are seeing today to "cloud" services.
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/26/b34813.htm [businessweek.com]
And the ones who will reap the profits are still the server-side service providers. Netscape is gone, now there is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Sun still lives on as part of Ellison's own network computing powerhouse Oracle. If someone could monetize a server-worthy version of Linux, there would be massive profits for that company as well.
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Yes just one more reason to take off work if the internet goes down... I think this whole cloud stuff is a good idea if run on a local server...
Over the internet? Are we really THAT insane?
ae
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Over the internet? Are we really THAT insane?
Yes, we are. Large organizations (both private and public) are already sufficiently dependent on the internet even without the Cloud that if the 'net goes down, they're in deep trouble. Adding some Cloud to that doesn't change very much.
Of course, there's both down sides and up sides to this. The big downers are that it is potentially more expensive and you're not in control. The big up sides are that it relieves pressure on your own data center, and it's easier to trace service costs back to particular wor
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Yes, we are. Large organizations (both private and public) are already sufficiently dependent on the internet even without the Cloud
Well then Gee lets hope no one ever figures out they can blow up 4 or 5 buildings to totally disable our entire economy...
BOSS: "Why aren't you WORKING Jeb!"
JEB: "Sorry sir, someone blew up the internet.. I can't type up that To-DO list you needed."
BOSS: "Can't you just use paper?"
JEB: "No sir, remember when the board decided to go totally paperless last fall?"
BOSS: "No... I honestly never pay attention in those meetings."
JEB: "O ok... well then you should know they also gave me a raise and access
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Having applications hosted over the network makes things subjectively different, however. If I have local copies of my application, I'll be able to work locally with whatever data I have while I wait for the Internet connection to be restored.
If the application is hosted on the Internet, however, all work stops when the 'net connection goes down. The option of working locally for a while isn't there.
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We're probably only a generation away before people own web-enabled smart phones instead of laptops and desktops. Us old timers aren't going to give up our gear, but in the future it might be ideal for average folk who just want to use the internet to communicate, shop, pay bills, read things and watch videos to migrate to a smartphone-like device.
Basically when the MySpace generation have kids, and those kids are old enough to start owning and operating electronics I think we'll see the shift.
His patent covers one choice voting ... (Score:2)
In two hundred years time the real reason behind the USA's multi-candidate proportional voting system will be forgotten ...
Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud market? They really mean VPS market. 'Cause that's all these "cloud computers" are today, quickly instantiated virtual private servers.
No service yet gives you the single endlessly expandable and distributed server instance. You still set up small servers and implement your own distributed application model, no different then buying multiple pieces of hardware. So far the "cloud" is all marketing.
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Doesn't Google App Engine give you something like that?
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