When I wrote the recent blog ‘Will no one rid me of this LibreOffice Writer ‘suggestion’ rubbish?’, a thought had floated through my mind that I had deliberately ‘abused’ Henry II’s (attributed) question once before. Knowing that this famous line has been deliberately misquoted already by many others, I dismissed the thought. However, tonight, whilst trolling through some ‘old’ stuff on my local copy of a one-time blog of mine ‘joebrown.org.uk’ I came across it:

Goodbye, Blue Sky Thinking – Hello, Cloud Computing?

My observation went on to say: ‘I tease, of course. There are now so many levels of abstraction between the software developer and the actual hardware, that it makes sense for sales buffs and techno-ignorant managers to use terminology they feel comfortable with. However, I feel that in the case of ‘Cloud Computing’, the term only serves to obfuscate, rather than enlighten. Remember – issues get ‘clouded’, there are ‘clouds of anger’, etc., etc.

So the tools we will use will be located on a server on the Internet – there now, that wasn’t too hard was it? (Yeah – but it ain’t a sexy soundbite I hear you say.)‘

The article (published in 2010) went on to demonstrate an example thus: ‘mbed is down for scheduled maintenance’
Things didn’t get much better in the UK, but were worse, much worse on my move to Portugal in 2012. It is only NOW in 2024, that I have access to ‘fibre’ broadband, having put up with ADSL, satellite, et al – mostly useless for too damn long.
By the way, both connectable.org.uk and joebrown.org.uk are (mostly) on the ‘wayback‘ machine. I say ‘mostly’ because there are sections and pictures missing in several places – don’t blame wayback, blame one.com for the ‘cavalier’ attitude they had to folks data.

Should anyone want ‘clarity’ or info on articles, then contact me via a ‘comment’ form.
I have ‘local’ copies of both websites running on one of my own servers.
Please be aware that these comprise a huge amount of work, at the time both websites were very popular.