Appunti per l'esame di Inglese Orale III, libro consigliato 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - John Naughton'

Cloud computing also means that the devices on which people do “computing” don’t have to be PCs

or laptops with specific expensive softwares installed. Nor do they have to worry about having enough

hard-disk storage on their machines.

But even if users of free cloud services are not charged a cent, they are unwittingly paying by

surrendering some of their privacy to the companies that run them. Most consumer cloud services require

you to entrust lots of personal information to their databases—information that can then be sold, in one

form or another, to advertisers and market-research firms. Dave Winer likens services like Facebook to

hamster cages. “They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages,” he writes, “that are designed to keep

the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. It looks great until you realize one day, that

you can’t get out! That’s the whole point of a cage.” So, he warns, “when they say you get to use their

social network for free, look for the hidden price. They’re listening and watching.It’s pretty and colorful and

endlessly fun for you and your human owner.”

For one thing, Facebook asserts the right to use or reuse any of the content that people post on the site.

For another, it profits by not having to create any of this content—it’s all done by the users.

For the computer industry . . . Cloud has implications for hardware manufacturers because it implies a

shift in the demand for personal computers—away from the complex, sophisticated desktops and laptops

toward simpler devices that have less-powerful processors, and different interfaces. When the switch to

cloud services first began, it was widely believed that Microsoft Office would be threatened, but some

people would still continue to use it, because Microsoft Office suite is so embedded in the workflow of so

many organizations that they would find it difficult to switch to another document-processing technology.

For companies that make expensive, powerful, computing-intensive, hard-to-learn programs for

creating and editing graphics, photographs, and movies, the threat of cloud-based alternatives seems

slight. Just as nobody in her right mind would want to revise a complex Word document on a mobile phone.

For mainstream businesses . . . Cloud computing has the potential to be very disruptive to

established companies and markets (bookselling, music…). Hagel and Seely Brown see the evolution of

cloud computing as a four-stage progression: (?)

For the environment . . . Cloud computing is only possible because of huge “server farms” or data

centers like the one we’ve just visited. Their PCs are the machines on which our e-mails, photographs,

YouTube videos, documents, Facebook profiles, and personal data are stored and processed.

Companies with comparable estates of server farms include Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, and

Amazon.

The environmental effects of ICT has two main components: the resources used, and emissions

produced: computers are much more energy-intensive than many other products we use in daily life. The

fossil fuels used to produce a computer are about nine times its weight. By comparison, the amount of

fossil fuels needed to produce an automobile or refrigerator is around twice their weights.” It was revealed

in 2007 that the computing industry is responsible for two percent of all the CO2 released into the

atmosphere.

On the other hand, even if cloud computing increases dramatically, there are powerful incentives for

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo! et al to reduce their carbon footprints. One is the sheer cost of

the energy required to power and cool data centers. Another incentive may come from new environmental

taxes. On the other side, disincentives may come from public reluctance to accept such huge industrial

facilities in their neighborhoods.

In 2009 a young physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, claimed that a typical Google search generates somewhere

between 5 and 10 grams of carbon dioxide. Google objected to Wissner-Gross’s estimate because his

concept of a “typical Google search” involved several attempts to find a desired result. The company

claimed that a one-hit Google search taking less than a second produces about 0.2 grams of carbon

dioxide. Nicholas Carr piled into the debate by claiming that maintaining an avatar on the virtual reality site

Second Life consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.

And over the horizon?

This is where cloud computing looks really interesting, because it lowers the barriers to entry for

innovators.

- Imagine a start-up with a good idea for a new kind of web service. In the old days they’d have to persuade

investors to fund a big enough network of servers to meet the anticipated demand, by signing up to use

Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services

- important national newspaper has made a major strategic decision. It’s going to scan its entire archive and

make it available online as PDFs. So he uses his personal credit card to book virtual machines on

Amazon’s Cloud, uploads the data—and the entire job is completed in twenty-four hours.

7. The Web Is Evolving

What exactly is the Web?

Here are two definitions:

- A computer network consisting of a collection of Internet sites that offer text, graphics, sound and

animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol.

- The set of all information accessible using computers and networking, each unit of information identified

by a URI.

For most of us, a working definition of the Web would say something like this: the World Wide Web is a vast

store of online information in the form of “pages” of varying sizes that are connected to one another via

clickable links. It implies that the basic elements are static “pages” that are stored on a computer

somewhere, but many such pages don’t exist until you click on the link. Their contents are assembled on

the fly by the server before it is dispatched to you. The definition also implies that all you do with the page is

passively to view it, but in fact you can also interact with it. And the Web page can respond to your input.

That’s why, if you don’t mark the box confirming that you have read and understood Ryanair’s terms and

conditions, the page will pop up a dialog box telling you that you cannot proceed.

The Web has been through two major geological eras—Web 1.0 and Web 2.0—and is now slowly moving

toward a third—Web 3.0.

The Web has three key components:

- A set of digital resources that are stored on Internet-connected computers across the world.

- Protocols that provide: (1) a standard way of assigning a unique, machine-readable address to each

resource; (2) a mark-up language for structuring the resource in a way that enables it to be accurately

rendered by browsers; and (3) conventions for conducting interactions between computers concerning the

transfer of web pages.

- Software for serving resources on demand, and for rendering them when they arrive at their destinations.

Vital Statistics: How big is the Web? Google claimed that its software had identified one trillion

unique URLs. Secondly, and more important, there’s the fact that the Web is like an iceberg in that the

visible part of it—the part that is accessible to search engines—may well be the smallest bit. We don’t know

the relative proportions of the visible and invisible parts because the “darkweb”—the part that search

engines cannot reach—is made up of resources that are locked away behind corporate firewalls or media

“paywalls,”.

The Web’s Geological Eras

Web 1.0

The Web was originally conceived as a way of sharing information among particle physicists who were

scattered across the world. The design was for a system that would make it possible to format these

documents in a standardized way, publish them online, and make them easy to access. The original design

was based on two key concepts. The first was the notion of hypertext— that allowed a computer user to

click on a spot in a document that would then take them to a defined place in another document. The

second underlying concept was that the Web should run on what computer scientists call a “client-server”

model. The client in this case was a program called a “browser,” which would connect to servers and

request web pages stored on their disks.

Pages were formatted using a special markup language called HTML. Finally, communications

between client and server were regulated by HTTP, a special Internet protocol (that is, a set of

conventions).

Given that it was intended as a system for academic researchers, the early Web didn’t make provisions

for images, for example. And it was a one-way, read-only medium with no mechanism for enabling people

to interact with web pages.

From 1993 onward there was a steady accretion of innovative technologies designed to expand e-

commerce, which desperately needed to transform the Web into a medium that facilitated transactions.

HTTP was not secure enough: in order to make transactions possible, were used cookies—small,

hidden text files that websites deposited on users’ computers, enabling a site’s operators to detect whether

a visitor was a new arrival or a repeat customer, what their preferences were, and so on.

Insecurity was addressed by the development of HTTPS, a secure version of the HTTP protocol that

encrypted all communications between browser and server. Capabilities were added by specialized add-on

programs (called plug-ins) like Adobe’s Flash, which enabled them to handle audio and video and other

kinds of files.

JavaScript—a programming language that enabled site operators to embed small programs in web pages

that can be run within the browser that is displaying them. For example, the page can pop up a window in

response to something that the user does; or it can check the validity of what is typed into a web form—so

that if you accidentally specify a return date for a flight that is earlier than the departure date, then the web

page can alert you to the error.

From 1995 onward, the Web entered a period of explosive growth that persuaded Wall Street that there

was serious money to be made from investing in so-called dot-coms.

Web 2.0

Web evolved from Web 1.0 at a furious pace under the combined pressures of commerce, software

development, entrepreneurship, increasing bandwidth, and a vast growth in the Internet-using population.

Sometime in 2004 the Web 2.0 was born.

The features of the surviving Web 1.0 enterprises and the new ones:

(1) Harnessing collective intelligence: The first, and most important, characteristic is that they had all

embraced the power of the Web to harness collective intelligence. Amazon sells the same products as

competitors like BarnesAndNoble.com, but Amazon has made a science of user engagement: they have an

order of magnitude more user reviews, invitat