Send in the Cloud -- Both Sides Now

with apologies to Stephen Sondheim, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins

Send in the Cloud
[a parody of parts of "Send in the Clowns"
from A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim]

[Inspired by the keynote presentation at Google I/O]

This is the pitch:
How will we share?
Me here at last on the roof,
You in mid-air.
Send in the Cloud.

Don't you love farce?
My fault, I fear.
I thought that you got what I sent;
Sorry, my dear.
But where is the Cloud?
We must have the Cloud.
Quick, send in the Cloud.

Is there a glitch?
Let's try it here.
Must get the timing just right
For the premier.
But where is the Cloud?
Quick, send in the Cloud.
Don't bother, it's here.

Both Sides Now
[a parody of part of "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell]

Rows and racks and rooms of cores
All spending time on virtu'l wars.
And here and there are online stores.
I've viewed the Cloud that way.

But now it's called The Next Big Thing.
Redundant storage, file sharing,
All the computing pow'r it brings:
The Cloud is now The Way.

I've seen the Cloud from both sides now:
From in and out, and still, somehow,
All the illusion I recall.
It's just a network after all.

Op Codes? We don't need no stinking Op Codes!

If a computer (or computer language) can do anything that any other computer (or computer language) -- given enough time and storage --  it is said to be Turing complete.

A computer can be Turing complete even if it has only one type of operation.  The most common operation used to illustrate this is 'subtract the value at address B from the value at address A replacing the value at address A with the result of the subtraction and branch to the instruction at address C if the result is negative or zero'.

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Alan M. Turing: How to Succeed in Building a Machine That Won a War Without Really Thinking

June 23, 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the pioneers of computer science and the design of computers.

Alan M. Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) was a British mathematician and cryptanalyst who developed many of the foundations of computer science and artificial intelligence.  His name has been given to a means of determining whether a machine is intelligent and to a theoretical model for determining whether a mathematical function can be computed.  His work on codebreaking machines helped the Allies win World War II.  He designed one of the first general-purpose stored-program computers.

In 1952, Turing was arrested and convicted of engaging in a homosexual act and underwent chemical castration.  On June 8, 1954 he was found dead of cyanide poisoning and an inquest decided that it was suicide, although his mother believed that it was an accident with chemicals he was working with that contained cyanide.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presents the A. M. Turing Award annually since 1966.  The award is considered the most prestigious in the field of computer science and the equivalent of the Nobel Prize.  The recipient of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award is Judea Pearl.