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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I have long been amused by this — and it shows the dominance of marketing.

> Of course, there's only so many ways to draw a cloud, right?

Well into the early ‘00s I would draw the ‘cloud’ (typically on a white board) the way it appeared in the early TCP papers (the origin of the term): a more vaguely symmetrical or “round” shape, not something with a sharp straight bottom. A “dust cloud”, if you will, that obscured its inner workings.

But of course once they heard engineers use that words, marketers misunderstood the metaphor, drew a cumulus cloud, and ran with it. And now we have a metaphor that doesn’t actually mean anything. As usual.

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I actually think the cumulus cloud makes more sense for The Cloud™. The TCP model was describing a peer-to-peer model with the "cloud" as just an intermediary that carried your packets around, but in the model used by Cloud™ services, it's an omnipresent eternal amorphous entity to which the puny clients report and from which they receive data. Other peers, if they exist in the service at all, communicate only in a form mediated by The Cloud™.

> a metaphor that doesn’t actually mean anything. As usual.

It is no longer a metaphor. Like the save icon, It is an idiom or symbol: a metaphor that has kicked the bucket. You can argue[1] that we shouldn't use idioms if we've forgotten what they originally refer to. In the case of "kick the bucket", you'd be right. It would be clearer and more accessible to just say "died". Few people have the sort of visceral memory of an animal being tied up in a bucket[2] and thrashing around that gives the phrase its extra punch. In the case of the save icon, we have no real widely-understood alternative. In the case of the cloud, the same is true. The danger is reinforcing a sense of understanding where there is none--but I'm not sure there is a misunderstanding here.

[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

[2] a type of butchers frame

I assumed (forgive the macabre topic) that "kicking the bucket" referred to the action of kicking over the bucket you are standing on in order to hang yourself.

I wonder if Mr. Safire has written about this.

You’re missing the point. Clearly this is proof Star Trek and nearly all scifi have had it right: evolution always produces a hominid form with 2 legs/arms as dominant life forms. /s

just to nitpick: in star trek it's not evolution, most humanoid races have a shared origin http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Humanoid :)

That was a good episode too!

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