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that commercial about the cloud (Read 858 times)


"run" "2" "eat"

    you know that commercial where the mom is trying to get a family picture, and the family won't cooperate, so she has all these halfway decent pictures she wants to put together, and she says, "to the cloud!" and then magic occurs with the picture editing? what's the deal with that? i mean, is that for real or is it like on CSI where they zoom in on a license plate and wah-lah they get a clear picture even though you know the pixels aren't there and it would never work that way in real life.

    i find the sunshine beckons me to open up the gate and dream and dream ~~robbie williams

    jeffdonahue


      I would have to say it is definitely possible.

       

      About 2 years ago we had a family picture taken by a professional photographer.  there were about 15 of us in the picture so the chances of everyone looking good at one time (especially given that 6 of thos people were 10 or under) was pretty minimal. 

       

      the photographer ended up taking the best picture, but my daughter and nephew both were off - one was making a weird face, the other had their eyes closed.  So he cropped their heads out of one of the other pictures he had taken where they looked good.  Even blowing thsi picture up into a large frame size (probably 12x18 or maybe even bigger), you cant tell that he did it.

       

      Granted, he does that for a living, but it is definitely possible.

      Trent


      Good Bad & The Monkey

        Photoshop has been doing this magic for a couple years now.


        "run" "2" "eat"

          oh, right -- yes. i know a professional or someone with software installed can do this. sorry, maybe i wasn't clear about my question. i'm not exactly asking about that particular piece so much as the whole "to the cloud!" thing. what the hell is the cloud and how does play into her fixing that picture?

          i find the sunshine beckons me to open up the gate and dream and dream ~~robbie williams


          Best Present Ever

            The cloud doesn't necessarily have anything to do with photo editing.  It just means that the software you're using is somewhere out in the innernets, not on your computer's hard drive -- google docs vs word. At least, that's how I understand it.

            MrH


               how does play into her fixing that picture?

               

              It doesn't. This series of commercials are confusing and misleading. The only time the 'cloud'  factors into the whole story is when she mentions Facebook at the end. Everything else is using the power of her PC and not shared internet resources, although she could store her photos online somewhere.

               

              The important message is that you should feel smug about how awesome you are while hating on the rest of your family's inadequacies. Microsoft Windows empowers and enables you to do this.

               

              The commercial  where the couple watches TV from the airport is worse. The technology used there is the opposite of the cloud.

              The process is the goal.

              Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.

              Trent


              Good Bad & The Monkey

                The Cloud is just a fancy name for some server somewhere that stores your data so that you don't have to.  Mobile Me will be doing this today.  Google Docs does this for you.  Dropbox as well.  The Cloud is nothing special, and in reality it is a buncha big hot boxes in a warehouse on the ground somewhere.

                 

                The idea is that eventually you will not really need hard drives, DVD players or installed software.  Everything will be stored and computed elsewhere.  Your device will really just be a portal to all that.

                 

                Blah blah blah.

                MrH


                   

                  Blah blah blah.

                   

                  The conceptual diagram of cloud computing is computers connected to a cloud. That helps a lot.

                  The process is the goal.

                  Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.

                  LedLincoln


                  not bad for mile 25

                    In other words, R2E, connecting the "cloud" to the ability to do amazing photoshopping is essentially bogus.  Maybe they are making the case that you can find applications in the cloud for your use as needed, that you may not have installed locally.


                    "run" "2" "eat"

                      okay, good. the cloud is exactly what i thought it was - places like google docs and dropbox where you can store your stuff and also something like shared processing which is perhaps some of what goes on here, at RA. we are sharing the processing power and the code that eric's built when we use the training log. my training log is in the cloud. right?

                       

                      the cloud is just another way of saying "not local" but all that photo processing the mom is doing is local and she is some kinda photoshop whiz to get such a stellar result.

                       

                      mr h - you said some good stuff there. this especially confirms that windows is the best software to meet my needs:  "The important message is that you should feel smug about how awesome you are while hating on the rest of your family's inadequacies. Microsoft Windows empowers and enables you to do this.

                      i find the sunshine beckons me to open up the gate and dream and dream ~~robbie williams

                        The important message is that you should feel smug about how awesome you are while hating on the rest of your family's inadequacies.

                        I'm trying to get that feeling with the folks who post here, but I can't quite bring it home. Any suggestions?

                        "I want you to pray as if everything depends on it, but I want you to prepare yourself as if everything depends on you."

                        -- Dick LeBeau

                        xor


                          Photoshop has been doing this magic for a couple years now.

                           

                          And the magic has existed in the professional photo world for a lot longer.  My extended family had a group pic taken 1998ish.  Impossible to get everyone looking good, and the photographer did lots of magic to superimpose faces from other shots onto the two bad kids in question.

                           

                          Mind you, apparently the final pic cost my parents a small fortune.  These days it would not.

                           

                          As for "the cloud", this is kinda hilarious. The Borg is always looking for The Big Evil elsewhere to claim that this is the "enemy" and the big competition that might finally cause the collapse to The Borg.  Once upon a time, The Big Evil was netscape.  Not because of their browser, but their master plan of developing a user environment within a browser which would render Windows obsolete.  A lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff would happen "in the cloud".  This was 1996ish.  Then Larry Ellison and Oracle starting talking about "network computing" and how everyone just needed basic computers because everything would happen "in the cloud".  If I recall, this was 1998ish.  I remember thinking that it sounded like a return to dumb terminals and mainframes, circa 1985.

                           

                          Fast forward.

                           

                          What did we get in 2009?  Little basic computers for reading email and getting to the internet. 

                           

                          What do we get in 2011?  The Borg pushing the concept of "the cloud".  Hahahaha.

                           

                          Anyway, peek into the cloud and you will see lots of not-Borg stuff.  Which is fine because the whole concept of "the cloud" is that we end-users don't have to worry or care about that.

                           

                          And NO, despite the fact that netscape went poof and The Borg is now claiming in commercials to own similar space, I am not saying The Borg "won".  Actually, the opposite.  Mostly I just think it is funny that terms are being offered up in 2011 as new and cool that were actually developed and offered up almost 15 years ago by the evil archenemy... and were blown off at the time...

                           

                            ... that being said, I would totally watch the season premier of Celebrity Probation.   In a cloud or otherwise. 

                            MrH


                               

                              mr h - you said some good stuff there. this especially confirms that windows is the best software to meet my needs

                               

                              Then the ad has been a success.

                              The process is the goal.

                              Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.

                                "The cloud" is sort of like the word "minimalist" in running in that it's become so overused for its marketing cache that it is basically meaningless.

                                 

                                Basically cloud computing is the new delivery model for a lot of IT services where the user does not have to know anything about the physical location, configuration or architecture of the underlying platform to be able to take advantage of and even create applications and services.  The cloud takes advantage of virtualization, service oriented architecture principles and lots of standards protocols to deliver services over the web.

                                 

                                It's pretty much the antithesis of everything Microsoft has always been about, as Mr. H and srlopez outlined.  Which makes those "to the cloud" commercials downright comical.

                                 

                                One of the most commercially successful examples (and one I use every day) of cloud computing is Salesforce.com also affectionately known to its millions of users as "SFDC".  It is a cloud based implementation of CRM (and related business applications), which has always been one of the most expensive and difficult to maintain applications in an enterprise.

                                Runners run

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