It's "Cloudy" in Seattle

This summer, Seattle's weather has been cloudy and cold. Luckily, "cloud" has another meaning. For those of you wondering, what "cloudy" means, Eric Nilsson, from Insilicos, has a great article in Xconomy on Seattle and cloud computing. A quick description of cloud computing would is to think of computer hardware, that is, the servers and data centers, as "utilities." Where other utilities like the Rocky Reach Dam produce and sell electricity, cloud utilities sell computing power. How they sell it is the distinguishing piece. I think this quote from the article describes it best:

Microsoft's cloud is exactly like your current Windows computer, except you never have to install new software; Amazon's cloud is whatever you want it to be, so long as it runs on Amazon's hardware.