Looks pretty sweet.

BLAST is a suite of programs...

BLAST allows quick matching...

"BLAST!" is what you'll yell when your computer gets hit by the type of virus you cannot deconstruct!

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Gutter Sistren whipping boy, innoventor of words, Life Coach to the Damned.

...as soon as someone can give me a coherent explanation for what "the Cloud" is.

As far as I can tell, "the Cloud" is a made-up term from Microsoft that simply refers to computers being able to talk to each other, which I'm pretty sure is already called "the Internet."

Abaddon, Baphomet, Samael, "that bitch who stole my wallet"... I am known by many names.

Sgt. Renee Jordan PUMC, PUV James Keeling

.....differently than the Internet. The Internet is kind of the information super highway, and the Cloud is a rest stop along the way.

Is there any *real* difference? No. It's simply a handy metaphor to make it easier to explain. Clouds float around, so you can store things in them. Makes more sense to luddites. They think of the Internet as lines connecting computers. The vast majority of the world isn't all that tech savvy.

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Cloud Computing — A computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Narrowly speaking, cloud computing is client-server computing that abstract the details of the server away—one requests a service (resource), not a specific server (machine). For a more in depth look at Cloud Computing, visit the Cloud Pyramid Website

But I do like the way you think -- always suspect Microsoft of being nefarious, tho now you might have to add Google. Hey, is the FDO using Google as a front in his take over the world plans? Very clever (course, now I've blown his cover! Eeek)

[flickr-photo:id=5069365035, size=m] [flickr-photo:id=4347154616] Pusher and member of the Gutter Sistren