Hats off to BBC Online’s Silicon Valley correspondent Maggie Shiels, who on her dot.maggie blog offers some defining purple prose for the new era in computing.
Attending the RSA conference, Maggie reports on the race to offer ‘cloud computing’ services:
ensuring security is not a “Johnny come lately” idea and that the clock was ticking for the industry to grasp the nettle before it was too late.
And Maggie continues:
While the drive to the cloud seems like a runaway train every business must hitch a ride on, the security concerns are clearly hampering it travelling in the fast lane.
So basically, cloud computing is a runaway train that’s prevented from running where it should be: in the fast lane of the motorway. Yes, you could say Maggie’s prose is an unexploded bomb with its volume turned up to 11.
Mixed metaphors have been an inspiration to us before. Older Reg readers will remember that for a while, the telecoms regulator (as then was) OFTEL was referred to as the “winged watchdog”.
According to folklore, Tim Richardson was inspired by an article at ZDNet now lost in time, which described how BT was “sheltering under the wings of the telecoms watchdog”.
Maybe there’s something in the water, but the author of that pileup later joined BBC Online.
So join us in embracing the runaway, high speed nettle of Cloud Computing.
A T-shirt goes to the most elaborately contrived metaphor pileup in the best, breathless BBC Online style.
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