Cloud based computing

The cloud based computing term is thrown around a lot on the web these days. While we wait for a completely cloud based computer to be released (www.cloudo.com) we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. This is my rundown of how I solve the common everyday problems. I bought an Asus EEE pc. It’s great, it’s small, it has battery life and a full qwerty keyboard. The biggest problem is the OS (xandros) which I can thankfully replace with a proper one (ubuntu, xp is to slow). But it still doesn’t have the kind of power I’m getting used to while at my computer.

Sure for office work I mostly use google documents, and for storing images (if I needed to) I have picasa or flickr or oosah or a million other services. But what I really want is a place to put all those things that I want to keep with me. Bookmarks, notes, files and so on. Google had most of these needs covered with google bookmarks and google notebook, but Google have yet to release their fabled online drive. And they also messed things up when they released Chrome, which is a great browser, that doesn’t support it’s own products such as bookmarks!?! Way to go Google, your age is showing. Is this the first step towards becoming Microsoft? Seems to be.

But lo! Saving the day a small upstart called Drop Box smashes into my life and makes things work. Drop Box is a small program or online interface that lets you sync a folder on your computer with an online storage space. It runs in the background, doesn’t take up any RAM (a lot of bandwidth though if you handle a lot of files) lets you sync the folder to an unlimited number of computers (windows, mac or linux) and has no file size limits. Sounds awesome? It is.

But whats the catch? Well, drop box is still in development and you can only sign up for 2GBs of storage… Sure, their free and that’s great. But I was hoping for more. This is a service I’d be happy to pay for though.