Lost in the Clouds

In addition, Microsoft now offers something called "Foldershare" which allows you to synchronize the files on several computers. Foldershare used to be an independent company, but they were snapped up by MS.

I've been using it to sync my research work and it works quite well, even though I know traditionally Microsoft has a bad rap.

Peter
How Your Electronics Work
http://www.howyourelectronicswork.com

This article doesn't live up to the quality that I've come to expect from this magazine.  No explanation is given for why cloud computing is inherently less reliable than the technologies it is supposed to replace.  Given that Cloud Computing is advertised as and should have the potential to delivery higher reliability than traditional service methods, some kind of explanation is expected.  Of course, the users of the cloud services are dependent on their Internet connectivity (versus, say, having the data live on their own LAN or HardDrive).  However, these connectivity requirements are not unique to cloud computing as many of the services that they are replacing also require this (e.g., corporate email, file services, hosted applications, etc). 

What's more, I believe (but am not certain) that both the Amazon S3 outage and MobileMe's issues had little to do with Internet Connectivity and everything to do with hiccup's on the service side (e.g., operator error, hardware issues, software bugs, etc).  In other words, Amazon and Apple likely didn't give enough consideration to scalability, potential for operator error, etc.  Clearly cloud computing is not a panacea that will allow its operators to give short shrift to day-to-day operations and software developers to completely ignore reliability issues.  However, it shows great promise to improve the accessibility, reliability, speed, and reduce the cost of a large percentage of computing services currently out there despite some initial stumbles (mind you, I've yet to see anyone compare what the reliability might have been for these same customers had they tried to host their data in-house)

If the thrust of this article is simply that the home consumer shouldn't yet replace local HD storage with the Cloud in certain circumstances, then you may have a point.  However, this same argument would hold true for any other local-storage replacement technology (e.g., storing data on a remote NAS).  You should clarify this.