I haven't been terribly impressed by most of the hype surrounding "the cloud". I've seen wyse terminals before. However, there a few useful applications that can be run centrally from the net that are definitely useful. Panda's cloud antivirus is probably the smartest use I have seen so far. Great method to keep everyones virus defintions up to date all at once and nearly instantly rather than relying on users actually updating their defintions themselves. Another great use is remote backup. However, I still consider "the cloud" to be just another catchphrase, a lot like "multimedia computer" 10 years ago. Wow! multimedia! I have to have one of those!
But more power to those that can flip some names and make money on it for the time being.
Just to piss off Gerry, I regged a few today. Perhaps a local cloud server (.com) might be more useful (and secure) than putting all your crap on the net.