Apple have launched a service called iCloud that allows users to store their data on a server in the cloud rather like the Ubuntu One service that Canonical have released for Ubuntu users. This is available for Apple iOS 5 and stores all of your documents, music and movies and makes them available over a wireless network to all of your devices. The iCloud system is integrated into the iOS 5 operating system and all the various applications can make use of this system, all of your E-Mail contacts, your messages and your calendar is all backed up to a cloud server making your data very safe in the event of a hard drive failure. Apparently, the service is not free but this would give Apple users some peace of mind that their data is backed up and safe. There is 5GiB of data storage for free, but extra storage space will cost US$20 a year for 10GiB, US$40 for 20GiB & US$100 per year for 50GIB.
This is not too bad, being able to write a document on an Ipad and have it shared to your desktop machine would be awesome, music is synced with this service, but only music that you have purchased with Itunes. Music of your own that you have imported into Itunes will need a separate service named Itunes Match that will cost US$25 per year. The Apple iCloud system would be the best thing for any Apple user that wants to be able to have their documents uploaded to a remote server and rest easy in the knowledge that their work will be available over the network to their other devices. This is just like the Ubuntu One system that Ubuntu uses to automatically sync your files to the cloud. I use Firefox sync to sync my bookmarks and settings betwixt Windows & Linux and that is a good way to manage your bookmarks. Bookmarking something on Windows and then being on Fedora and not having access to your Windows bookmarks is annoying, so this new feature solves this.
I prefer Fedora Core 15 to Ubuntu now, I like the XEN virtualisation tools, I have used this once with Fedora 14 to run Fedora Core 3 in a XEN virtual machine and that worked perfectly, setting up an Internet connection to the Fedora Core 3 session was not hard and I found that Firefox 1 still displays web sites pretty well even now. Although I use Firefox 7.01 and Konqueror 4.6. Konqueror 4.6 is a very fast and reliable web browser with ad blocking features built in that can be used to block various images from websites saving bandwidth.
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