BetaNews Staff

Online shoppers weren’t the only ones encountering dog images on this year’s Amazon Prime Day. Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- which supports thousands of websites globally -- experienced its own problems, as businesses attempting to access their management consoles also got puppy images.

These issues may have slipped under the radar, but they were significant -- reinforcing, once again, that even the most reputable service providers can and do experience outages (sometimes at the most inopportune times). The companies using them need to take proactive, diligent steps to insulate themselves.

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Using a virtual operating system has its merits.  For developers, it’s the ideal tool for sandboxing your computer so you can test software for bugs before it’s released to beta testing. You can also install your software across a range of operating systems for compatibility.

As a consumer, there are valid reasons why you may want to consider a virtual system. You may need to use a Windows computer for work but would like to experiment with a Linux installation. A virtual OS enables you to test new bleeding-edge software or tools where you are wary of the source. Problem? Simply revert back to a previous snapshot.

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Ever since Microsoft introduced Windows 10, which allowed users more insight and control over their privacy, the concern that Windows and other third-parties gather too much information has been growing.

Although Microsoft increased the transparency of privacy policies that doesn’t mean you should leave it at that, because there are some important settings to consider. In this article, I’ll show you 5 ways to regain control of your privacy in Windows 10.

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It wasn’t so long ago, you bought a brand new computer, installed your favorite applications, only to find a few months later it was clearly operating more sluggishly.

There were various reasons for this, but the primary reason was a defragmented hard drive. The more you write data to the drive, the more scattered the contents and the physical head spent far longer retrieving the data. We know people who would systematically simply wipe their drive and start again just to regain the speed of their original PC.

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Before any trip, I like to research. Where’s the best place to eat, pick up a decent coffee on the way, other interesting points of interest and more.

Google Maps makes this easy. Research online, add a new folder to your places and start saving pointers along your intended route. When you land, simply refer to Google Maps and navigate to your saved locations. Easy. Well, it would if your hire car let you use Google Maps.

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For more than five decades, researchers wanting to learn more about cellular composition and cellular physiology used a process called flow cytometry to examine the physical and chemical aspects of blood and other kinds of fluid. It involves passing the substance through at least one laser.

Any fluorescent molecules that are present emit fluorescence, while other particles show light-scattering properties.

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We handle a lot of support inquiries and one of the most common questions is how do people fully remove installed software, especially a security suite.

Problem is, most people do not realize that the software is often in use when they start their computer. This makes it really tricky for Windows to fully remove in-use software from your PC. In theory, next time you boot the uninstall process should continue and remove the rest of the application, but this often fails to execute.

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The sharing economy is dictating how we plan our vacation. We’ve previously featured Airbnb and HomeAway, as well as Uber, Lyft and Coup in Berlin. There are now a number of options you may not have otherwise have experienced if it wasn’t due to the sharing economy.

Now there is a slightly bizarre but interesting option if you wanted to take to the sea as it involves borrowing someone’s yacht when not in use. Borrow a Boat is being touted as the "Airbnb of the boating world", after the company launched its app earlier this summer.

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Netflix is arguably the most extensive streaming movie and TV platform in the world. But, much to users’ dismay, the content selection isn’t identical in each country.

So, if a person gets used to watching a certain show on Netflix, then moves to another nation, it may not be possible to keep enjoying a similar library of content. For example, the United States has the most television shows on Netflix compared to any other country -- 1,157. It also boasts the most movies, with the current total over 4,500. Considering Portugal only has 537 films in the Netflix collection and just over 200 shows, it’s no wonder people get frustrated by those geographical differences.

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The agile philosophy is a set of principles that encourage cooperation and dynamic strategies. The agile development philosophy is the best fit for companies that aim to innovate.

These teams leverage creativity and usually break up large projects into small, multi-disciplinarian tasks. Complex problems are broken down into digestible chunks and better solutions are discovered through feedback loops.

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Who do you trust in 2018? We often get asked for our security recommendations and it’s a struggle to come up with a definitive answer. We won’t go in to detail in public, but there are reasons why we might avoid recommending a well-known security suite and it’s not just due to recent issues involving potential backdoors either.

There is a general consensus that you can trust solid German engineering (VW/Audi issues emissions issues aside) and this same theory should apply to security software. You know your data is secure, your privacy intact and it will perform a solid job looking after your PC.

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We browse the internet unaware of the amount of personal information made available to websites, social media networks and public forums. Every time you access a site you leave behind traceable information including a unique IP address and timestamp.

With this information, anyone can find you rather easily. ISPs, by law, are required to offer this information to the authorities on request. Now, this won’t affect 99.9 percent of people as most users do not have anything to hide, but there are solid reasons why you might want to disguise your identity.

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Every year, Shutterstock customers across the world make billions of searches for images, footage, and music. Our data and creative teams analyze this search and download information to discover the biggest year-over-year increases. The information gathered, plus expert knowledge from our content, design, video, and music teams, forms the creative trends series which identifies and predicts the trends for the upcoming year.

This year, we selected a "trend to watch," a style we predicted would explode onto the design scene in more ways than one: Holographic Foil. The holographic trend has notes of the ‘80s, a dash of sci-fi, and a hint of nostalgia. Up 435 percent in searches, holographic’s chameleon palette of shimmering colors has been a trend to watch, even finding its way to the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week; Iridescent designs were showcased by Maison Margiela models walking down the runway in prismatic looks accompanied with iridescent lips.

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In the beginning, workloads, tools, and requirements for big data were simple because big data wasn’t really all that big. When we hit 5TB of data, however, things got complicated. Large data sets weren’t well suited to traditional storage like NAS, and large sequential reading of terabytes of data didn’t work well with traditional shared storage.

As big data evolved, the analytics tools graduated from custom code like MapReduce, Hive, and Pig to tools like Spark, Python, and Tensorflow, which made analysis easier. With these newer tools came additional requirements that traditional big data storage couldn’t handle, including millions of files, read-writes, and random access for updates. The only constant was the data itself.

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Finding the right web browser isn’t easy. As a Chrome user for years, I was forced to switch when it went through a much-publicized Mac slowdown, moving to Safari. I became rather impressed with Safari, particularly if you move between the iOS and desktop edition.

Problem is, add a Windows PC into this mix and you’ll find there’s little point using Safari. So I switched to Firefox as recent UI changes made it look as fantastic on a Mac as it does on a Windows 10 computer.

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