Articles about Cloud

You’ve got a speedy, modern PC and a fast internet connection -- so why is it that you can’t watch streaming videos without regular dropouts and interruptions?

These kind of problems can be frustrating, and they’re certainly tricky to diagnose. But the free DPC Latency Checker could help point you in the right direction.

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In the beginning there was English and it was good. Okay, not so much. Honestly I found YouTube captions early on to be pretty darn bad. The Google speech recognition tool wasn't up to snuff and it sometimes led to hilarious results. But, to it's credit, the company has made strides to improve. In fact, if you have used Android lately then I think you will find speech-to-text to be pretty solid.

YouTube, a Google property, introduced captions back in 2009. At the time it was English only, but as the technology improved other languages were added -- Japanese, Korean and Spanish were next to appear. Now the service offers an additional six languages.

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Almost four months ago Microsoft relaunched Hotmail as Outlook, as the company's response to Google's Gmail. In the meantime the new service reached more than 25 million active users, a number which has steadily grown since its introduction. To expand reach into Android territory, Microsoft even launched a new app for green droid devices.

The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation says that because of conversation threading, keyboard shortcuts, quick access to search operators and tab/send the transition towards the new Outlook email service is easier. Taking the fight over to its main competitor, the company also "finds" that four out of five (that's 80 percent in pie chart talk) Gmail users would switch to Outlook after just five days of use. That's a rather bold claim, and it seems a bit far fetched. But why?

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Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 8 and its ARM counterpart little more than a month ago. But even today apps like Twitter are still missing from the official Store selection. However, third-party alternative, Tweetro+ should be available soon for die-hard users of the social network.

Previously available as a free app on Windows Store, Tweetro was pulled due to the 100,000 access token limit, imposed by the Twitter API. The developers announced that Tweetro+ will take its place, but as a paid app due to the associated costs. This appears to be the preferred solution instead of going the ad-supported route.

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It seems to have been in beta for a very long time, but, at last, HTML and CSS editor TopStyle 5 finally is released. And there’s a very lengthy list of new features to explore.

Strong CSS3 support, for instance, now makes it easy to create one stylesheet for large displays, perhaps, and another for mobile devices. A CSS Gradient Generator means you can use gradients in CSS3, no images required; you can add text shadows in a couple of clicks, and the new Prefixr handles the tricky business of converting your tidy CSS3 code into something which will work on all the main browsers.

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German Linux pioneer SUSE announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a partnership with Inktank to bring the Ceph Distributed Storage System to the SUSE Cloud private enterprise cloud platform.

Inktank made headlines last September when Canonical co-founder Mark Shuttlesworth put a million dollars behind the development of Ceph, so it could be used as a cheaper storage alternative to Amazon's S3 cloud storage.

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Red Hat on Tuesday announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise, the company's Platform-as-a-Service offering first unveiled last May as a part of Red Hat's roadmap for 2013.

OpenShift Enterprise is a cloud application platform for enterprises that can handle public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. It is based upon the OpenShift Origin codebase which was used to power Red Hat's public cloud PaaS OpenShift Online. The platform offers developers a choice of languages (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby,) frameworks (Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django, Java EE), and application lifecycle tools.

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Today Amazon kicks off the first-ever AWS (Amazon Web Services) conference in Las Vegas. Sure, it is too late to get to AWS re:Invent now and the Technical Bootcamps are all sold out anyway, but that doesn't mean you need to miss everything. Some of the event will be live-streamed right to your computer. The show kicks off today and runs through November 29th.

This conference is tailor-made for those looking to integrate the Amazon cloud services into their business. There are workgroups surrounding the use of AWS in building web-scale apps, a talk given by Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix, AWS cloud security and a whole lot more. In fact, there will be over 150 different sessions.

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Suddenly, I don't feel so special. But that's okay. For some time, I belonged to a small, elite group of Chromebook users. But new, lower-cost models and Google's aggressive "for everyone" marketing campaign moves the cloud computer into the mainstream market. On October 18, I started using the $249 model announced the same day. The question: Is 'for everyone' for me -- or even you?

I already had adopted the $449 Chromebook as my only PC. The question: Could the ARM model satisfy? Except for 40 hours back on the costlier Intel, for performance comparison, I've used the smaller Chromebook full time for more than a month. In trying to answer the question, I hoped to perhaps get one for people tempted by the newer model's lower price or that of the (gasp) $199 Acer. Samsung makes the other two.

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About a month ago I posted "Whom do you trust with your personal?", containing two polls. The number of respondents is surprisingly low, so I'm back with them, using a slightly different approach. Perhaps the InterWebs will respond more to the negative trust question.

The results so far don't surprise me. Facebook is distrusted by a wide margin -- 57.42 percent of respondents. Microsoft and Google are most trusted (38.6 percent and 34.5 percent, respectively). But Google also is second-most distrusted (27.1 percent). Both polls provide just five major tech companies but opportunity for respondents to give their own answers. Nine percent trust no one.

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Over the weekend, my daughter asked: "Have you heard of Cyber Monday?" I thought but didn't say: "Have you been living under a rock?" She's 18 and a shopaholic. How is it she only just learned about this dreadful day?

I despise the Monday after Thanksgiving, mostly because it's an artificial retail construct created during my adulthood. I'm too young for Black Friday. But I remember when suddenly the Amazons of the world added one more day to Black Friday weekend, and greedy analysts looking to sell clients new services promoted the concept. Supposedly, Shop.org coined the term eight years ago. Is that all? It seems so much longer.

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Google's attempt to sell the Nexus lineup on its own Play Store could be considered a failure. The company appears to be unable to keep up with the high demand, and as a result devices are mostly sold out all over the world. In order to prepare for that one moment when sufficient stock exists there is a website that checks global Play Stores for Nexus device availability.

Google Nexus Devices World Availability Checker keeps track of all Nexus 4 (including black bumper), 7 and 10 units sold in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. The website allows users to verify whether a particular device is available in stock at the local Play Store in the above mentioned locations. The advantage, over manually checking, is that prospective buyers are not limited to their regional online store, and can look up international availability, which comes in handy for those that want to shop abroad.

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I can see only one good reason to choose iPhone 5 over Nexus 4: The LG-manufactured mobile is sold out, and you can't wait. For the patient, Google's fourth-generation stock Android delivers rewarding experience. The new Nexus is the smartphone to buy this holiday season -- if you can find one.

Two reasons stand in iPhone 5's favor, neither is good, just necessary for some people: Your carrier -- for example, Sprint and Verizon in the United States -- isn't supported (Nexus 4 is GSM/HSPA+), or you bought heap loads of apps from Apple and don't want to lose your investment. I feel your pain, but offer no pity. Nexus 4 is exceptional.

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“It happens to the best of us” was Dropbox’s explanation for this, the swift appearance of Dropbox 1.6.2 for desktop, less than a week after Dropbox 1.6.0 made its first appearance. ” You test a build but when you finally put it out there for tons of people to use it they find more bugs. So here we are with a quick bug fix release”.

Version 1.6.2 fixes four major bugs reported since version 1.6.0 first appeared, including install failures in older versions of Windows and blank selective sync windows in OS X after updating.

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US Thanksgiving is a time for reflection on the year behind, with plenty of time to ponder resolutions for January 1st. Yesterday, I posted about the things Microsoft should be grateful for in 2012. Today, I followed up with another, for Google. For consistency's sake, the list numbers eight, in line with Microsoft's, for which I chose to hat-tip Windows 8.

The list is by no means comprehensive, just some things that stand ahead of others -- and it is organized from least to most important. Google had a great year, perhaps the best ever. Few companies released more innovative products, affecting so many people and building such positive brand awareness.

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