Articles about Cloud

Microsoft is taking its subscription-based productivity suite Office 365 into the realm of higher education in the first quarter of 2013 with a new package called Office 365 University.

At just $1.67 per month, college students can get Office 365 for their entire four years of undergrad for just about $80. The subscription includes the usual Office Home and Student Gang: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, plus Outlook, Access, and Publisher which aren't available in the $119.99 desktop version (but are only available to Windows PC users.)

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When I opened Apple Maps in iOS 6 for the first time, I was struck by how basic the actual maps are. Zooming in shows the roads, and road names, but it’s all very simple. By contrast, when you zoom into Google Maps you often get to see the buildings on either side of the roads, which can help to get orientated and locate important landmarks.

Google today boosted this subtle but incredibly handy navigation feature by adding a further 25 million new algorithmically-created building footprints to the desktop and mobile versions of Maps.

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Eight days before Windows 8's big launch, Microsoft served up expected, dismal news about its successor, in the wake of disastrous third-quarter PC shipments. They sapped Windows division revenue and profit, keeping to a recent trend. There was never a question of negative impact, merely how bad -- as Wall Street analysts expected overall company revenues to decline. The question everyone should ask: Can Q4 be any better than this?

For fiscal first quarter 2013, ended September 30, Microsoft revenue fell 8 percent to $16.1 billion, year over year. Operating income: $5.31 billion, down 26 percent. Net income: $4.47 billion. Earning per share fell 22 percent to 53 cents. The results are impacted by a $1.36 billion, or 13 cents-a-share, deferral related to Windows 8 and Office 2013 launches.

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Who said that pirates don't embrace the future? In a blog post, Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced that it's moving the entire operation to the cloud. How's that for a change?

The trackers, torrents and servers are "ditched" and the controversial BitTorrent tracker has moved its data, in "deeply" encrypted forms, in "thousands of clouds," according to the announcement made yesterday. There is also a fail-safe system used to reboot the nodes that "transform" the data into a deadlock. So what's the point of all this? Surely it is not to embrace modern data storage solutions. The Pirate Bay has had problems with the law in the not so distant past, and moving sensitive data to the cloud looks like a move designed to protect the men behind it from various allegations.

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Changing your email address can be a major pain. You’ve got to tell everyone about it, move your emails from the old account to the new one and so on. I know people who’ve been using Hotmail for the better part of a decade, despite loathing it, just because they don’t want the perceived hassle of switching to another service (or even upgrading to Outlook.com).

AOL’s new cloud-based email tool, Alto, is designed to avoid this problem by working alongside, or rather on top of, the main webmail services, rather than replacing them. You don’t need to sign up for a new email address, you just log in with your existing AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, or iCloud details. Once you’re in, Alto will help manage your inbox and cut back on clutter.

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Ubuntu fans, be prepared to upgrade! Canonical, parent company of one of the most popular Linux distros available on Thursday released Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" in desktop and server variants. It's labeled as a suitable alternative to Windows 8, coincidentally just before the October 26 launch of the latest consumer-oriented operating system from Microsoft.

On the desktop forefront, Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" brings integration between cloud and desktop environments and integration with popular web-based applications, which Canonical claims is the next evolutionary step in the transition towards a cloud-based, multi-device world. The server variant includes the Folsom release of OpenStack, as well as deployment and management tools touted as a time-saving solution for developer teams that deploy distributed applications.

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The cat's out of the bag, and we can all stop guessing as to what the Surface RT will cost. Microsoft confirms many things, namely that Steve Ballmer was spot-on with his estimates on Surface pricing roughly a month ago. The Surface RT is going toe-to-toe with the iPad down to the very last penny. That's a good thing.

One thing I'm curious about is how Surface will change the way K-12 looks at computing devices for the next generation of students. I've already penned my thoughts on why I believe the Surface could very well outshine the iPad in education. A big part of this winning equation has to do with the ecosystem that surrounds a given technology.

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Although ISO files are a very convenient way to distribute software, then can often be very large, perhaps gigabytes in size. And if you only need maybe one or two files from the image, having to download the whole thing first will probably seem just a little annoying.

There could be an alternative, though. Re7zip is an interesting Java-based tool which can remotely extract files from an http-hosted archive, without having to download the full archive first -- and in some situations that could save you an enormous amount of time.

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Cloud-based asset management platform Panorama9 officially launched support for Linux and Mac OS machines on Wednesday, broadly increasing the amount of hardware covered in the still very young IT management dashboard.

Panorama9, a new player in the enterprise services space, provides IT asset and network management as a non-contract, subscription-based service beginning at $1.50 per user per month. The company claims it can be set up and deployed in as little as five minutes.

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Ever wondered what the inside of Google’s high-tech data centers look like? Or fancied taking a stroll around the server floor -- a place where only a select group of the company’s employees are allowed to tread? Well, the good news is now you can, virtually at least.

No, Google hasn’t fully unleashed its Street View trikes inside the data centers (more on that in a second), but it has given photographer Connie Zhou unrestricted access to them. The result is a website filled with striking, and surprisingly colorful high-res images of some of the most advanced server networks on the planet.

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Changing a successful recipe is often met with skepticism, and judging by the introduction of Timeline in Facebook profiles that holds true as well for social netwoks. The business-oriented LinkedIn decided to launch a revamped Profile page, with improvements touted in three main areas. Will users embrace or reject the change?

Due to its business-oriented nature and purpose to deliver a virtual resume LinkedIn's new Profile page is designed to give its 175 million users an improved tool in marketing their skills and accomplishments. Compared to the current one the redesign gives a more up-to-date look and provides a different experience when viewing people's profiles, by focusing on the activity and connections. The redesign shows insights on companies and people on the network, which LinkedIn says makes easier establishing common ground with and connecting to people outside of one's network.

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If you’re worried about the safety of a file on your PC then uploading it to VirusTotal.com is a great way to get some piece of mind. The site will run it through more than 40 of the top antivirus tools -- GData, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, they’re all here -- and let you know if any of them have raised a red flag.

There could be a lengthy delay while the file is uploaded, of course. But you don’t have to put up with that, because VirusTotal Scanner delivers the same results without having to upload the file at all.

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Connecticut-based WinZip International LLC has updated the Windows version of its world-famous compression tool with a plethora of major new features, including cloud integration and sharing. WinZip 17.0 launches with the ability to zip, manage and share files directly from cloud-based services and social media sites.

Version 17 also adds tools for converting Office documents to PDF, resizing images and adding watermarks, plus revamps its interface in a move designed to make the program more intuitive to use.

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Whether you think Microsoft wants to be Apple, or not, the company continues to roll out products designed to compete with its major rival. Today’s announcement is for Xbox Music, a digital music service for the Xbox games console, which will also appear as the default music player in Windows 8.

The service, which goes live tomorrow and will be available in 22 countries from launch, is a cross between Spotify and iTunes. Users will be able to listen to songs or full albums for free, create artist-based streaming radio stations, and put together music mixes and playlists. The iTunes element comes in the form of a music store, which will allow users to purchase and download tracks. The store will reportedly offer over 30 million songs, some four million more than Apple's store. There will also be over 70,000 music videos on offer.

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Aimed at developers and webmasters, Google introduced the open-source Apache HTTP server module 'mod_pagespeed' in beta form almost two years ago, and now it is finally available as a stable release that is ready to be deployed.

Touting features such as automatic website and asset optimization, more than 40 configurable filters, open-source nature and individual deployment, mod_pagespeed is part of the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation's efforts to improve the Internet experience by offering performance improvements to web pages. Together with PageSpeed Service, it's part of PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project that is designed to provide best performances practices for Internet pages.

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