Articles about Cloud

I like to make jokes. In fact so deep is my love of comedy I’ve co-authored a couple of non-fiction humor books. I can see the funny side in most things, but I’m also able to self-censor. That is, if I think up a joke that someone may find genuinely offensive or upsetting, I will choose very carefully whether or not to say it or post it. I’ve learned over the years to think before speaking, although that doesn’t mean I’ll always do it.

Twitter is full of would-be comedians posting jokes and irreverent observations. Sometimes they’ll score a hit, other times a miss. When a joke occurs, they’ll rush to post it in an effort to impress their peers, and score retweets. The speed that Twitter operates at means people often don’t think before they post. When someone tweets something in bad taste, followers will pick up on it, and the sheer weight of disapproval will frequently lead to the removal of the offending missive and a swift apology.

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Will you be next?

If you missed the controversy, read colleague Ed Oswald's "NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage", then come back for my reasons why Twitter cocked up. Royally. His headline says it all, if you'd like to keep reading here. For a service often praised for supporting free speech, Twitter suppresses Guy Adams', presumably to protect a media giant and business partner. The suspension should matter to anyone using cloud services or supporting online free speech.

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Leading IT systems and technology company Oracle on Monday announced it will be acquiring privately-held company Xsigo Systems. Oracle targeted Xsigo for acquisition because of its network virtualization solutions, a hot zone in IT right now. Just one week ago, VMware announced the billion dollar acquisition of Nicira, a company that specializes in software-defined networking technology similar to Xsigo's.

"The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential," said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems in a prepared remark on Monday. "With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand."

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If you are living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bhutan, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Vietnam and want to watch the London Olympics today I’m told your only choice is YouTube.  Ten events are available at any time through the International Olympic Committee (IOC) YouTube channel.

Of course 60 live channels are available in the USA through youtube.com/nbcolympics, but I think the international story is more compelling by far because it brings live competition to places where it was never available before.

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London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.

The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.

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It’s the end of another month and the end of another busy week of software releases. If you’ve been too caught up with other things to keep an eye on the titles that have been hitting the download servers over the past seven days, this roundup will bring you up to speed.

Tomahawk 0.5.5 is a social media player that enables you to play your local music collection as well as tracks from the web, and also enables you to browse through the collections of your friends. If you’re keen to share your musical taste with your friends, look no further than ON AIR 4.0.0.834, which will automatically update your Skype status with the track you are currently listening to.

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One of the new features of Office 2010 (yep that’s 2010) was the Outlook Social Connector. This addon brought with it the ability to display social network information within Outlook itself. It took a little while for developers to get on board but last time I checked you could download "providers" to integrate Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Xing data.

Well, Office 2013 is now with us, and the social connector has been improved further. You no longer need to download a specific "provider" for Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply sign in with your existing credentials and Outlook 2013 will pull through the relevant data.

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Ah! Life in paradise. As the literal incarnation of the mythical "guy who ran away to a tropical island", I've had the joy of returning to my once primary (and now mostly vacation) home in the United States only to discover all of the things that can go wrong with an empty house in the Florida heat (this time, it was a failed A/C compressor -- ugh!).

However, I've also had the opportunity to revisit many of my core IT beliefs from the perspective of a relative outsider living in the slower-paced world of coconuts, litches and 2Mbps ADSL connections. Basically, my geographic isolation has forced me to take the long view on new technology trends. Which is why I'm so excited about the potential of BYOD: I see the emergence of the Post-PC phenomenon as a truly disruptive force that will forever change how people view "computers".

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If you are a music fan, you’ll undoubtedly have an extensive collection of MP3s and other music files on your hard drive. It is also likely that you listen to music on Spotify and Sound Cloud, and perhaps watch the occasional music video on YouTube. Tomahawk is a music player that enables you to access all of this and more in one handy application but there is a social focus to the player that opens up some interesting options.

Software that broadcasts information about the music you are listening to is nothing new, but this is a feature that you will find in Tomahawk. The program will scour your hard drives for music files and create a library for you. As you listen to your collection, Tomahawk enables you to view artist information and discover related artists that you may be interested in. This is all well and good, but it is the social aspect of Tomahawk that is especially interesting.

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How do you monetize a technology that is hard to monetize? BitTorrent, the company behind all things torrent and the uTorrent client has several answers for that. Not long ago it began to offer the uTorrent Plus client that added features like antivirus protection, a build-in media player or a media converter for a price to the uTorrent program.

But that did not really solve the question that artists and other members of the entertainment industry were asking: how are they going to monetize their content using BitTorrent?

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VPN clients are a generally a very good way to maintain your anonymity online, and Hideman is no exception: just launch the program, click the Connect button and in a second or two you’ll be allocated an IP address in another country.

Which country? Hideman provides servers in Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Netherlands, Panama, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States.

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On the same day as reporting strong second-quarter results, virtualization software developer VMware said Monday that it has entered into an agreement to purchase network software Nicira for $1.05 billion. The company's software is used to manage network deployments and create virtualized network infrastructure. VMware expects the deal to close in the second half of the year.

"The acquisition of Nicira adds to our portfolio of networking assets and positions VMware to be the industry leader in software-defined networking", VMware CEO Paul Maritz says. Others called it a major move which positions VMware well in the fast-growing cloud computing sector.

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Going online means having to decide which web browser you’re going to use to find your way around the Internet. If security is your primary concern, a new browser just entered the arena and vies for attention. If Comodo IceDragon sounds familiar, you’ve probably been put in mind of Comodo Dragon, the security focused web browser based on Chromium. IceDragon is very much the same idea but this time around there is a Mozilla core.

Comodo have recognized that not everyone wants to use the same web browser just to get the benefits of added security, and Chrome is not a browser that suits everyone. The unveiling of a Mozilla based version of the same tool opens up a world of more secure web browsing to a wider audience. If you are already a Firefox user, you’ll be pleased to find that your bookmarks history, passwords and more can be imported into IceDragon.

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Pundits can't seem to glow enough about Yahoo's new CEO, who has been on the job for less than a week. Marissa Mayer is a Google darling flown the coop and swooped in just as Yahoo shocked shareholders with another quarter of disappointing performance.

It's get to work time, and we've got a to-do list for Mayer -- eight things she should do as soon as humanly possible.

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Microsoft released the preview version of Office 2013 less than a week ago. This new installment of the productivity suite has many of the same features as its previous versions, 2003, 2007, and 2010: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook. But there are other programs as well, and Microsoft has connected the Office Suite to the Azure Cloud.

In this review I’ll discuss the requirements for installation and the installation process. I’ll also discuss the contents of three of the Office 2013 suite programs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and how the cloud-based Office 365 may change the way many users work with the suite. I’ll also talk about Windows 8 integration, and wrap up with a discussion about the impact that Office 2013 can have in business enterprises.

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