Radu Suceveanu

Article source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/05/18/weekend-reading-may-18th-edition-ie9-powers-prometheus-and-brandon-generator-experiences-three-hot-windows-phone-apps-amp-skype-rolls-out-on-xfinity-in-10-markets.aspx

Article source: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/578985-google-microsoft-said-to-be-creating-new-cloud-services

Weekend Reading: May 18th Edition–IE9 Powers “Prometheus” and “Brandon Generator” Experiences, Three Hot Windows Phone Apps & Skype Rolls Out on Xfinity in 10 Markets

Radu — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:16:25 +0000

In this edition of Weekend Reading, we’ve got stories on two awesome HTML5 experiences powered by Internet Explorer, three gorgeous new apps for Windows Phone, Skype rolling out on Xfinity in 10 markets and much, much more. Don’t miss any of them!

“Prometheus” and Brandon Generator – two HTML5 experiences powered by Internet Explorer. In preparation for the upcoming film Prometheus (in theaters on June 8), Weyland Industries is accepting applicants to join the crew of the Project Prometheus spaceship. Now, the Internet Explorer team is proud to announce our partnership with Fox Studios to create the Project Prometheus Training Center — designed entirely in HTML5 — giving fans the chance to demonstrate they are capable of being a crew member on the Prometheus ship. Read this Wednesday post on the Exploring IE Blog for the rest of the story. Mashable also covered the story. And don’t miss this feature story and slide show on the Microsoft News Center focused on The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator, the brainchild of filmmaker Edgar Wright, comic book artist Tommy Lee Edwards, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team – and you. The audience is being invited to help shape the four-episode series of animated shorts by suggesting characters, plots, nemeses and entire scenes. The site received thousands of submissions after the first episode premiered in mid-April, which ended with a plea to help Brandon overcome his writer’s block. Below is a screen shot from the Project Prometheus Training Center.

Skype on Xfinity rolling out in 10 markets. Together with our partner Comcast, we’ve debuted Skype on Xfinity in Boston and Seattle, enabling Comcast customers to communicate with family and friends through Skype HD video calling on their televisions. Soon, the offering will also bring Skype audio and video calls and instant messaging to the living rooms of Comcast Xfinity subscribers in Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Atlanta, Augusta, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, Penn. You can read all about it over on The Big Blog. Check it out.

Three hot apps for Windows Phone. Over the past several days, three beautiful apps have been added to the Windows Phone Marketplace – LinkedIn, AboutOne family organizer and Weather Flow. Head on over to the Windows Phone Blog and Next at Microsoft to check ‘em out. Also, don’t miss the last week’s Windows Phone news wrap. Below is a screen shot of the LinkedIn app for Windows Phone.

Forrester Research: Microsoft in the lead in the TV race. Earlier this week, New York Times reporter Nick Wingfield wrote this piece focused on a new report from Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey that says Microsoft is far ahead of the competition in the television market with the Xbox. “With the Xbox, Mr. McQuivey believes Microsoft is the farthest along in creating a meaningful audience of people watching online video through their television sets and holding that audience’s attention for the longest amount of time,” Wingfield reported. Don’t miss it.

Los Angeles Community College District chooses Microsoft Live@edu. Microsoft announced on Monday that Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is rolling out Microsoft Live@edu to provide anytime, anywhere communication services to its students, faculty and alumni. Live@edu will allow LACCD to provide everyone on campus with easy-to-use cloud communication and collaboration tools while saving administrative and IT staff time. Head on over to the Microsoft News Center for the whole story.

China takes action to stop software counterfeiting. The Chinese government has dealt a strong blow against intellectual property crime, penalizing counterfeiter Shang Yajun for copyright infringement and the sale of illegally manufactured registered trademarks. The 1st Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing upheld the Haidian District Court’s decision that sentenced Shang to seven years and six months imprisonment, representing the longest-ever criminal sentence in China for selling and distributing counterfeit software products. Read this press release for more details.

And now, a little how-to from the Excel team. Who could be better than a Business Intelligence analyst at teaching us a thing or two about Excel? We asked our own number-crunching wizard Stacey Armstrong to share some Excel tricks she’s learned along the way. Check out her first trick Resizing column widths in pivot tables as well as this Excel Blog post on split and merge data in URLs.

Technology skills helping youth make the world a better place. Today’s young people are tomorrow’s leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators. The continuing acceleration of technology and innovation creates incredible opportunities but it also challenges us to keep up by getting the right skills, education and experiences in order to be prepared for these new jobs and opportunities. Many young people are struggling because they don’t have the experience, knowledge or connections they need to find employment. In a recent interview, Binta Coudy Dé, an IT student from Senegal, observes that her peers are challenged to apply the things they learn in class to secure employment. Through working with businesses, the nonprofit community and governments, Microsoft is committed to providing opportunities for youth through technology, training, and experiences. Head on over to the Microsoft Citizenship Blog for the whole interview. Check out the photo below of Team Cyan Girls at the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in New York in July 2011.

That’s a wrap for this edition of Weekend Reading! Thanks for stopping by!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

What IT Pros Need to Know about Cloud

Radu — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:58:23 +0000

Cloud computing promises new career opportunities for IT professionals. In many cases, existing core skill sets transfer directly to cloud technologies. In other instances, IT pros need to develop new skill sets that meet the demand of emerging cloud job roles.

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Article source: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/578473-what-it-pros-need-to-know-about-cloud

Midweek Download, May 16: Bing Updates Begin Rolling out, New Apps/SDKs for Windows Phone and Deep Dives on Windows 8 Features

Radu — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:49:06 +0000

In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on big updates for Bing, some new apps for Windows Phone and some previews of what you’ll see from Windows 8 and IE10.

Bing Updates Available for Test Drive
You may have heard last week about some big updates coming to Bing that we think will provide you a new and exciting way to search. The new features began to roll-out Tuesday here in the U.S. You can check out some of the new features at http://www.bing.com/new.

You can also learn more about the updates from the video below, which provides a nice overview of what you’ll find in the new Bing some and background on the new features. With a refreshed design, the new snapshot feature for instant access to action-oriented information, or get advice and recommendations from friends and experts with the new social sidebar, it’s a big release for the Bing team, and we hope you like it.

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Aviary SDK available for Windows Phone …
Steve Clayton reported some interesting news for developers, as the folks from Aviary have issued an SDK for Windows Phone, making it easy for a developer to integrate Aviary’s impressive photo editing tools into mobile apps.The editor itself can be integrated into a web site or app with a few lines of code, so well worth checking out.

… and LinkedIn too
Another exciting piece of news for Windows Phone customers. LinkedIn has released a really nice new app for Windows 7 phones. It’s one a lot of us have been looking forward to, and early reviews of the design and functionality are positive.

You can read more about the app from the LinkedIn blog, or download it today.

Security Advantages Emerge in Cloud Computing
While at first blush, many companies may see a move to cloud-based systems as creating potential security issues, a new study commissioned by Microsoft shows that many companies are finding the opposite to be true. For many small and mid-sized companies, cloud services can offer a great deal of security benefits and expetise that can be difficult and costly to achieve otherwise. Survey respondents report spending nearly one-third less time managing security issues than those not using cloud services.

Windows 8 Utilities and Disk Health
In a recent post on the Building Windows 8 Blog, Kiran Bangalore, a program manager on the Windows team, reviews in detail some of the changes being made to the chkdsk utility, used for detecting and repairing issues of disk corruption. While such issues occur rarely, the time it takes to run can be a source of frustration to Windows users. The changes are designed to make this process more transparent and less intrusive. It’s one of the many behind-the-scenes improvements the Windows team is making that promises to save Windows users and IT Administrators a good deal of time and trouble when issues come up.

Windows 8: Sharing Works like a Charm
One more from Windows 8 – and IE10 – but on the features side. The IE blog has a nice post explaining how the team has made sharing links faster and easier. Today, sharing a link from a Web site you like involves copying the link, opening or toggling over to another app, and then pasting it in to share or email that link.

With the share charm, you can share links to Web sites in a much more useful and visually-appealing way. Rather than use cryptic URLs, Windows 8 and IE10 create a rich link preview, using Web page titles, descriptions and thumbnail images to display and share, much as you share items with many social media sites. And Windows 8 and IE10 both support the OpenGraph protocol, so site owners can control how their web sites and pages show up in Windows 8 as well.

That’s all for this week … thanks for stopping by!

Article source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/05/15/midweek-download-may-16-bing-updates-begin.aspx

Greenpeace Rains on Apple’s iCloud (Again)

Radu — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:44:19 +0000

In its continuing campaign to pressure cloud providers to use cleaner energy, Greenpeace sets up a “pod” and projects images onto Apple’s headquarters. [Read more]

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Article source: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/577779-greenpeace-rains-on-apples-icloud-again

Google Prices its Cloud SQL Offering, Solidifies Cloud Database Market

Radu — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:26:05 +0000

The cloud database market continues to solidify as Google puts a price tag on its Cloud SQL offering. With actual charges to begin on June 12th, the move finally gives developers a way to see what they’ll be spending on Cloud SQL, but comparing Google’s offering to Amazon, Microsoft and others might still be a bit tricky.

Google’s Cloud SQL is MySQL-based and is intended to be used with Google App Engine (GAE). Google’s pricing structure is very simple, though not as comprehensive or as expandable as Amazon or others.

Google has two billing plans: a package plan and a per-use plan. The package plan has four tiers, each of which includes a set amount of RAM, storage and I/O per day. For instance, Google charges $1.46 per day for the D1 tier, which has .5GB of RAM, 1GB of storage and 850,000 I/O requests. The top package (D8) includes 4GB of RAM, 10GB storage and 8 million I/O requests for $11.71 per day.

The same instances are available on an on-demand basis, starting at $0.10 per hour, with storage and I/O extra.

The cheapest package from Google, then, runs about $45 a month and the most expensive runs about $357. That doesn’t count any overages for I/O or storage.

Sizing Up Google’s Pricing

Trying to compare Google pricing with Amazon, Azure or databases offered with PaaS services such as Heroku and Engine Yard is tricky, at best. Heroku’s database offerings start at $50 per month, but the specs for its database differ considerably from the other providers. For example, Heroku features data clips for developers, and the hstore extension for key/value data storage.

Amazon’s DB instances seem to be a bit more powerful than Google Cloud SQL instances, and Amazon has features that Google Cloud SQL doesn’t. For instance, Amazon’s Small DB instance has 1.7 GB of RAM and has the equivalent of a single CPU. You’re also limited to Google App Engine supported languages, Python and Java.

Developers can choose between 5GB and 1TB of storage (the max for Google is 10GB storage). The Small DB instance runs about $77 a month, if it’s on-demand. But, choosing a one-year reserved instance brings that down to about $45 a month. The pricing, then, seems to line up for the “small” instances for Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL, but Google has fewer features and what looks to be less compute power.

But if you’re using GAE, then Cloud SQL is the natural choice – so it’s nice to see Google finally getting this into developers’ hands. If you’re using GAE and Cloud SQL, we’d love to hear what you think.

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Article source: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/577210-google-prices-its-cloud-sql-offering-solidifies-cloud-database-market

HP Moves Into Public Beta with its Cloud Services

Radu — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:47:00 +0000

While Citrix’s moves ahead with CloudStack and its abandonment of the OpenStack cloud computing platform dominated the news recently, let’s not forget that OpenStack has enormous backing and a well-funded foundation forming around it. In our post “OpenStack’s Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race,” we detailed some of the many tech companies that are developing around the OpenStack platform.

Hewlett-Packard, for example, has announced its Converged Cloud services and platform tools, based on a “hardened” version of OpenStack. And now, HP is ready to deliver the public beta version of its HP Cloud Services, which could mean a lot for the struggling company.

HP has delivered public, open beta versions of three OpenStack-based services: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network. Users will pay only for the services they consume, and while HP has gone out of its way to position its services as different from Amazon’s you can bet that HP will be competing closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud.

Along with HP’s announcement, there are many partners and supporters making related announcements. Opscode, which specializes in cloud infrastructure automation, has announced integration with HP Cloud Services. And Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud application management solutions, has announced support. Standing Cloud offers a simple way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud. You can find the full details on HP’s partner community here.

HP’s pricing is very fully disclosed as seen here, and the pricing looks like it will be very competitive with what Amazon and other cloud platform players charge. Of course, we’ve made the point before that in the cloud, everything will come down to support. Many of the companies “backing” OpenStack are contributing code or pursuing other forms of community contribution, but a unified, robust support effort is what will really make a difference.

HP Cloud Support is up and running, and you can find more details on it here. Can HP become a major player in the cloud by betting on a flexible, open source platform? We’re about to see, and this should be interesting to watch.

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Article source: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/576181-hp-moves-into-public-beta-with-its-cloud-services

At Citrix Synergy, Citrix’s CloudStack Strategy Spreads Out

Radu — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:46:48 +0000

This week, the Citrix Synergy conference is going on in San Francisco, with lots of news related to Citrix’s CloudStack strategy coming out, and more. Through today, Friday, you can still access live keynotes and sessions from the conference, available by webcast here. Here is a roundup of some of the major news out of Citrix Synergy.

Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says “customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models.”

Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its Incubator program. CloudStack, is, of course, ramping up for a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene.

In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here. Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.

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