Lenovo IdeaPad U300s ultrabook review
The Lenovo IdeaPad U300s is the one of the newest laptops to compete for the Intel Ultrabook crown, but how does it fare?
11/27/2011
— Filed under: Internet
Tags: IdeaPad U300s, Lenovo
As email dies Yahoo will need to restructure its core
Email is dying. It is being replaced by posts on social network walls, chat and inter-network messages. Why bother waiting those lengthy minutes for an email to be delivered when a simple bulletin board post can reach thousands of people in seconds? This philosophy seems to be taking hold as the world largest free email supplier, Yahoo, is losing page views and visitor volume to social network messaging.
Acer Aspire 5560G review
ere at T3 towers, we’re big fans of Acer’s laptop but the strangely muted performance from this mid-range Acer laptop was a shame
11/15/2011
— Filed under: Internet
Tags: Acer, Aspire 5560G, Review
Microsoft aims to reduce Windows Update restarts
Microsoft is tweaking its Windows Update service with Windows 8, and is trying to limit the number of restarts for consumers and small business users to one per month. Also, instead of the current 15-minute warning that a reboot is required, users will have three days to choose the most convenient time to update their PCs. In businesses, where IT administrators set group policies to prevent automatic restarts, users will get a notification on their log-on screen to tell them that a restart is required. This notification will remain until a restart is performed.
11/8/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Software
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Update
Skype-co-founder leads $5,5m funding round for Wrapp
Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström has joined the board of Swedish social gifting service Wrapp after it raised $5,5 million in a funding round led by Zennström’s venture capital firm.
11/7/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Skype, Wrapp
Lenovo plans hybrid Android ThinkPad X1 laptop, $800 Ultrabook, and quad-core tablet
Three new Lenovo rumors and newsbits: a quad-core tablet on the way, a Windows laptop with an Android mode, and an $800 Ultrabook next May.
Microsoft Hopes Skype Will Continue Business Software’s Success
Microsoft said Thursday that it is in the process of integrating Skype across many of its business and consumer communications platforms, even as those platforms helped drive record revenues.
Dell, HP Already Backing Microsoft’s Windows 8 For Tablets
Microsoft is expected to launch the next version of the Windows OS — Windows 8 — in the second half of 2012. It recently showcased the developer preview of Windows 8 at its Build conference. Windows 8 will be targeted at both the computer and tablet markets. While it is the dominant platform in computers, it will compete primarily with Apple‘s iOS and Google‘s Android in the tablet segment. Dell and HP, the largest computer manufacturers have already started planning and working on Windows 8 tablets. [1] They will be launching their tablets soon after the official launch of Windows 8.
Yahoo! ‘Growth Plan’ Offers No Shareholder Comfort
CEO Jerry Yang should focus on identifying buyers that will pay a premium for the company’s parts and are better equipped to cut loose the company’s cumbersome corporate structure rather than a vague management «growth» plan, analysts argue.
Microsoft and Oracle part ways over multitenancy in the cloud
Summary: Microsoft and Oracle are on opposite sides when it comes to the importance of multitenancy support to their respective public-cloud platforms.
After years of ridiculing the idea of cloud computing, Oracle is officially «all in» as of last week’s Oracle Open World show. At the confab, CEO Larry Ellison took the wraps off Oracle’s public cloud platform and strategy.
Oracle’s public cloud is going to be a combination of platform as a service (PaaS) and applications/software as a service (SaaS), with the «glue» being Java Enterprise Edition. The five components comprising Oracle’s public cloud are Sun servers; Fusion Middleware, Oracle database; Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c; and Oracle’s Fusion Applications.A few pieces of the Oracle cloud (like CRM) are there now; most pieces seem to be coming «in the near future» (as is pricing, apparently).
Summary: Microsoft and Oracle are on opposite sides when it comes to the importance of multitenancy support to their respective public-cloud platforms.
After years of ridiculing the idea of cloud computing, Oracle is officially «all in» as of last week’s Oracle Open World show. At the confab, CEO Larry Ellison took the wraps off Oracle’s public cloud platform and strategy.
Oracle’s public cloud is going to be a combination of platform as a service (PaaS) and applications/software as a service (SaaS), with the «glue» being Java Enterprise Edition. The five components comprising Oracle’s public cloud are Sun servers; Fusion Middleware, Oracle database; Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c; and Oracle’s Fusion Applications.A few pieces of the Oracle cloud (like CRM) are there now; most pieces seem to be coming «in the near future» (as is pricing, apparently).
While Ellison aimed almost all of his barbs and rhetoric at Salesforce last week, Oracle has another big PaaS competitor out there: Microsoft. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s PaaS play, with its .Net «glue» and System Center management components. Office 365, SQL Azure, Windows Intune and other Microsoft-cloud enabled apps (like Dynamics CRM Online) are its SaaS play. So far, none of Microsoft’s cloud-enabled apps is running on Windows Azure; they’re running in Microsoft datacenters but not hosted on Microsoft’s own public-cloud platform.
The Java-.Net differentiator isn’t the only key one worth noting between Oracle’s and Microsoft’s public cloud platforms. Oracle officials claimed last week that a multitenant model isn’t the right one for Oracle’s cloud customers because of potential security issues — a rather vague claim that not just Oracle’s competitors have called into question.
Microsoft it taking the opposite stance. The Redmondians increasingly are channeling Office 365 users toward using the «Standard» (multitenant) SKUs and away from the «Dedicated» (single tenant) approach. Earlier this year, Office 365 officials told me that they believe in just a couple of years the vast majority of Office 365 users will be relying on the Standard/multitenant offerings, resulting in a phase-out of the Dedicated Microsoft cloud-apps.
I asked Microsoft for comment on how its public-cloud solutions compare to those announced by Oracle and was told no. (I guess the Softies are saving all their cloud-compete arrows for VMWare and Google Apps/Docs….)
Oracle wasn’t the only company launching more direct attacks on the Microsoft cloud platform last week. Google also unveiled a developer preview of Google Cloud SQL, a cloud database for the Google App Engine platform. The new offering is a MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications). Google isn’t offering any guidance as to when it will make a final version of Google Cloud SQL available.
Microsoft officials also declined to comment on how Google Cloud SQL stacks up against SQL Azure.
09/21/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: cloud, Microsoft, Oracle
