the cloud
OnLive Release Date & Price Announced
March 11, 2010
Remember the online gaming service we covered a few months ago called OnLive that moves your gaming to the cloud? Well it just got real. In case you missed it, OnLive aims to deliver over the air gaming to users in a similar way to general cloud computing.
Data and games are stored on OnLive servers and the images are beamed to gamers around the world who compete in an online environment. The Beta went up quite a while ago and it seems the waiting is almost at an end for US gamers, as the official OnLive launch date has been announced as 17th June 2010.
For $15 a month users will be able to access the OnLive community, however games themselves will cost that little bit extra which is a given considering developers are still going to want their money’s worth out of their games. However this does raise some concerns with potential gamers.
Continue reading »nuTsie Mobile App (Sync iTunes Playlists & Stream To Mobile Phones)
January 15, 2010
Android’s been in the news a lot so far this month, with the release of the Nexus One just before CES 2010 and with more devices on the way, there hasn’t been a better time to switch to Google’s open source mobile phone platform. The only thing putting me off the purchase of an Android device has been the inability to take my music with me. My iTunes library is over 32GB in size, and the Nexus One comes with a measly 4GB storage via MicroSD, which caps out at 32GB.
For me to be able to carry around my music with me is essential in my decision to purchase a new device, and it seemed that my only option was to sync only certain playlists at a time, which is inconvenient at best. Why Apple don’t have an iTunes streaming application for the iPhone is a mystery to me, but why Google themselves don’t is a major question, with Google being very cloud-centric in their future plans.
Continue reading »Technology Of The Noughties: Cloud Computing
December 31, 2009
Cast your minds back to the beginning of the decade… Broadband was making its first appearance in the technology world and all our applications were installed locally on a hard drive in our computer. Fast forward nine years, and we still have a lot of local applications, but with fast internet connections, having your local applications with you all the time is no longer a necessity, in fact the vast majority of applications on your hard drive right now probably have some sort of cloud equivalent…
In my opinion Google has, and continues to, make major breakthroughs in cloud computing. If you were working on a presentation or important document on your computer ten years ago but forgot to take it with you to work on the crucial day, there wouldn’t be a lot you could do about it…
Continue reading »Dropbox iPhone App Review
December 24, 2009
You may have caught our look at the Dropbox online file sync service for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux a few months back, where I mentioned its availability on the iPhone platform. If you’re a user of Dropbox and have an iPhone or iPod Touch then you should definitely check out the free Dropbox app on the iTunes App Store.
When you’ve downloaded Dropbox, you’ll need to enter your email address and password to sync it to your account, and everything on your personal storage will be available to download and view. The interface is extremely simple to navigate, with 3 options at the bottom of the screen allowing you to switch between “Favorites”, “My Dropbox” and “Settings”.
Continue reading »Pub Landlord Fined £8000 For Customer’s Pirate Download On Wi-Fi
November 30, 2009
One of the great things about Wi-Fi networks is that they are dead easy to set up, and thus let people easily access the Internet when they’re out and about – and that is why thousands of restaurants, pubs, fast food outlets and cafés (such as Starbucks) across the country are jumping onto the Wi-Fi bandwagon. But some may be feeling a little less confident about their decision thanks to this recent news.
The managing director of ‘The Cloud’ which is a company that provides wireless hotspots for the aforementioned establishments has said that over the summer a pub owner has been fined £8,000 because one of the people using his Wi-Fi illegally downloaded copyrighted material.
The owner of the rights to the material (the identity of which is not known) took the pub owner (the identity of which is also unknown) to court, and the result was this fine which presumably aims to persuade others to take stricter measures.
OnLive Mobile Phone Demo Of Cloud Gaming
November 16, 2009
A few weeks ago you may have read my article on ‘OnLive’ moving gaming into ‘the cloud’. The global gaming network played via the internet eliminating the need for exceptional hardware spec to play the latest modern games. If you didn’t then I recommend reading that before this revolutionary announcement.
Today, founder and CEO of the company Steve Perlman, announced and demonstrated the OnLive service, not only on a regular PC but on the iPhone too. This extends the service from the current TV or PC/Mac platforms to gaming on the go too, not only on the iPhone but also on a number of regular mobile phones which have yet to be announced.
Continue reading »Dropbox Review (File Sync Software)
October 20, 2009
My MobileMe subscription ran out last month, and I decided not to renew it, as I didn’t use the 20GB online capacity you’re given with the service. In fact I only ever used it as file sync software to transfer a few documents between home and wherever I happened to be, and for me that wasn’t worth £59 a year. Naturally, I needed a replacement, and decided to go with an application called Dropbox, a free application available for Windows, Mac OS X, the iPhone and Linux which allows you to share files between your computers or over the internet on a public computer.
The thing that attracted me to Dropbox was the fact that it isn’t just a web-based file hosting service, it’s an application that you can install on your computer whatever OS you’re running and just drag and drop files into your “Dropbox” folder on your hard drive. When you add or remove files from the folder, every other dropbox you have that’s linked to the same account will automatically sync and update the files in its own folder – so it’s also working as a form of online file backup.
Continue reading »OnLive – Video Gaming Moving Forward Into The Cloud?
October 8, 2009
At the game developers conference this year, we learned about a revolutionarly video gaming service called OnLive which could provide games on demand. Created by Steve Perlman, mainly recognised as being the creator of Quicktime, comes a service backed my gaming giants such as Electronic Arts, THQ, Eidos, Ubisoft and Codemasters.
In essence, OnLive is an online game streaming service. The hardware itself is still in Beta testing and consists of a pretty small box unit and wireless controller.
They say that to play the highest quality games, users will require download speeds of around 5mbps or more, which is fairly reasonable as by the time the product is released, that will be a very modest connection indeed for any serious gamers.
Continue reading »Microsoft Office 2010 Preview Guide
July 19, 2009
Here at Zath we’ve already had a look at some online aspects of Microsoft Office’s impending release and now Microsoft have released a load more info that gives us a better idea of what will have changed in Office three years on, and whether it will actually be worth buying.
The Office line is a pretty important one for Microsoft, and with the recent rise of the open source market it is now competing with the likes of Open Office (which I am currently using due to the fact I’m on a netbook) on a bigger scale, as well as its Apple counterparts. So intrigued as what it will bring? Read on!
Continue reading »A Dead Computer, Backups and Living On a Cloud
July 17, 2009
Have you ever considered using an online backup service before? What would you do if your computer died on you? Have you thought about how you’d cope in terms of potentially losing your important files forever?
Well I’ve recently got to find out that for myself as one night last week my computer’s power supply died with a loud bang, plunging us into darkness as it knocked off the whole house’s electricity and left me with the definitive smell of dead power supply – definitely not something that I like the smell of in the morning, evening or any other time of day!
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