cloud

Microsoft wants the world to know it is ready to go head-to-head with Amazon Web Services on both features and price.

As expected, Microsoft today announced that its Linux and Windows Server virtual machines (VMs) on Windows Azure are now generally available and ready for deployment. These are the persistent VMs that Microsoft publicly unveiled last June, and which provide users with a way to run existing Linux and Windows Server apps in the Azure cloud without having to completely rewrite them.

Microsoft announced last year that these persistent VMs will allow users to run Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows … Read more

Those of you waiting for Microsoft to unveil a version of Office for iOS or Android should stop waiting and take CloudOn's Office app for a spin.

Reports of Microsoft bringing Office to the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices have been in the wind for the past year.

Initial rumors pointed to a launch date of last November. The timeframe then slipped to last month. And now an alleged Microsoft road map suggests that a mobile version of Office won't appear until later next year.

The head of the Microsoft Office division recently suggested that iOS and Android users try Microsoft's SkyDrive app. … Read more

Two of Apple's communication networks, iMessage and FaceTime, are currently experiencing outages for some users.

According to Apple's fancy system status page, the issues for the two services began just after noon PT.

iMessage, of course, is Apple's proprietary messaging platform that works between iOS and OS X users. FaceTime is the company's live video chat service, also for those two platforms. Affected users report being unable to send or receive iMessages or FaceTime video calls.

This is not the first outage for either service, though iMessage has historically experienced more problems. This latest follows one … Read more

Amazon's Cloud Drive is one of many online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive where you can save pictures and documents for access on another system with Internet access.

While the Cloud Drive service has been available for a while, one of its lacking features has been a well-integrated file sync option that makes use of the online storage seamless. Additionally, Amazon's older tools for accessing the drive were written in Java, which is no longer included in OS X and which many are avoiding because of security issues.

To bring its service up … Read more

One would have assumed that Amazon, the Web services cloud giant, would already have had file syncing available for its personal cloud storage service, Cloud Drive.

Turns out that the digital lockers didn't have that capability until recently.

The Verge reported today that the company has quietly rolled out the new feature to Cloud Drive users.

File syncing seems like it should be a fairly standard feature for any cloud-based storage and collaboration platform, and Amazon's version doesn't seem much different.

Basically, users can just drop a file into a specified folder. That file is automatically uploaded … Read more

Physical music formats were so 20th century, so we put our music on computers. But even that was too much of a burden, so music is going up, up, and away, into the cloud and streaming. The iPod Classic is firmly rooted to the ground, and I like it that way.

I can live without Siri, iCloud, a camera, iOS 6, a Lightning connector, Bluetooth, AirPlay, or any of that jazz to keep the Classic's 160GB storage capability, and the Classic's "classic" 30-pin connector that still works with gazillions of docks and accessories. Is there another … Read more

Reports from Internet monitoring services show that recent news of a cyber attack so big that it made the Internet slow to a crawl around the world was a bit dramatic.

The New York Times reported about spam-fighting nonprofit Spamhaus and a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the Dutch group's site that became the "largest computer attacks on the Internet" and caused a "widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world."

Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, the company enlisted to fight the attacks for Spamhaus, told CNET today that the attacks -- which ceased yesterday … Read more

I'm a cloud-computing, Chrome OS fanboy for the most part. But today was one of of those days I was glad to have old-school Mac and Windows PCs lying around my home office.

I'm no power user, but Google Docs suits me for word processing, while Google Sheets works fine for creating spreadsheets. However, when it comes to importing and editing files from the incumbent power, Microsoft Office, Google just isn't meeting even my low-end needs.

Google handles such documents -- in either the older .doc and .xls formats, and the newer .docx and .xlsx formats -- … Read more