Items tagged with Cloud
There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who are working at home as of late, because of the Coronavirus outbreak. Social distancing is the recommended course of action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (along with frequent hand washing). Fortunately, the Internet infrastructure is mostly passing the test of this unique time we find ourselves in, and yes, parts of it are being strained, such as Microsoft's Azure cloud services. In a recent update to its Azure blog, Microsoft revealed that it has seen a massive 775 percent increase in its cloud services in regions where social distancing and/or stay-at-home orders are being enforced. It has also seen a big spike in Teams usage—it...
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More people are working from home to social distance themselves, as recommended by numerous health organizations in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Can the Internet infrastructure hold up? It's an interesting question—several streaming video services, for example, have cut the quality of feeds in Europe. In light of these "new and unique challenges," Microsoft says it is prioritizing its cloud infrastructure to first responders and certain government bodies. "As companies operationalize to address new and unique challenges, we have mobilized our global response plan to help customers stay up and running during this critical time. We are actively monitoring performance and usage trends...
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Cloud gaming is quickly becoming a high stakes affair, and companies both big and small are figuring out how to navigate the landscape. We have seen Google make big promises with its Stadia platform, NVIDIA roll its GeForce NOW service out of beta and into the public spectrum, and now Shadow is announcing some key changes to its own platform, including a significant price cut for its entry-level tier. Shadow now starts at $11.99 per month in the United States, if paying annually ($14.99 per month otherwise). That is down from $24.99 per month previously. This gets subscribers into the French-startup's Boost tier, which provides cloud access to a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, a quad-core CPU clocked at...
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This will come as little consolation to early GeForce NOW adopters, but that whole messy situation with Activision-Blizzard abruptly pulling its titles from the game streaming service right after its public launch? Well aw shucks, folks, it was just a simple "misunderstanding." In short, NVIDIA thought the agreement it had with Activision during the GeForce NOW beta period extended into the public launch. NVIDIA was wrong. So, what does this mean for gamers? Nothing has really changed—GeForce NOW is still devoid of Activision games, and there is absolutely no clarity on when or even if they will return to the service at a later date. "Activision Blizzard has been a fantastic partner during...
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After all of the hype and anticipation—and there was plenty of both—Google's cloud gaming Stadia service has arrived, and some early adopters are pretty pissed at what has been delivered versus what was advertised. Part of it boils down to the usual growing pains, especially for a project this ambitious. Still, the annoyances are starting to pile up. One of the big complaints has nothing to do with gameplay or performance, but missing access codes. Some of the people who preordered Stadia—a group referred to as founders, because they purchased the Stadia Founder's Edition—are still without their access codes days after the service launched. "We're aware that some of you...
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It as seems as Google is getting its ducks in a row in preparation for its Stadia cloud gaming service going live later this month. Ahead of Stadia's launch on November 19, Google has made available a Stadia app for Android in the Play Store. Anyone who owns a compatible handset can head over there right now and download it. Stadia will enable to gamers to play titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, Borderlands 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 (to name just a few of the bigger hits arriving on the platform) on desktops and laptops, on Chrome OS devices, and on televisions through a Chromecast Ultra dongle. It can also be played on Pixel 2 and later handsets. In its current form, the Stadia app is listed at...
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We already knew Google was planning to launch its Stadia cloud gaming service in November, and now we have an exact release date—mark your calendars for November 19. That is when the Stadia Founder's Edition packages will arrive on doorsteps, with servers set to open up to the public at 12:00 pm EST (9:00 am PST). Stadia is not a game console, but there is some hardware involved. The Founder's Edition package, which is still available to preorder for $129.99, contains a Chormecast Ultra streaming dongle, limited edition Night Blue controller, a pair of 3-month Stadia Pro subscriptions—one for yourself and one of the form of a "Buddy Pass" to hand out to a friend. Though Stadia is...
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AMD is on a roll with its Zen CPU and Navi GPU architectures, the former of which is proving particularly compelling to customers across the board. Intel still dominates in overall semiconductor sales, but AMD is not exactly playing second fiddle, or at least it's trying not to. In what could be a major boost to AMD's bottom line, there is speculation that Google may migrate its cloud data centers to EPYC hardware. Bear in mind that the data center is the real high stakes battlefield for AMD and Intel, where margins are much higher compared to desktop and laptop products. AMD is on the cusp of introducing the world's first 7-nanometer x86 data center CPU, a next-gen EPYC product line based on...
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Google's G Suite has been around for a long time now, and one of the features that users have wanted since its inception was an offline mode. Google has now announced that users can work anywhere with a new offline mode for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The offline mode makes it easy for G Suite users to continue to work when they are offline or when they have a bad internet connection within Google Drive. A new offline preview mode allows users to see which files are available for offline. The preview mode is accessible by hovering over the circle with the check inside on the right upper corner of the Drive menu and click enable offline preview. To make documents available offline, right...
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It is easy to imagine that all of the engineers and everyone else involved in Sony's PlayStation division saw the pact between Sony and Microsoft in the cloud gaming space coming. After all, the collaboration had been in the works for over a year. However, that is apparently not how it went down. The agreement between Sony and Microsoft was not just a surprise to the press and public at large, but also to most of the people involved in the development of the PlayStation console and related services. In case you missed the announcement last week, Sony and Microsoft have entered into a vague partnership on "direct-to-consumer entertainment platforms and AI solutions," one that is centered around...
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Intel is facing increasingly fierce competition from AMD in many facets of the CPU market today. Retailer metrics show that the AMD Ryzen consumer parts are chipping away at Intel's dominance in the consumer market. At the same time, AMD is slowly encroaching on Intel share of the server market. However, Intel has its fingers into many pies, with one of them being cloud computing. Today, Intel and Google have made a new announcement concerning acceleration of hybrid cloud architectures. Intel says that it has long believed that cloud architectures are a foundation for data-centric computing, while underscoring that a multi-cloud foundation is required for ideal growth of a business. To that end,...
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As has been warned in the past, if your company uses Box to share files and is employing a custom domain, you might be exposing confidential data. That is not because of a bug or vulnerability in Box. Instead, it's due to improperly configured settings that could allow a snoop to find your files. Security firm Adversis said it was able to identify thousands of Box customer sub-domains through standard intelligence gathering techniques, and via brute force using a relatively large word list. This led to the discovery of hundreds of thousands documents adding up to several terabytes of data. "Companies using Box Enterprise get their own sub-domain, and documents saved on Box can be shared to anyone...
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Microsoft Research and its cloud engineers are busy building a cloud network that promises to deliver console-quality game streaming on any device, the company's Phil Spencer said on stage at E3. While details are light at the moment, Microsoft did say that the upcoming service is rooted in its artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. To what extent remains to be seen, as does everything else about the new service. Spencer did not elaborate on when the service might launch or what pricing will look like. Still, it's an interesting path that Microsoft is embarking on, and not exactly an easy one. Microsoft is not the first company to see the potential in rolling out a streaming...
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Microsoft is looking to the future, where it wants to be the Netflix of the gaming world. The goal is to create a game streaming service where gamers never have to buy a physical or digital game again; they simply stream whatever they want to play from the cloud. Analysts on Wall Street reckon that this is exactly what Microsoft needs to become a $1 trillion company. "We see Microsoft building out the 'Netflix of Gaming,'" Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss wrote in an investor note. "We think that gaming has historically been largely ignored, misunderstood, and undervalued by analysts and investors." Weiss isn’t the only analyst that thinks streaming gaming is the next big thing for Microsoft,...
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When it comes to gaming today, many people get their fix via a console of some sort (i.e. an Xbox One or PlayStation 4). However, there are gaming services are out there that are capable of streaming games directly without the need for expensive, high-end hardware sitting in your entertainment center. Microsoft apparently thinks that cloud gaming is the future to the extent that the company has announced an entirely new cloud gaming division. Microsoft has been signaling for a while that it intended to bet big on cloud gaming with acquisitions of Havok back in 2015, Simplygon in 2017, and PlayFab earlier this year. The software giant has also been shuffling around executives to prepare for the...
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Gaming on-the-go for most people means an app on a tablet or smartphone, and there are of course the folks who will do their mobile gaming with a laptop. The catch is that gaming with high-end games requires some serious muscle of the sort that many laptops, tablets, and smartphones simply can’t muster. A new streaming gaming service is launching in California called Shadow, and it will come to more locations later (exactly when is unannounced at this time). Shadow is like a “powerful Windows 10 PC” that allows you to surf the web, play games, and use high-end software on tablets and smartphones. Shadow can also turn basic laptops into workstation/gaming class machines. The...
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In April 2013, cloud storage provider Backblaze kicked off what would immediately become a tradition. Each year, the company analyzes an incredible amount of data collected over the course of the year to give the rest of us an impression on which hard drive vendors come out ahead, and which fall behind. In other words, it's a polite way of analyzing which vendor "is more likely to lose your data". In Q4 of last year, Backblaze had 91,243 hard drives in operation, a number which excludes boot drives and a few others that couldn't meet the company's criteria of having at least 45 drives of one model in use during the period monitored (to give more accuracy to the results). As seen in the table...
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Try wrapping your head around this one—Google is diving under water in order to build a bigger cloud for land dwellers. It's not actually as confusing (or ironic) as it sounds. Google has already helped built three undersea fiber-optic cables, and now it plans to add three more, which will both speed up data transfers to certain reasons and offer alternative routes when data fails in other areas. It will cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars and take more than a year to lay the new cables. It's a big investment, though a drop in the bucket compared to the $30 billion Google has spent to date on improving its infrastructure over the past three years. That includes money spent on both...
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Microsoft this week reported earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, 2017, and what a quarter it was. Non-GAAP revenue came in a healthy $24.7 billion, with earnings per share checking in at 98 cents, beating most estimates. Microsoft's operating income for the past three months was $7 billion, while its profit for the quarter came to $7.7 billion, a large part of which was attributable to Microsoft's cloud business. "Innovation across our cloud platforms drove strong results this quarter," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft, "Customers are looking to Microsoft and our thriving partner ecosystem to accelerate their own digital transformations and to unlock...
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The numbers are in and they show that Microsoft needs to seriously consider refreshing its Surface line, and especially its Surface Pro tablets. Revenue from Microsoft's Surface products declined 26 percent year-over-year during its most recent quarter ended March 31, 2017. The only other segment to post a lost was Microsoft' Enterprise Services, which dropped 1 percent. This is where it gets tough competing in hardware, as Microsoft is finding out. Microsoft now has a somewhat fleshed out lineup of Surface products, including its relatively new Surface Book laptop and Surface Studio all-in-one PC. However, both of those product SKUs are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum and are intended...
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Here at HotHardware, we've talked a lot about the importance of keeping good backups. On a personal level, a failed backup would affect just a couple of people (if not just one); but carelessness in the enterprise can can affect a lot more people. Unfortunately, this is a lesson GitLab has found out the hard way. As its name implies, GitLab is a website designed to help developers manage their open-source projects from start to finish. Users on the site have an expectation that their data is going to be kept safe, but as is proven here, problem can arise, so we can never treat a single source as a de facto backup. What happened here is that an IT manager working a late night accidentally deleted...
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Do you need to move a lot of data? To be clear: we're talking lots of data. Sure, that 64 TB NAS box might seem meaty, but that's paltry compared to the kind of data we're talking about. Think 100,000 TB, aka 100 PB. It's almost hard to wrap our heads around that kind of storage, but that's the amount Amazon says it can move with ease via its new Snowmobile service. In essence, Snowmobile comes to us in the form of a pure-white 18-wheeler that's used to bring your data from point A to point B. Amazon says that Snowmobile will show up at your door after a quick assessment and then work with you to connect the truck's internal storage to yours, and then begin milking it until everything is transferred....
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