Items tagged with Cloud
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...
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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."...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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With Intel finding itself inside most of the world's consumer PCs and enterprise servers, it's begun making a massive push on making sure its chips wind up in all other devices - those that most of us regular folk don't think about. We're talking "edge devices" and "fog computing" hardware. "Edge devices" are those that connect all of our devices, so they can include routers, switches, and so forth. "Fog computing", by contrast, acts as decentralized resource management. An example of fog computing can be seen in Windows 10, which has the ability to serve updates to other PCs in a household or...
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In June of last year, Intel announced a $16.7B acquisition of chip designer Altera, a Silicon Valley bellwether known for producing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), PLDs (Programmable Logic Devices), Embedded Processors, and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). At the time of the announcement, Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich said, “Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments. With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more.” That’s a...
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Following a few months of teasing, Microsoft has finally rolled out Windows 10 Enterprise E3, which can be purchased through its official Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. While enterprise-level software solutions are typically feared due to their expense, Microsoft is making the E3 cost-of-entry modest enough to make even small businesses consider making the switch. Microsoft is pricing Windows 10 Enterprise E3 at $7/mo, or $84/yr. While few enjoy the idea of a subscription-based OS, this is one of those products that could pay for itself over time. We're talking enterprise-level control...
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More details about a previously disclosed security breach at cloud storage provider Dropbox have come to light. The hack itself is old news—it occurred back in 2012—but what's new is how many users were affected by it. Hackers made off with details belonging to north of 68 million Dropbox users, prompting a mass password reset. The folks at Motherboard got their mitts on a sample of files containing email addresses and hashed passwords of users affected by the Dropbox hack. The information is contained in four files totaling about 5GB, with details of 68,680,741 accounts. Apparently a senior Dropbox...
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