Cloud Computing

Wed, January 18, 2012 - Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, and MapR mix simpler setup of Hadoop clusters with proprietary twists and trade-offs

Mon, January 09, 2012 - Was it the philosopher George Santayana who said, "Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it?" Did he offer any hints for those of us who want to repeat the past, especially the successes? We're beyond the teary elegies of 2011 and deep into making resolutions for 2012. If we're going to stand half a chance of creating something great this year, it only makes sense to pause and celebrate what went right in 2011.

Thu, January 05, 2012 - In the beginning, it was Macintosh vs. Windows. Then it was Windows against OS/2 against the Mac. Followed by Netscape Navigator head-to-head against Internet Explorer.

Mon, December 19, 2011 - Ubuntu 11.10 has some jagged edges and documentation isn't easy to locate, but Canonical is certainly dreaming big with this latest update, dubbed Oneiric (dreamy) Ocelot.

Wed, December 07, 2011 - It used to be that when I said "cloud services," people's eyes would glaze over and in minutes they'd be gently snoring. That was then. This is now. While CIOs and CTOs still debate about what role the cloud will have in business, personal cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone's computing plans.

Wed, November 30, 2011 - Engine Yard provides the most extensive control over the application environment, while Heroku makes life easier for developers

Wed, November 02, 2011 - The minimum "best practice" backup arrangement for your vital data is to maintain three copies of the data: the original, a local backup, and a second backup offsite. With LaCie's CloudBox NAS device, you simply back up to the ethernet-connected unit, which then automatically backs up to LaCie's own online backup service. But easy as it is, CloudBox is also expensive, capacity-challenged, and slower than average.

Thu, October 13, 2011 - If you ask IT execs why they're hesitant about moving to the public cloud, security comes up at the top of the list. But security vendors are responding to these concerns with a raft of new products. Here are four interesting cloud security tools that we tested.

Thu, September 29, 2011 - Nearly all the tools you need to run a small or midsize company are within reach of any Web browser

Tue, August 30, 2011 - Now that Microsoft has launched Office 365, it is officially "game on" for online office productivity suites. Microsoft may enjoy a near-monopoly in the desktop office suite market, but online it faces established rivals in the form of Google Apps and Zoho Docs.