Connectivity & Cloud - Page 20

Ghost has finally moved out of the Alpha stage and into Beta. The cloud based virtual desktop is free to use and features a few nice tools for productivity and for fun.

We took a quick look at G.ho.st and found it useable but unfortunately a little slow for our tastes. The OS looks like a linux distro and has a "Go" button and the usual desktop icons. You can upload documents and files to your Virtual G.ho.st drive.

This allows you to work on them from any Web Connected computer. It was opening uploaded files that we found to have the biggest issue. The default system has Zoho for document editing. It tool over 5 seconds to open and display a short rtf (rich text font) document and was unable to display a pdf we used.

Images were not a big problem but the larger the image file, the slower it loaded.

We did not play with the mail or IM client yet but imagine the issues inherent with relying in your internet speed could potentially limit the usefulness of this new Cloud OS.

G.ho.st stands for Global Hosted Operating System, it was founded in 2006 and is made up of a team of Palestinians and Israelis. This team has had to do much of their work through phone and video conversations as travel between the two states is very controlled. Still the team has proven that Palestinians and Israelis can work together to accomplish something global.

Sugar Labs, the open sourcerer which came up with the software for One Laptop per Child's (OLPC) little laptop has now announced it has bunged its OS onto a USB stick which can be used on any old computer. Literally.

Sugar on a stick, as it's being called rather sweetly, can be run directly from a 1GB USB drive, giving kids a veritable candy mountain of collaborative educational software to play with. The stick, unwrapped at the LinuxTag conference in Berlin, aims to sugar coat the market with free software, according to its Sugar Labs developers, who only recently broke off from OLPC.

Patriot Memory has announce a new addtion to the Xporter Magnum flash drives, the 128GB model.

Patriot is the only one on the market with a 128GB flash drive and it is the largest that is available. Patriot says that the drive is capable 31Mb/s read speeds but does not say how fast the drive is capable of writing. Since it connect through USB, you can be sure that it is no faster 40MB/s and would certainly take quite a while to fill up.

Kingston has done something pretty impressive. They have launched the first ever 128GB USB flash drive. This impressive new drive is part of the DT200 family and features a capless design, ReadyBoot compatibility, Password Traveler software for Windows, and a $546 price tag.

If that high of a price puts you off your lunch you can still get the DT200 in 32 and 64GB flavors and not miss your rent. Due to its high manufacture cost the 128GB DT200 will be a made to order product.

If you need the biggest USB key out this might be your thing.

Read more here.

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling! Ok, ok not really but in the near future we may see some of those expensive GPS satellites falling from the sky and hindering our ability to drive to the store without getting lost.

The problem is that no one has been spending enough to keep the aging GPS satellite system in working order. To get accurate global coverage you need at least 24 GPS nodes floating up there, currently there are 31.

No problem you say, but the rub is that most are already past their designed life and the US military (the people with the pink slip0 have not been replacing them fast enough. So in the next couple of years we may have GPS outages while they rush to replace the failing satellites.

Read more here.

NEC has introduced the world's first USB 3.0 host controller, the µPD720200.

The new host controller supports the finalized SuperSpeed USB standard, allowing for transfer speeds up to 5Gbps and is fully backwards compatible with all previous USB standards.

Microsoft has made a last minute change to Windows 7 in an effort to try and increase security even more. This time around they have removed the AutoRun feature for most USB drives.

Silicon Power has released a 64GB eSATA/USB SSD that fits in your pocket, about the size of your typical USB Flash drive.

Google Earth and Street View are two very controversial tools. Lately Google has come under fire for both. Very recently Google Earth has been used by Hamas to plan rocket attacks into Israel while the terrorists that planned the Mumbai attack used both Google Earth and Street View to plan.

*Correction Google's Version of Street view is not available in Mumbai or Israel*

Google Earth Boss, John Hanke has gone on record to defend both tools.
In an recent interview he claims that if the attackers didn't have Google Earth and Street View they would just use something else.

The problem is that his examples are not comparable to the data you can get from Google Earth or Street View. Using those two internet tools you can plan anything from afar without the risk of exposure and detection.

He says that Terrorist would simply have an informant on the ground "who was working in the hotel and drawing layouts of everything on a napkin"
Or use a tourists map. Here is the rub, the informant in the hotel runs the risk of detection and being caught, it gives the security forces a chance to prevent the attack. Using a tourist's map does not show military installation details; in fact most do not show much detail at all.

To Google I say this, own up to the fact that these tools are not good for anything other than providing criminals an anonymous means to reconnaissance. And either dump them (as they should do with the privacy invading Street View altogether) or blur out detail on sensitive areas to reduce their effectiveness as tools of terror.

Read more here at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Addonics has a new device for anyone that is into storage and like flexibility from their drives.

This new gadget is a NAS adapter and is capable of turning any ordinary USB HDD into a fully working NAS device.

The Addonics NAS Adapter supports SMB, Open Source Samba, FTP (for up to 8 users) and can ever be setup as a print server and Bit Torrent download appliance.

Read more at Business Wire.

Steam will launch a new cloud service that will allow gamers to save their game settings online.

This new service called Steam Cloud (very inventive) will be able to store keyboard and mouse related settings as well as paint tag settings. This is a great feature if you are in the habit of playing your Steam games from different systems. The saved setting will be automatically applied as soon as a user launches a game through their Steam account and any changes made will be saved to the Steam servers.

Steam will make this available to all game companies using Steam for distribution free of charge and will go live with the upcoming demo of Left 4 Dead.

Elitest storage provider LaCie has just introduced a new series of portable hard drives which primarily cater to multimedia users.

The USB 3.0 specification was released only this month on the 13th and already a company by the name of Fresco Logic has managed to run a live and very working demonstration during the Intel Developer Forum.

The IDF red carpet is to be rolled out for USB 3.0, next week, claims this report from TG Daily.

The lads at TechConnect have sighted some images of a fully decked out HD 4850 graphics card which comes equipped not only with a superior cooling solution but multiple connectivity options including DVI, HDMI and Displayport for future-proofing.

Nick Knupffer over at the Technology@Intel blog voices his opinion on the recent controversy that Intel is keeping the USB 3.0 spec all to itself.

Recent reports claim that Intel hasn't been sharing the hot and juicy details with tech company heavy weights such as AMD and NVIDIA.

When folks think of "Corsair" they not only think about high-performance DDR memory modules but also equally high performing USB pen drives.

Arctic Cooling has today unveiled a product which all Northern Hemisphere based folks probably shouldn't do without now that the summer heat is starting to well and truly kick in.

ARCTIC Breeze allows you to ride with the wind (oops, that is MSI's line) play with the wind. This simple yet genius device takes one of Arctic Cooling's 92mm cooling fans and essentially puts it on a stick with some USB cabling to power it. You can switch the fan speed between 1200 and 2000 RPM and it is supposedly quiet at both speeds.

It will be on sale from next month and set you back around $16 USD - please send one to me, Taipei humidity is shocking.

So, are you one of those people who still love Walt Disney's classic Mickey Mouse? Thankfully, if you are, you'll be overjoyed to discovered that A-DATA has a licensing agreement with Disney that allows them to produce all sorts of weird and whacky Disney based USB memory products.