Month: November 2012

Microsoft’s DropBox alternative, SkyDrive, is ramping up. I hooked up mine in my Windows 8 build on my laptop, but I still, personally use DropBox!

By the way, if you would like to connect with DropBox, do me a favor (to give me space credit) and do it by clicking here: https://db.tt/vRTI68D

SkyDrive usage has doubled in the last 6 months, now you can select what to sync

“About 6 months ago, we released the first sync apps for SkyDrive making it easy to view and manage your personal SkyDrive from the File Explorer in Windows and Finder in OS X. We’re excited to announce that since then, you have put more and more of your files into your own SkyDrive and in the last 6 months, you’ve doubled the amount of SkyDrive storage being used.

We’re both humbled and excited by this pace of growth. While many of you have told us that you love being able to have everything in one place and access it from anywhere, you’ve also said that sometimes you want to be more selective with the files you sync to each device. So today, we’re releasing an update to our sync apps that includes the ability to select what you sync along with the ability to share files and folders right from the Windows File Explorer. In addition, we’ve just released a few updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows Phone and Android improving how you access your SkyDrive across different devices. Between these updates and the way SkyDrive comes with Windows 8 and the new Office, we’re excited to see how fast your SkyDrive storage usage will grow in the next 6 months.

Select what to sync

With today’s release, you can now select which folders from SkyDrive are synced – making it easier to use SkyDrive with laptops or tablets with small drives. You’re in control. If you’d like to keep all your photos and documents in SkyDrive but only sync a folder of your most important documents to your laptop, you can do that – even if your desktop is syncing the full set. You can choose specific sub-folders to sync as well; you aren’t limited to your primary SkyDrive folders.”

Go NC State! Researchers there have come up with a cool way to increase WiFi speed in existing routers via a software upgrade! As much as 700%! How cool is that?

The end of slow public WiFi? Researchers develop new protocol that boosts WiFi performance by 700%

“Conferences, airports, cafes – they might offer free WiFi to visitors, but they are often sluggish in their operation because everyone else is hogging the connection.

This issue might become a thing of the past, after a team of engineers at NC State University (NCSU) announced the development of WiFox (via ExtremeTech), a new software protocol that could theoretically be added to existing Internet routers and is capable of boosting WiFi performance by 700 percent.

Traditionally, routers offer a single channel of data to users. When the access point receives an increased number of data requests, it becomes harder for it to send back the data it has requested. The access point could be programmed to give all pieces of data a high priority to clear its backlog, but then users have issues submitting new requests.

Data backs up, and the router has issues dishing out the necessary information to users. You may have experienced this when you turn up early to a conference, enjoy the public WiFi connection, and then get kicked off when the venue starts to fill up and you have to share it with everyone else.

NCSU engineers position WiFox as the software equivalent of a traffic policeman, ensuring that the data traffic moves smoothly in both directions. WiFox works by monitoring the traffic on a WiFi channel, intelligently detecting load issues and granting access to priority data when it detects a backlog of information passing backwards and forwards.

The team says that when they tested the software on a router in their labs capable of handling 45 users, it saw improvements of between 400 and 700 percent when it reached the maximum number of users. On average, the router was able to respond to data requests four times faster than a router that didn’t utilize the protocol.

Purely software based, WiFox has the potential to change the way heavily-trafficked routers operate around the world.

The NCSU team intends to present its research paper at the ACM CoNEXT 2012 conference held in Nice, France in December – from a purely selfish point of view, we hope it makes it into the access points offered by various technology companies at their product launches.”

My favorite office suite has a brand spanking new release!

LibreOffice

“The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.3, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment, on personal desktops or inside organizations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice has quickly become the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software. Instrumental for the overall progress is the growing developer base, which has just reached the number of 550 since the launch of the project, making LibreOffice one of the fastest growing free software projects of the decade.

After the City of Munich and the French Government, which are migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, it is now the turn of several provinces in Italy, including the largest one in term of inhabitants. In addition, there are many private companies switching to LO, like the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in Romania, with 1,000 Windows and GNU/Linux desktops.”

Happy 8th Birthday, Firefox!

From Mashable:

“On November 9 2004, eight years ago today, the Mozilla foundation launched the first version of Firefox.

This anniversary may be confusing for some, as we’ve recently compiled a timeline of Firefox’s first 10 years. This is because the browser that would eventually become Firefox, called Phoenix, was actually launched as a beta in 2002. When the first full version of the browser was launched in 2004, it was renamed to Firefox.

Mozilla’s open source browser was seen as a breath of fresh air at the time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market share, annoying many users with its numerous security issues.

Over the years, Firefox captured a sizable chunk of the market share from Internet Explorer, but in the last couple of years it has gotten some very serious competition in the form of Google’s Chrome and others. Currently, Firefox is the world’s third most popular browser, behind IE and Chrome.

For the future, Mozilla plans several important features, including a Windows 8-ready version of Firefox, as well as the Social API, which will enable integration of Facebook and other social networks with the browser.”