While Google has been ever increasing it’s Gmail capacity, Microsoft overtook them with their upgrade to their Live email services brand. But Google is looking to one up Microsoft this time. Google is getting ready to launch their G drive as some call it, a free online storage space. Although Microsoft already launched a service like this called Skydrive, it only has a 500MB capacity. No word on Google’s capacity has been released but it will surely be in the gigabyte range for their free accounts, with more storage available for purchase. The service should be available by next year.

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Tags: google, microsoft, storage, tech

It seems that with XP’s newest service pack won’t only be a bug fix/patch release but will actually help performance. Using an Office benchmarking tool the Devil Mountain Software group have shown the new Service Pack to have as much as a 10% boost over Service Pack 2 and over twice as fast of the same test under Vista. One more reason to stick with trusty old XP a little longer. Just goes to prove that Vista’s biggest competitor is XP itself.

Source: TechSpot

Tags: business, computer, IT, microsoft, vista, windows

Fedora 8 was released and some of the biggest improvements were to the audio system. A new daemon dubbed PulseAudio allows much more control over audio streams and the programs producing them. Another big improvement is the inclusion of a little utility called Codeina which allows user to purchase legal codecs for dealing with different media formats. PolicyKit is the new authentication system that aims to make programs that require root access more secure by only allowing certain processes of the program root access.

The full feature list can be found here.

Source: ArsTechnica

Tags: computer, fedora, IT, Linux, release

Windows Home Server (WHS)

I did a review of the beta release of WHS back in March, and now it seems that it has finally it the market. WHS is a nice product that simplifies the process of backups and acts as a central repository for all your photos, music, moves. The beta was very simple to install and extremely easy to connect client computer to the server (inserting a CD). HP delayed their release of the product as they were adding custom software to connect to some of their other software.

From HP

MediaSmart, which won’t ship until later this month, is priced at US$599 with 500GB of storage, or $749 with a terabyte of disk space. Those prices were identical to the listings leaked by Amazon.com in late August.

Although this is more of a niche product that niche has been growing lately, 50% of homes have at least two PCs and 25% have more than three. Although I personally use a Linux server for all my needs, this is a very nice product from Microsoft (I know I can’t believe I said it either)

Source: PCWorld

Tags: computer, microsoft, tech, WHS

Companies and businesses will always need an IT department, why you ask. Because the people these companies hire just don’t care about security or just don’t know any better. A recent survey of employees revealed that at least 35% have violated IT policies put in place to protect company as well as customer’s data. At least 15% have use P2P networking clients on corporate networks, if thats not asking for trouble I don’t know what is. What you had 100,000 customer accounts in your shared folder, oh well?!

Most employees don’t care about their information either, 3/4 or employees check their personal accounts (email, banking, ebay) from work. Not only does this pose a security problem in the form of spyware, viruses, and other forms of nasties, but puts their personal information out on a public network. That same 3/4 also probably installs the good ol bonzi buddy, and my cool web search. This is why companies will also need IT to clean up the mess their idiotic employees make, oh and to have someone to blame for the whole lost customer account thing.

Source: Net Security.org

Tags: business, IT, security