Sunday, January 27, 2013

Google Cloud Servers

Google is now offering cloud server hosting services under the tradename Google Compute Engine.  Its currently limited to Linux Virtual Machines.  The pricing is comparable to that of Rackspace for the same specs.  But for entry-level VM's, Rackspace still comes out a bit cheaper.  And Rackspace still offers companies more OS options.

Where Google is known to excel is in scalability.  So companies looking for massive scaling solution and high-performance computation of "BigData" should look into this.  I do not know about Google support though compared to dedicated hosting companies like Rackspace or Softlayer, who have solid track record for excellent support.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Jelly Bean on my Galaxy S III

My Samsung Galaxy S III downloaded the latest Android OS (Jelly Bean) and firmware by itself.  It just prompted me if I wanted to install it already.  The installation process went very smoothly except for a minor inconvenience -- it complained that my external SD is damaged.  I've suspected before that I might have removed it improperly as a USB device so it did not get ejected properly.  I had to reformat it to make it usable again.

The new OS seem zippier (or maybe its just my imagination).  For one, I am happy that they re-positioned the Bluetooth icon in the pull-down menu to be accessible on the first screen.  With the previous OS version, I had to do an extra swipe to the right just to be able to access it.

There is also a multiple window support now.  I'm sure this is handy with a tablet but I don't know how useful it is for a Smartphone with a small screen anyway.  Splitting your screen further into multiple windows does not really give you that much real estate left.  It is kinda cool to see both Facebook and GMail on a tiled layout within the same screen though.

The "desktop" already support folders similar to iOS.  So multiple icons on the same screen can be grouped together into a "folder".  Clicking the "folder" will expand it to what's contained inside.