Kiran Upadhyay

Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30 researchers, companies and customers, including ARM, Canonical, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat. As Google points out in today’s announcement, evaluating the performance of different cloud services isn’t easy. There are a few companies like CloudHarmony that offer cloud-performance reports (and tools like New Relic obviously let you monitor your existing installs), but none of these take your specific needs into account, and it’s often unclear how those tests were performed. Once installed, PerfKit runs about 20 benchmark tests that look at everything from raw CPU performance to more complex database and network ben...

Duolingo, the popular language learning tool, today announced the launch of Duolingo for Schools, a service that makes it easier for schools to use its platform in a structured learning environment. Using this new service, teachers can use Duolingo for their classes and track their students’ progress through a centralized dashboard. From there, they can get detailed reports on the lessons their students took. There are already plenty of teachers who use the service informally and they will surely be happy to get access to these reports. With Duolingo for Schools, it will be easier for teachers to integrate the service into their lessons plans, assign it as homework or give students extra credit for using the service outside of class. More importantly, though, Duolingo may actually be able to give students a more personalized learning experience than a large classroom because the program can quickly figure out a student’s strengths and weaknesses and then fine-tune its lessons ...

Hot on the heels of a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet, the announcement of the Datalogix acquisition marks an aggressive move on Oracle’s part — an attempt to prove to the market that it’s getting serious about data-driven marketing. Salesforce added Datalogix to its marketing cloud back in April 2014. This Oracle acquisition will probably be making some Salesforce folks feel like they got a lump of coal in their stocking this year. The past year has seen much fanfare surrounding marketing cloud solutions, integrated software promising to help maximize and measure marketing impact across all activities. Oracle’s Data Cloud is the latest part of the company’s answer to this growing category, and Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce, SAP, and IBM all have their own take on the one-stop enterprise solutions. In developing its own cloud platform, Oracle has been highly acquisitive in recent years — scooping up Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai and Compendium — among others. Not many people pre...

You can get pretty much anything on a stick. You can actually, and I kid you not, get fried butter on a stick. And soon, thanks to Intel, you can even get a full, Windows 8.1 PC on a stick. The Windows 8.1-based Compute Stick contains a quad-core Atom processor, 32 gigabytes of storage, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and wi-fi and Bluetooth support. It will retail for $149, early this year. A separate Linux version will contain half the RAM, a third of the storage, and will sell for a reduced $89. Here’s the thing in all its stick-y glory: Intel is working to shrink the size of its computing products. Its new Quark SE SOC — system on a chip — could help the wearable revolution become less a dream, and more of a functional reality. Intel was late to smartphones and tablets — its earnings tell that story each quarter — but when it comes to even smaller machines, the company appears bent on not falling behind.

Mozilla today rolled out Firefox 34. While most browser updates these days aren’t all that exciting, this one includes a couple of interesting new features. What most users in North America will notice right off the bat, however, is that this is the first version of Firefox with Yahoo as its default search experience. It’s easy enough to change the default search engine in Firefox, and I would guess that most current users will quickly switch back to Google. The Yahoo Search experience, which the company specifically tweaked for Firefox users, is perfectly all right for most searches. But at the end of the day, it feels like it doesn’t have some of Google’s smarts, especially when it comes to queries that would usually trigger Google’s Knowledge Graph. With today’s update, Mozilla is also moving its WebRTC-powered chat tool “Firefox Hello” out of the beta channel and into its mainstream release. The organization built this service, which allows you to start audio and video chats ...

The boxed copy sales model for professional software is dead, and increasingly companies are realizing that charging certain customers at all doesn’t make much sense. Microsoft figured it out, and Autodesk is expanding the pool of people who get free access to include all students, teachers and schools at academic institutions around the world. That’s in addition to the U.S., where it made its software free earlier this year as part of the ConnectED program created by President Barack Obama. The move means that Autodesk software, including AutoCAD, Sketchbook, 3D Max, Maya and more, will be available to around 680 million students and teachers across 800,000 secondary and post-secondary schools, according to the company, without any paid license required. The catch is that some cloud services and support require additional paid subscriptions, but that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to enterprise software sales model these days. Free software for schools and studen...

Editing code isn’t that hard. A terminal, a little Vim, a little PHP, some beer, and maybe a few Google searches and you’re off and running. But what if you want to work on a project without compromising your personal server or don’t really have an environment for coding? SourceLair is one answer. The freemium service lets you build projects right in your browser. It supports Python, Ruby, HTML5, JavaScript, PHP, and C++ and offers a Linux shell right in the browser. You can run things immediately (here is my hot project) and it supports Git and Mercurial. The founders all went to the University of Athens and they’ve worked on a number of larger projects including dev positions at Warp.ly, ARM, and Niobium Labs. They’ve closed a $250,000 round with the National Bank of Greece and they have 1,000 users right now. “SourceLair does not attempt to port existing solutions for creating software into the browser. SourceLair augments the existing development experience by integrating ...

For more than 12 years now, the .NET framework has been the programming model for developers who want to build apps for Windows. But in its efforts to take many of its developer tools cross-platform, Microsoft today announced that it plans to take .NET to both the Mac and Linux soon and that it is open-sourcing most of the full server-side .NET core stack (not client-side .NET), starting with the next version. As Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me, about 6 million developers are now building applications on top of the framework. “We’ve been widely successful with that,” he said. But now the question is, how do you move .NET forward? Microsoft already open sourced the .NET compiler earlier this year, so it’s not new to this (even though many pundits may still take a double-take when they hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence). Looking at Microsoft’s recent history, however, today’s announcement doesn’t come a...

When you are building Web apps — and especially when you are debugging them — all the subtle differences between the different browsers start coming into play. Testing on every single browser is a hassle and there are no good tools available that help you easily automate these tests, partly because the different browsers’ developer tools can’t talk to each other. Mozilla, however, has now built an adapter that allows it to connect the Firefox developer tools with Chrome and iOS to help developers test their web apps there right from Firefox. For the time being, this new tool is only available in Firefox’s Nightly builds with the Firefox Developer Tools Add-on installed. It also only works with the latest beta of Chrome (37) and Safari on iOS (but not the desktop). All of these limitations clearly show that this is still a very experimental preview release, but it’s something the Firefox team has been working on for a while. Mozilla says it expects that it’ll be a few more mont...

The Web is going to get faster in the very near future. And sadly, this is rare enough to be news. The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, but they are. It won't be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. The Web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us. That problem is images. As of August 2014, the size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the Web is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB. If you've got a nice fast fiber connection, that image payload isn't such a big deal. But if you're on a mobile network, that huge image payload is not just slowing you down, it's using up your limited bandwidth. Depending on your mobile data plan, it may well be costing you money. What makes that image payload doubly annoying when you're using a mobile device is that you're getting images inten...

Windows 9 has been leaked, and seems to show a backing away from the aggressively touch-focused Windows 8, with a mini start menu and dropping of the Charms bar, but we’ll get a better look September 30, according to the Verge. The blog reports Microsoft is planning an official unveiling of what’s next for its desktop OS for that date, with a technology preview available for early adopters following quickly after that. The upcoming Windows 9 release is codenamed ‘Threshold,’ and expectations are that we’ll see it arrive for the general public as a stable release sometime early next year. Previously, we covered what might be happening with the new release, which suggests that the desktop might be getting a return to glory in the new version – think more Windows 7 in your Windows 8 experience. Expectations are that Modern Windows (aka Metro) will still exist in the next generation, but it’ll be more closely integrated with the desktop side, with apps running in windowed mode instead ...

Microsoft is not known for its quick adoption of new trends, but when it does get on board, it often tries to make up lost time with gobs of money and hoards of experienced software engineers. This strategy seems to be working with Office Online, a cloud-connected version of the world’s most popular productivity software that is free to use (with limitations) and offers a buffet of useful features. You’ll even find Office Online useful, if you already have a copy of Office installed on your computer. Office Online Is Free There’s always been one big, fat problem with Office; the price. It’s expensive, and many users simply can’t afford it, even if they prefer it over a free solution like Google Docs or LibreOffice. Office Online, however, is one of the few ways you can use Office entirely free of charge, forever, and without any specific limitations. Office’s web apps are the same whether you pay or not, and free users even receive 15 gigabytes of cloud storage, which is far mor...

If you’re a freelancer, small business, or running a non-profit organization, fillable PDFs could be really useful for you. You might send them to clients to apply for your services, or to create a design brief for a project. You may use them yourself if you regularly need to provide clients with standard information that only changes a little, such as an invoice for payment. This article will show you how you can design your own fillable PDF form, completely free. Free & Open Source Fillable PDF Creation Most PDF-creating programs charge if you want to do anything more involved than reading a PDF. With LibreOffice Draw, an amazing open-source program in the LibreOffice Suite, you can take full control of creating documents including fillable PDFs, and it won’t cost you a dime. Incidentally, LibreOffice Draw, which we covered more generally before, can be a decent overall alternative to Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator for creating art, illustrations, and documents.

It’s never too late to learn Linux. Sure, it’s been around for over twenty years, but the good news is that Linux has yet to hit its peak. Every year, the number of users continues to grow and there’s no sign that it’s going to stop any time soon. Whether you’ve been putting off Linux for years or you’re just hearing about it for the first time, there are ample reasons to start today. Want to try now? These resources will get you started. Why Learn Linux? Linux isn’t for everyone. If you’re tied to Windows for some reason or another, then stick with it. If you don’t have the time or energy to learn a new operating system, that’s fine. However, you should know that there are real benefits to switching to Linux. Open source philosophy. Linux is one of the most famous instances of open source software and a prime example of open source as a viable model for business. Without open source, we wouldn’t have Firefox, Apache, MediaWiki, BitTorrent, or any number of other products that...

Everything important that you need to know about living a successful life, you can get from a computer program. Don’t believe me? Read on. When I first started programming as a young kid, it only amounted to copying foreign-looking words and symbols out of a computer magazine so that my brother and I could get our old Franklin 64 with a dual floppy drive to play a cute little digital tune at us. Back then, there weren’t many life lessons to discern out of that cryptic text. A number of years later, in high school Pascal class, things started to look different. Learning about IF statements and FOR loops started to spark philosophical synapse connections the likes of which Walt Whitman and Robert Frost would have been proud of. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but still the insights were pretty cool. Yes, I know, it’s quite a nerdy thing to say — but the truth is that there’s a lot of wisdom in code….in while statements, arrays, methods, objects and all that. In fact, a whole lot that I...

New changes to Skype and the support of third party apps have left many users frustrated, particularly where call recording is concerned. With suggestions that the service isn’t as secure as once thought, could now be the time to start looking for an alternative VoIP call recording service? Quit Skype? Are You Mad?! Had you told me 12 months ago that Microsoft was going to disable the Skype desktop API, thus rendering many third-party call recorders useless, I’d have suspected you (or they) were mad.  Although a temporary delay has been announced , the writing is clearly on the wall. Like many people, I use Skype extensively, both as a telephony system (I work from home, and my Office 365 subscription gives me free monthly call credit) and for podcasting with two online colleagues. The best solution for podcasting in this way (and for bringing in someone over the phone) is a call recording app – I use  MP3 SkypeCallRecorder . To find that the technology giant ...

Windows XP is really old, and we would suggest that you don't use it unless you really have no option. For the most part, however, that age doesn't really manifest itself. Sure, the operating system is missing the security features, hardware acceleration, and built-in support for things like USB 3 that newer versions of Windows have, but old software doesn't have the same issues as, say, old cars. Old software generally runs as well today as it did when it was brand new. But Windows XP users have noticed that this isn't  entirely  true. A bunch of them have found that the old operating system is working considerably worse than when it was released in 2001. The problem is that—especially among those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7—each time you boot your Windows XP machine, it slows to a crawl. There's a built-in process, svchost.exe, chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the mac...

Watching TV has never been easier, with apps for smartphones and tablets  streaming live pictures to your handheld device. It’s been tougher for desktop users, but with the release of Windows 8 several apps have come along that make enjoying TV on your computer much easier. Desktop and notebook owners have long had the advantage of TV cards and USB signal converters that enable the capture, display and recording of TV signals from terrestrial, satellite and cable providers. However, setting up these devices can be tricky, and in the case of the USB solutions, a drain on your system resources. While there are various standalone client apps that stream TV to your computer, Windows 8 has several apps that make watching television much easier. The following apps are all free from the Windows 8 Store. TVCatchup  (UK Only) In the UK, TVCatchup has a huge user-base across the various mobile platforms and has also been released on Windows 8. Although considered...