Hasta La Gadget!

Apple co-founder and technology celebrity Steve Wozniak spoke last night at a monologue show by Mike Daisey, saying that he thought the next few years of cloud computing will be “horrendous.” Letting the crowd of the show “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” know how he felt about the cloud trend in everything from music streaming to content storage, Woz wasn’t shy about noting how worried he was about the future. Woz noted that considering what we’ve got in the so-called cloud already “there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”

With many of the top hardware and software manufacturing groups working with “cloud-based” services now, Woz let it be known that he’s not entirely happy with how the idea of ownership has transformed very recently. “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things.”

Woz is a notorious owner of things, that’s for certain. Speaking onstage where Robert MacPherson of the AFP could hear him, the wise one continued:

“A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it. … I really worry about everything going to the cloud.” – Steve Wozniak

This “cloud” movement, for those of you unfamiliar, is the move away from hard disks that are able to be accessed from one’s own immediate area toward a model with remote servers. Once you’ve got your information “in the cloud,” you still do have it on someone’s computer somewhere (a server, that is to say), but you’ll need the internet or some other network connection to get at it.

Steve Wozniak is worried about the massive break-down that always has the potential to happen when massive amounts of information is stored remotely in any given situation.

What do you think, SlashGear readers?

Woz speaks: “With the cloud, you don’t own anything” is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As both Google and Apple bring their big guns to the cloud market with Google Drive and iCloud, so too has Microsoft accepted the challenge with a cloud-connected Office 365 for both PCs and tablets. Utilizing their undeniably popular Office suite with Office 2013 as well as web-based versions of apps in Office 365, Microsoft has at once brought the Office back to the desktop (with desktop-based 365 applications) and connected it all back up to the cloud for any-machine usage. Users’ Microsoft accounts are attached in the upper right-hand corner of each Office 365 application, all of it connected to SkyDrive for web-based storage.

Users will still be able to purchase the one-machine set of applications that is Office 2013 if they wish, that being a one-time cost with per-machine licenses for the software suite. Office 365 is the set of (many of the same) apps that will have a subscription fee that covers your usage of SkyDrive in everything you do on any computer. You can find out more about the subscription plans available soon from our post New Microsoft Office 365 announced with a bang.

This new set of software also includes a whole new look thats reflective of the Metro styling present in Windows 8. This software may very well be available for Apple computers running OS X, but no Office 2013 or 365 integration has yet been announced by Microsoft. The main idea here appears to be making Microsoft’s Windows system a wholly next-level environment, with your Office suite being part of your everyday life as Google has been successful in implementing with services such as Gmail and Docs for several years.

It’s not your computer anymore, it’s whatever computer you happen to be at, connected to your account.

You’ll find yourself able to download pre-release versions of all of the software (or most of it, anyway) mentioned above via Microsoft as they ramp up towards final release versions later this year. The site which you can sign up with for downloads is [Microsoft Office Download and Preview] – let us know if you like it!

Microsoft Office 2013 and 365 aim for cloud supremacy is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Cisco caused an uproar when it pushed out an update to certain Linksys routers that blocked local access to router settings, instead prompting users to sign up for the Cisco Connect Cloud service. Not only that, but the policy for the service stated that users had to agree to anti-porn and anti-piracy clauses. Now Cisco has taken to its blog to try and clarify the situation.

Cisco say that the default option for routers will be to use local browser settings instead of the Connect Cloud service. Not only that, but the company has simplified the opt-out process for the service and clarified that users don’t need a Connect Cloud login to access their router settings. Cisco also clarified the privacy concerns, saying that it won’t “arbitrarily disconnect customers from the internet,” and that it doesn’t collect or store personal information of any kind.

The only information that’s sent back to Cisco is what’s needed to signup and login for the Connect Cloud service. It looks like Cisco really wants to drive this point home, as it was a major point of contention for customers when the firmware update went live. Finally, the company confirms that firmware updates won’t be pushed to routers if the automatic update setting is turned off.

Cisco drops Connect Cloud from default router settings is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As anticipated, Google has just launched its cloud service for businesses at Google I/O 2012, called Google Compute Engine. Starting today Urs Holzle announced “anyone with large-scale computing needs” can access the infrastructure and efficiency of Google’s datacenters. The company is promising both performance and stability — Amazon EC2 they’re coming for you — claiming “this is how infrastructure as a service is supposed to work”. It’s also promising “50 percent more computes per dollar” than competitors. Beta testers will be on hand at later meetings to give impressions of the service, if you want to know how running your apps on 700,000 (and counting) cores feels. During the presentation we got a demo of a genome app and we’re sure if we understood what was going on, it would have been impressive. Hit the source links below for more details on “computing without limits” or to sign up for a test yourself.

Check the live blog for more details as they’re revealed.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s developer conference at our event hub!

Google Compute Engine brings Linux virtual machines ‘at Google scale’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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