Google Docs goes down for hour

Alphabet Inc. handed procrastinators a good excuse not to work Friday. Its Google Drive Web-based productivity tools went down for almost three hours.Google acknowledged the outage in a tweet just before noon PT. By 2:30 p.m., “Google Docs” was the top trending item on Twitter. Google said service was restored a few minutes later.The Google Apps status dashboard showed service disruptions impacted Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides on Friday. Alphabet didn’t respond to a request for comment.

For some, this meant early Friday drinks, watching baseball playoff games, and trying to avoid other ways of doing work. Microsoft Office still appears to work just fine.

“Our preliminary diagnosis is that this was caused by a code push which behaved differently in widespread use than it had during testing,” Google said in an emailed statement.

 The main website for Google Drive and Slides, the presentation counterpart to Docs and Sheets, at first appeared to be unaffected but later also went down. Classroom, which is used in schools, also went down, according to the company.

"Google Drive, Docs editors and Classroom have been restored for 99.5% of affected users as of 1:01 PM Pacific, and for the remaining 0.5% of users by 2:10 PM Pacific," Google said in a statement. "During the event, our top priority was to restore service."

During the disruption, users who tried to open documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Google Drive were greeted with error messages. Others were unable to load Google Drive's website at all.

Facebook tests a dedicated shopping field

Facebook’s where people spend their time on mobile, and now it’s working on several new features to give shopping sites a cut of the attention. The most eye-catching is a test of a Shopping feed that aggregates posts and photos about products on sale from different retailers. It’s also beefing up the fast-loading “immersive ads” it started testing last month by letting merchants host whole product catalogs on the pages that load inside Facebook instead of kicking users to a mobile browser.

This is all part of Facebook’s goal to consume the shopping experience. Today’s corporate blog post also mentioned its in-feed Buy button, carousel product ads, and new Shopping sections of mobile Pages that’s designed to be an alternative or supplement to retailers needing their own mobile commerce apps or sites.

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Google Spearheads Effort to Hook Mobile Web on Speed

Google on Wednesday announced speeded up Mobile Pages, or AMP, an open source initiative to accelerate mobile internet page loading.

The objective is to have internet pages with wealthy content — equivalent to video, animations and graphics — paintings along sensible advertisements and load instantly, with one code running across a couple of platforms and devices.

The assignment will use AMP HTML, an open framework in line with existing internet technologies, which we may just developers build light-weight internet pages.                                                                                              Read more...

Microsoft Pushes Deeper Into Linux, Containers, IoT

Microsoft announced a slew of corporate cloud answers at Tuesday”s AzureCon.

“The worth for IoT is in control, knowledge sequence and analysis, and Microsoft is it sounds as if development a cloud carrier that may do all three, and wrapping it with enterprise-level security,” acknowledged Rob Enderle, primary analyst at the Enderle Group.

Microsoft announced a new open Azure Container Service that may let enterprises deploy and configure Apache Mesos to cluster and time table Dockerized apps across a couple of virtual hosts.It may be to be had for preview through year end.

“I discovered it appealing that [Microsoft is] going to send Linux cluster container control on Linux forward of Windows,” acknowledged Al Hilwa, studies program director at IDC.

This is “definitely the recent Microsoft looking not easy to be as platform-agnostic as it would in the cloud so as now no longer to be left behind,” he told the E-Commerce Times

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Facebook Tests New Button-Pushing Plan

Facebook on Thursday announced a pilot examine of “Reactions,” some way to respond to posts at the network in a more nuanced way than its Like button allows. The recent feature is reside in Spain and Ireland.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg up to now alluded to the eventual touchdown of a Like alternative, despite the fact that he stated it’s going to now no longer be a much-requested Dislike button.

Facebook had excellent reasons to withstand a Dislike button, with all of its attendant negativity.

The new Reactions bar addresses the spirit of the user requests with a “more expressive Like button,” stated Chris Cox, leader product officer at Facebook.

Posted by way of Chris Cox on Thursday, October 8, 2015

Besides Like, users can select emoji to specific several other sentiments by way of soaring or long urgent at the Reactions bar. The to be had feelings are Like, Love, HaHa, Yay, Sad and Angry.

Anticipate the Negative

The Reactions bar can even additionally advertise more certain studies and serve as a device to quash negative ones.

It can even additionally assist save you Web bullying by way of alerting Facebook when anything is out of order, in keeping with Tony Lee, social media lead at 5W.

“For the primary time in Facebook”s history, there could also be some way to come across Web bullying prior to it gets out of hand”.

Theoretically, Facebook can step in when it notices a pointy uptick in negative reactions to a specific user”s content, in keeping with Lee.

Cyberbullying invokes worry via hateful messages and images, and “these opportunities for negativity already exist,” noted April Masini, writer of Ask April.

Facebook”s Reactions emoji might curtail the impulse to make long-winded and pointed comments by way of giving other folks an strategy to simply sign in their overall sentiment.

Looking at the Reactions bar from every other angle, the new emoji at the panel can even additionally make Facebook more interactive.

Each of the sentiments represented opens up the prospect of a lot more discussion than a Like button alone, Masini pointed out.

Reasons At the back of Reactions

The new Reactions bar must make communique “more emotional and no more technical,” noted Justin Garrity, president of Postano.

“Today, when somebody posts about a private tragedy, and you need to enhance it, it feels wrong to click the Like button,”. “I think those new features supply ample emotional features as well as Like to more correctly display the form of enhance one friend has for another”s post on Facebook.”

Beyond fulfilling its users, the Reactions bar will feed Facebook”s giant information projects with new intelligence, stated 5W”s Lee.

“Facebook is already the industry leader in offering free, top-quality analytics to corporations — and Reactions buttons will be every other layer,” he said.

Ads Up

By attractive users to pump new streams of insights into its giant information machines, the Reactions bar can even additionally make Facebook”s ads platform an even more helpful tool for advertisers.

“Facebook Commercials is already the maximum accurate and cost-effective web advertising and marketing in the market,” stated Lee. “The user reactions can theoretically upload more relevancy and accuracy to the A/B testing, extra making Facebook the industry leader to measure a virtual campaign”s effectiveness.”

It”s a large win for advertisers and social visualization platforms like Postano, which now can thing in mood, stated Garrity. “Showing Love is a lot more robust than Like, and if an ad is making users Angry, it may well be a excellent indicator to reconsider the ad.” 

Microsoft Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL With Windows 10 Mobile, 'Liquid Cooling' Launched

The waiting is finally over! Microsoft on Tuesday at its “Windows 10 devices briefing” event unveiled the two flagship smartphones. Both the handsets run Windows 10 Mobile, the mobile edition of the company’s latest operating system.

The two smartphones, platform lead devices for Windows 10 Mobile, were unveiled by Microsoft’s Panos Panay, the new head of engineering of the firm’s premium devices division. The Lumia 950 will start from $549, while the Lumia 950 XL will start at $649 – both will become available in November.As for the specifications, the Microsoft Lumia 950 sports a 5.2-inch QHD display with a pixel density of 564ppi. It is powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC, and 32GB of internal storage.

The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, on the other hand, sports a 5.7-inch QHD display with a pixel density of 518ppi. It is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC. It also comes with 32GB of internal storage.

The biggest surprise with these new devices, arguably, was the inclusion of new "liquid cooling" technology.  Microsoft blew by this bullet point on one of its slides, but it's one that will surely be of interest to PC fans. For high end gaming PCs liquid cooling is a long-standing solution for dissipating heat faster than is possible with a pure air convection solution.  The idea is to flow liquid by some hot component (say your GPU and CPU chips via a metal heatblock.  The evaporated fluid (typically some sort of inert/nonconductive coolant) is then ciruclated to a condenser, where a fan blows air to push out the heat and condense the cooling fluid.   While such systems are common in the gaming space and are even found in some gaming laptops.  Under load, or when using certain functions (e.g. the GPS), modern smartphones can get quite hot, particularly the battery and system-on-a-chip (SoC).  Presumably Microsoft is utilizing some sort of internal capillary system with an inert, evaporative closed cooling loop.  

Both phones are dual SIM enabled and have 4G support. In addition, the phones use UCB Type-C, and support Qi wireless charging and fast charging, to give 50 percent battery in half an hour. Another useful feature is Glance Screen, which lights up only a few pixels on your screen when your phone is in standby mode, so you can see your notifications without turning on the display while also saving battery life. There's also the new Iris Scanner on both phones, nestled next to the front cam, which scans your eye to unlock your phone. And last, but not least of the hardware, there's an all -new liquid cooling system that Microsoft has implemented from their tablets. That would make them the first smartphones with that kind of tech.

New Memory Chip which Stores Data with Light

A light-based memory chip that stores data permanently is a new development from University of Oxford and other scientists at the universities of Karlsruhe, Munster and Exeter. Taking materials already used in CDs and DVDs, the researchers say this chip is likely to significantly ramp up the speed of our modern computing.

As it is, computers now slow down to allow for electronic data to move between the processor and the memory. "There's no point using faster processors if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to-and-from the memory -- the so-called von-Neumann bottleneck," said Professor Harish Bhaskaran, the research leader, in the release. "But we think using light can significantly speed this up."

Simply bridging the processor-memory gap with photons isn't efficient, though, because of the need to convert them back into electronic signals at each end. Instead, memory and processing capabilities would need be light-based too. Researchers have tried to create this kind of photonic memory before, but the results have always been volatile, requiring power in order to store data. For many applications -- such as computer disk drives -- it's essential to be able to store data indefinitely, with or without power.

Using light instead of electricity to move information between a computer’s memory and its processor could lead to much faster and more energy-efficient computers (see “Intel’s Laser Chips Could Make Data Centers Run Better”). But right now it is necessary to convert the optical signals to electrical ones and store the data electronically, which is relatively slow compared with the speed of today’s processors. The new “all-photonic” memory, which takes advantage of the same materials used in rewritable CDs and DVDs, is a step toward systems that achieve more efficient data transfer and storage, according to the technology’s inventors.

In the near term, a memory technology like this could be used to augment the performance of data centers and thus expand the kinds of applications possible thanks to cloud computing. Several major computing companies are developing systems for moving light around a chip using waveguides, or from one chip to another using optical cables like those common in the telecommunications industry. The technology is still far from commercialization. The researchers only demonstrated the ability to read and write several bits. More research and development will be needed to understand how exactly it can or should be applied.