Software : Download of the day: Skype |
- Download of the day: Skype
- Industry voice: How to get connected apps right: looking to Platform-as-a-Service
- Downloads: Binary boot camp: 10 apps to get your PC in perfect shape
| Posted:  If you need to stay in touch with friends and relatives, Skype is for you – its free voice and video calling services are feature rich and simple to use. Why you need itIt's fair to say that Skype has revolutionised the way we stay in touch in the internet age. By allowing us to make free video calls over the web, it took a science fiction fantasy and made it a reality enjoyed by millions of users across the globe. If you don't have a webcam to make video calls, you can still make voice calls or use Skype as an instant messaging app, all for free. It also doubles as a traditional telephone service, allowing you to call mobile and landline numbers anywhere in the world using its Skype Credit system. And it's ideal for business users thanks to its ability to set up group calls or group video calls. Provided everyone in your conference call has Skype, that allows you to stay in touch with business partners and clients completely free of charge. There are tons of extra features, too. Get a phone number for your Skype app and attach a caller ID to it, forward calls from Skype to the phone of your choice, or share contacts and files. You can even share your screen with the person you're calling, useful for demonstrations or one-to-one tutorials. So whoever you need to stay in touch with and however you need to do it, Skype is sure to offer a great service to fit the bill. Key features
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| Industry voice: How to get connected apps right: looking to Platform-as-a-Service Posted:  The Internet of Things (IoT) enables us to connect every device we own to the internet. This could be linking light bulbs to the web, or even the dishwasher, coffee machine and doorbell. Looking outside the home, commercial applications of IoT devices include sensors in plant machinery, or biochips in farm animals, all the way to sensors in the ground detecting temperature and moisture content in sports fields. Not only will every device with a circuit board have some kind of connection with the internet, but so will those systems we might never have considered to be electrical a decade ago. This interconnected world produces a number of hurdles for the internet in its current state. We've already heard about core infrastructure upgrades taking place to move from IPv4 to IPv6 to cater for all of these additional addressable devices. So we have seen bandwidths increasing not only across fixed lines but also, more importantly, over wireless connections as well, such as LTE. These are critical to the success of IoT, but are our applications ready for the influx of additional data collection, storage and processing that they now have to handle? Ubiquitous connectivityThere are billions of new devices connecting to the internet and many billions more on their way, with Gartner predicting 26 billion connected devices by 2020. As a result, the scale of the computer systems required to manage these units has grown considerably. We've seen this in the past few years with the growth of the number of smartphones and tablets, and how enterprise IT departments have had to scale to handle these additional devices on their networks as well as within their applications. For instance, they're now having to consider additional software licenses, increased RAM, enhanced CPUs, more storage and faster networking to name a few. Managing these ever increasing demands, as well as providing a scalable and highly available service is a tough ask. But there are a number of technology solutions coming to the forefront to help address these issues. What is PaaS?Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides a mechanism that allows enterprises to control the whole application environment from a single place. Leveraging the investment in the virtualised layer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the PaaS sits on top and uses the required infrastructure resources. This enables application developers to build applications without worrying about the execution environment of the app, or how to scale it or provide high availability. The application describes to the PaaS the resources that it needs to run and the operator of the platform controls how much memory and storage the application requires from a management console. Choosing a languageThere are a number of programming languages available to develop applications, and different languages can be used in tandem to meet business needs. For example, developers can write a high throughput Node.js application that uses Web Sockets to serve their clients within the same PaaS as they are running a Java application that executes CPU intensive image manipulation. Establishing controlOperators are able to manage how a deployed application behaves and what resources it has access to. From a single place, the operator has complete control over the runtime characteristics of an application, what data sources it has access to, what compute it's permitted to use and how to handle failures. For example, if there was a sudden increase in site traffic due to a marketing push, adding additional instances of the application could be handled via a single click, or it could be automatically handled in some cases (although down-scaling is hard to predict precisely). PaaS also gives the developer control over the services that their applications can access. This is critical in IoT application development as the volume of sensor data that is expected to be transmitted over the network is increasing, and as a result, the ingestion of this data needs to be controlled. The PaaS provides another abstraction layer where the data providers can be separated from the applications accessing them, meaning the amount of throughput for each application can be easily governed. A high throughput example would be an application that ingests data from sensors distributed around a railway network, where the processing and storage of this data is not only business critical but also potentially harmful to life if it's not handled expediently. At the other end of the scale, a lower class of application that is storing data collected from dishwashers and processing it to provide better servicing plans to customers wouldn't require such high throughput compute and storage. As IoT becomes an increasingly integral part of everyday life, so too does the ability to securely receive data from everywhere, process it quickly, store it and scale as business demands dictate. Those businesses that take advantage of new technologies such as PaaS will be able to control and scale their business needs to meet the increasing demands of their customers.
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| Downloads: Binary boot camp: 10 apps to get your PC in perfect shape Posted:  New Year is when many of us head for the gym to work off all those mince pies, but a January boot camp doesn't just benefit humans – it can be good for your PC, too. A regular cleanup can do wonders for your PC and make it the lean, mean machine it was when you bought it – and making your PC better can make you more productive too. Here are some of the apps that can help get your PC back in peak condition. 1. SiSoftware SandraSandra is the electronic equivalent of getting a full medical check: it analyses your PC and lets you know how well each part of it is performing, producing benchmarks that you can then compare against similar systems. It can tell you the state of your hard disk, analyse the speed of your network, let you know if any part of your system is delivering less than stellar performance or identify conflicts between bits of your system, and while it's probably a little over the top for casual computer users, it's a great tool for PC power users and the insatiably curious. 2. CCleanerRunning CCleaner on your PC is like sweeping it with a brush: it gets rid of the dust and cruft that can accumulate over time and that can make your PC work harder and/or use up more disk space than it really needs to. The app makes it simple to get rid of temporary internet files, system files and unwanted installers, clear log files and remove redundant Registry entries, clear applications' temporary files and prevent unwanted apps from running when Windows starts. It's simple, user-friendly and very quick, and there's a portable version if you want to run it from a flash drive or CD. 3. CrystalDiskInfoWant to know what state your hard disk or solid state drive is in? Then you need to get S.M.A.R.T. It's short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, and it's a system that essentially means your hard disk can tell you whether it's feeling poorly. CrystalDiskInfo lets you see the S.M.A.R.T. information for your drive(s), enabling you to see whether a drive is running too hot, if it's starting to report more and more disk errors or if it's about to go boom and take all your important data with it. It's a useful tool to have. 4. DriverEasyIf you're using Windows 7 or later you can skip this one, as Windows Update does a great job of keeping your system drivers up to date. On older systems, though, staying on top of driver updates can be a pain – albeit a necessary one, as driver updates often eradicate bugs and security flaws. DriverEasy promises to make the whole process painless by analysing your system and comparing what you've got to its driver database to let you know whether anything needs updated, and while it doesn't install the new drivers automatically - that's in the paid version - downloading manually isn't too much hassle. 5. Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+Ad-Aware is designed to remove unwanted programs and to prevent them from getting onto your PC in the first place from malicious websites and infected emails. It scans for viruses and other dangerous software, and it also looks for adware and spyware. The first of these is software that blasts you with unwanted ads, and the latter tracks what you're doing and uploads that information to third parties. A full scan of a typical PC can take ages, but it's worth doing – and once you've done it then the real-time protection should help keep your PC free of net nasties. 6. MP3tagIf like us you've got gigabytes of digital music on your PC, you've probably got a problem with it: the meta tags, the information that says what song is what and who did it, is often very messy. MP3tag can solve that. From imposing consistency – no more will you have some songs marked REM and others R.E.M. – to correcting errors, standardising file names and downloading the correct album art for each record, MP3tag does a great job of taming even the largest, messiest MP3 collections. It works with non-MP3 music files too, with support for FLAC, AAC and more. 7. HandbrakeVideo formats fall in and out of fashion, and that means it's easy to end up with a hard disk full of clips in varying formats and in various resolutions, or a library of discs just dying to be digitised. Handbrake can sort it all out for you. It can convert video clips from almost any format to any other format, which is great for getting files from dying or obsolete formats into more modern ones, and it can backup DVDs and Blu-rays too. Its filters also do a pretty good job of correcting common quality problems with home movies. 8. EraserDeleting files doesn't actually delete them: your computer just marks them as "safe to overwrite" and pretends they're not there. That's not a problem unless you're dealing with information you don't want to share – for example if you're selling a computer or giving it away you might not want someone to recover your personal banking information or other personal or business data. Say hello to Eraser, which ensures that deleted files can't be recovered by overwriting them with carefully selected patterns. It's programmable, too, so you can schedule it to run at regular intervals such as the weekend or in the wee small hours. 9. RecuvaAs you may have guessed from the name, Recuva does the opposite of Eraser: its job is file recovery, not file deletion. It's our go-to app for retrieving image files from corrupted camera memory cards, enabling us to recover our precious holiday snaps, but it's just as happy recovering accidentally deleted music from iPods or business documents that got trashed during a computer crash. It can rebuild corrupted Word documents from temporary files, recover accidentally deleted emails and get files back even after hard disks have been reformatted. When things go wrong, Recuva can usually make them right again. 10. Revo Uninstaller FreeRevo Uninstaller reaches the parts the default Windows uninstaller can't reach, scanning your PC for the various bits and pieces that are often left over once an app has been uninstalled, such as temporary files, user documents and redundant Registry entries. That's particularly handy if you're tight for hard disk space or tend to install lots of apps. If you need more powerful uninstallation, for example to automatically remove multiple programs at the same time or to force-uninstall a program that's refusing to go nicely, the 30-day trial of the Professional version is fully functional and gives you access to all its advanced features. |
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