Dan’s Papers February 4, 2011 LIFESTYLE danspapers.com Page 28
by Steven A. Ludsin
M You may have heard the phrase “cloud computing” and asked yourself what it meant. We have evolved from the use of those 5.25-inch floppy disks to smaller disks (3.5-inch) that had hard exteriors but were still called floppies. You used them to carry around your data and to have a backup in case your hard drive crashes or your data is somehow corrupted. You may have used Zip disks, which grew in size from being able to hold 100 kilobytes to 1 gigabyte. I still use flash drives and external hard drives for backup. It is very convenient to rely on cloud computing because it means you can access your data from any PC or laptop. You simply create a user name and a password and you’re good to go. These filehosting services allow you to store documents, images and files on distant servers. Google has servers that are as large as one million square feet. These massive servers give us the opportunity for free storage. I keep all my sent mail in my gmail account and when someone wants a copy of the file you sent a year ago or claims you never sent it you can e-mail it again. The DropBox folder resides in your My Documents folder. You can create a new folder for the particular file you want to save in the clouds. You simply copy and paste the file by right click-
BIG GAME DAY Bless those Dallas Cowboy fans for hosting Super Bowl XLV on Sunday, February 6, and inviting the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team the Cowboys have played in three Super Bowls (Steelers 2-1) and the Green Bay Packers, whom the Cowboys gave a thrashing to in 2007 in a battle for the NFC playoff. It’s downright hospitable of the Cowboys, who fired their coach this past season for their lousy losing streak. Sports pundits predict that Super Bowl XLV will be one of the most memorable games in history. Questions abound: How many sacks will Clay Matthews have? Will Troy Polamalu, tied for second in the league with seven interceptions, intercept? Who are you betting on for the most passing yards, Aaron Rodgers or Benjamin Todd “Ben” Roethlisberger? How many “Terrible Towels” will be flapping from the stands? Game time: It all starts Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on Fox.
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ing your mouse and let the program upload the file to the clouds. You will see a processing sync icon and when the transfer is complete you will see a check mark. The Internet is everyone’s hard drive. There are legitimate fears for the security of the files you transfer and these storage services try to keep the hackers away but that is a neverending task. Cloud computing storage services also allow your regularly used files to be shared with friends and co-workers. You can upload a collection of photos to show your fans, and workers can exchange graphics or documents with their colleagues. The services also let you share a public link to the document with anyone or even share the entire folder. Most of the services offer a few gigabytes of storage free, which will accommodate a few thousand photographs and thousands of Word documents. I find it reassuring to know if my laptop crashes I could go to DropBox on a remote computer and still have the data. The service offers two gigabytes of storage free, 50 gigabytes for $10 a month and 100 gigabytes for $20 a month. Sugar Sync has an interesting feature that includes a Sync from an e-mail system that allows you to upload a file through e-mail, a useful trick for storing photos or documents that others have sent you. SugarSync costs $5 a month for 30 gigabytes of storage, and up to $40 a month for 500 gigabytes, enough to store 40,000 photos. Crate is a new service that allows a user to simply drag a file onto a stylized crate icon to upload it. You Send It is a free service that lets you upload and send files to others through e-mail. It offers a free trial service that lets someone upload a file and identify a few e-mail recipients. ZumoDrive gives users remote access to music and photos, no matter the device, including smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry.