Yahoo Gives Photo Sharing Site, Flickr A New Look And Offers One Terabyte Of Free Storage Space
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 13:41
Flickr, a photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, got a huge upgrade. With Yahoo! fighting to make itself more relevant, Flickr will now give you one terabyte of free storage for your photos.
While everyone wants to consolidate their files as much as possible, we're already seeing seeing apps that let you manage free storage space from multiple providers in a single interface. So this could be an ingenious move by Yahoo!.
In addition to the massive upgrade in storage, Yahoo! gave Flickr a new interface that is much more modern.
For a couple of years, we've been hearing about computers and devices being controlled by hand gestures. No touching the screen, no using a mouse--you just use the motion of your hands, face, or eyes to execute commands. To understand the impact this will have on the way we control our PCs, TVs and other devices, take a look at this video showing a new software that extends Windows 7 and 8's touch screen to physical gestures.
Private clouds for advisory firms usually have a silver lining. Other times, however, they don’t let the sunshine in and can hinder your firm.
Private clouds are nothing new. A private cloud is very often based on old “terminal services” technology that has been around for over a decade. This allows you to put desktop applications on a Web server and use it securely. So instead of keeping a server in your office, you might put it in a hosting facility.
When using this type of private cloud, you can derive some important benefits. Your apps are accessible from the Web and employees can access them securely from any Web connection. Plus your servers are safer in a hosting facility than in your office.
However, this type of private cloud is not the latest and best technology and has some big disadvantages versus other options for moving to the cloud.
A newer technology for creating private clouds uses “virtualization” to emulate a desktop experience in the cloud. This newer technology allows each user to have his own unique desktop, while the older type of private cloud set up means that all your users see the same desktop. The new private cloud technology makes it easier to manage printers and other peripherals and can offer better security.
But both types of private clouds offer disadvantages when compared with Web applications. Web applications are the most modern ecosystem and will almost always offer the best software and user experience. Software companies are not putting resources into improving desktop apps because Web apps offer much better economies of scale. They don’t need to be hosted in a private cloud and their features are much more easily updated and offer better security.
A4A is going to be offering a series of webinars beginning today to help advisors understand the benefits of private clouds, their drawbacks, and the different kinds of private clouds. The series will be tapping the expertise of IT consulting firms from around the country that focus on serving financial advisors.
We’re going to make this very confusing area of technology understandable and we’re going to tell you how much it costs to do these things right. We’ll explore the limitations of private clouds being offered to advisors by software vendors and explain how Microsoft Office and Exchange fit in with private clouds.
Josh Phillips of ProVisionIT in Orlando, Florida kicked off the series with a primer on private clouds, which is available for replay to A4A members ($60 annually). If you have trouble logging in or have any questions, email us at
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The second session on private clouds is scheduled for Friday, May 14 and will explains the different versins of Microsoft Office and the different ways to integrate Office with an RIA's cloud IT strategy.
Financial advisors use a lot of the same documents all the time. Sure, you also create new documents, but you probably have a few Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher documents that you must refer to or update frequently. Here’s how to make them more easily accessible, assuming you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8.
First, some basics: At the bottom of the screen, your Taskbar displays which apps are open on your computer.
You may know that you can "pin" apps to make them always appear in your taskbar. Simply right click on an icon in the taskbar and choose "Pin this program to taskbar," as shown above, and that app will always appear in your taskbar.
You may also know that when you right click on any Office icon in your taskbar, a box like the one shown above pops up listing your most recently used documents in that Office application.
What you may not know, however, is that when you right click on any document in the recent documents list, you can pin it to the recent documents list. Just click on "Pin to this list" and the document will always show up atop of your recent documents list.
Password Meters That Tell You If You're Creating A Strong Password Really Do Work
Monday, May 13, 2013 21:01
Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Microsoft are among the first to test the effect that the ubiquitous password meters have on real users choosing passwords. They found that meters grading the strength of passwords had a measurable impact in helping users pick stronger passcodes that weren't used on other accounts.
What's more interesting is Ars Technica's suggestions that sites ban the use of the one-million most commonly used words in the English language. In other words, password meters would reject dictionary and names.
