Fluc is a company that "connects you with your friends, and pays you to receive offers on your mobile phone for free". Dear Lord.They are prolific, I give them that.Feel free to leave a comment of your own on their CEO's blog. In fact, feel free to leave as many as you like. Alex Eckelberry
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Susan Gorman is our anointed Install Goddess (in other words, she writes the installers you see for all of our products, a task that is actually far, far more complex than one might think).She runs a great blog on install and configuration management. If you're involved in this field, I would recommend adding it to your feed. The blog is located at www.gormanonline.com/blogs/msidle. Alex Eckelberry...
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Vietnamese language pack for Firefox embedded with adware. Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog posting. "Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy," she wrote. "Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner...
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A large open room with hundreds of Kilowatts or even Megawatts of electrical energy being consumed and a set of powerful fans blowing air in sounds like an ideal place to make a great fire! Detecting fire quickly and extinguishing it before it takes hold is a critically important feature of all data centers.
Fire Detection
Early [...]
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During my time at BT I set the Data Centre team the challenge of getting Asset Management right, the team thought I was just being stupid and unreasonable but buckled down and with a bit of hard work got it close to 100% right with processes to keep it right. As a direct result of [...]
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The basis of intelligent cooling is that it allows us to deliver only the cooling that is required to meet our temperature requirements. By reducing the flow of air down to that which is actually needed (rather than just blowing as fast as we can) it is possible to reduce the energy demand of our [...]
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Just found a great new product on the web: DimDim a freeware collaboration tool that looks and feels really cool. There are a number of critical things that DimDim have done to ensure success. The first is to make the product really lightweight, there are no downloaded Java modules, so much easier to make work in a [...]
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Today I spoke at the Sustain IT, Green IT Conference in Central London, The topic I chose was Green IT through Discipline and Hygiene. My conference notes as well as two of the other presentations are available here on my .mac Public Folder. (I love the whole .mac Web experience, like most things Apple it is just [...]
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My little brother Laurie O’Donnell who is a top man in the Education world, (winner of the George Lucas Education Foundation Global Six) was asked to speak to a group recently on the subject of leadership and identify some top tips for aspiring leaders. Here is what he came up with:
Be a lifelong learner - as soon as [...]
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One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
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Electricity is a traded commodity with a Futures Market, exactly like oil, tea and pork bellies. The wholesale electricity price is driven by analysts' perceptions of the relationship between supply (how much is readily available and at what cost) and demand (how much is required now and in the future).
The wholesale electricity price is one of the [...]
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The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
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Pushes AntiVirProtect. Alex Eckelberry(Thanks for pointing it out, Baz)
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This is surreal. Gas is now so expensive that some older pumps can't display the prices. Just like computer engineers couldn't imagine that their little machines would last until Y2K, the mechanical engineers who designed these pumps back in 1995 when gas was the equivalent of $1.60/gallon apparently couldn't imagine a day in 2008 when dead dino juice would be this expensive. Unfortunately for customers...
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I'm more than pleasantly surprised. Much more actually. As you know from my past "tough love" posts on SAP and their often dusty messaging, while I liked the company, I thought that they just didn't get "it." The "it" being...
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We’ve been nominated as a finalist in the Red Herring North America Top 100 awards. Propoganda here. Alex Eckelberry
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Leading up the the JavaOne developers conference, Sun Microsystems posted an embarrassing quarterly profit loss, is making OpenSolaris more open than ever, bringing the OpenSolaris platform value to the Amazon Web Services cloud, and is still using variations on the projectile theme to send T-shirts into the international crowd of eager Java developers. Here in San Francisco on Tuesday, the 12th annual JavaOne developers conference opened, still drawing throngs of the Java devoted. It's clear from the gathering that Java tools, standards, middleware, runtime instances and distributed computing methods still dominate the non-Microsoft enterprise IT landscape.
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For those who have argued on this blog that CCTV cameras help make the UK safer, the Guardian today reports that CCTV's actually don't work to reduce crimes, despite enormous cost, and enormous intrusions on personal privacy. This is not new news -- the British Home Office said this years ago, despite the expense of these cameras.Let's hope that this is noticed in the US, where the trend is going toward...
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Last week at the Uptime Institute symposium on IT Energy Efficiency, Will Forest of McKinsey & Co. rolled-out a major study they've done, "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency". BTW, to my surprise, this report was even picked-up by the New York Times.True-to-form, the report is chock-full of really great data. Also true-to-form, it has lots of words... and it has (ahem) yes, yet a new IT efficiency...
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When I first ran SiteAdvisor (back when it was Chris Dixon and a couple of other people, with Ben Edelman lending a hand), my first thought was: A search company is going to buy this. Well, it turns out that McAfee bought it instead. Yesterday, however, McAfee announced a deal with Yahoo to have search results filtered through SiteAdvisor.This is a very, very good idea. And, of course, it's beneficial...
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JustSystems said Monday that it is contributing its intellectual property rights for its invention of extensible business reporting language (XBRL) to XBRL International, the standards body responsible for overseeing the language's specification. JustSystems is making the move as part of its campaign to help organizations adopt XBRL, the XML
-based standard for communicating business and financial information.
The company made the announcement at XBRL International Conference in
Eindhoven, Netherlands.
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Genuitec, the MyEclipse IDE vendor, has marked development progress with two interim releases. The Flower Mound,
“Where I used to use Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop exclusively for my site work and graphics creation, I know use Kompozer, Bluefish, gPHPEdit, The GIMP and Inkscape. Toss in Filezilla for FTP duties and you have a very capable set of tools to create with. Totally Windows free too I might add.
I'll admit that [...]
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The openSUSE team is proud to announce the second Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! New changes include countless bug fixes, as well as the import of the new openSUSE 11.0 artwork for login, splash screens and more. The live installation should work, but there are several known quirks, so be sure to check the most [...]
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