Here in a blog about the Microsoft/Google dance of power, it all boils down to the last and final point which was:

“Simply said, Google is innovating the web. Communication, dynamic (AJAX-based) clients, toolkits, collaboration tools, etc. They are hiring the brightest minds, and they are just pumping their resources as well as money and hardware into production and publishing of the most innovative, simple, clutter less and free web services and tools.

So, can Microsoft really catch up on Google on all of this?

Technically and financially - yes.

Practically - no.

Microsoft would really need to completely re-invent itself in order to fairly enter the battle with Google.”

And reinventions of an entrenched successful company has been shown over the years to be very very difficult to do.

To read the balance of the article, click

To put that in perspective: Someone who receives, say, 50 legitimate e-mail messages in a day, can count on receiving another 450 that aren’t. Or as most of us receive lots more than that, what can we expect… the ability to even find legitimate emails?

IT managers are saying spam traffic has increased 280 percent in the past five months, thanks to a new Asian botnet that is “spewing spam at an alarming rate.� Anti-spammers, like the spammers themselves, are creative — and many threatening approaches have been turned back by smart defenses. Unfortunately, a new attack seems to materialize just as quickly as an old one is foiled.

For more click here.

How can I tell if my Surge Suppression Still Functional? How do I tell if I have exceeded the limit.

Most power strips on the market today use the Metal Oxide Varistor (MOV) as the primary component for suppressing surges and spikes in electric voltage. The MOV is an electronic component that resembles a capacitor. It is typically a round disk with two electrical leads, and comes in various sizes for differing levels of protection. See the photo below of typical MOVs.

Most MOVs are made from zinc oxide with differing amounts of manganese, cobalt, bismuth, and other metal oxides. This matrix of materials is then placed between two metal plates to which the electrical leads are attached. The boundary between grains forms a diode junction, which allows current to flow in only one direction. The mass of randomly oriented grains is electrically equivalent to a network of back-to-back diode pairs, each pair in parallel with many other pairs. The diode pairs react differently at high and low voltages. When low or normal voltages are present, there is very little current flow through the MOV. However, in the presence of high voltages, the diode junctions break down, and a large current flows through the MOV. Another way to say this is that the MOV has a very high resistance at low voltages, and a low resistance at high voltages.

Read the rest of this entry »

The two most important parameters to understand when trying to choose a power strip are:

• What are you plugging it into?
• What are you pluggin into it?

The “source� you are plugging the power strip into determines what voltage and amperage you need the power strip to be compatible with. There are many options, but most are combinations of these amperages and voltages:

• 15Amp
• 20Amp
• 30Amp

• 110-125Volts
• 208 Volts
• 220-250Volts

Knowing the source will determine the amperage and voltage you need to match.

Read the rest of this entry »

This project has intrigued me since it was announced several years ago. While the laptop won’t be available for $100 as originally hoped it appears to have a great chance for wide distribution. One of the major impediments was security, how to keep these precious items from being stolen from the children that most needed them… how do you secure the computer in other words. It looks like some of the hurdles have been overcome as you read in this fabulous Wired article.

By Ryan Singel| Also by this reporter

SAN FRANCISCO — The One Laptop Per Child project, which proposes to give every child in the developing world a computer of his own, dazzled fans with the unveiling of its little green “$100 laptop” in November 2005. Now it’s impressing hard-bitten security geeks with a plan to lock down the hundreds of millions of educational machines against spyware and computer intruders.

The laptop, officially called the XO, includes a swiveling LCD screen that can switch between low-resolution color and higher-resolution black-and-white. It also has a camera and microphone that enable clear video calls, three USB ports, 128 MB of RAM, 512 MB of flash storage, built-in Wi-Fi with extraordinary range, a long-lasting battery rechargeable by a cord or car battery, and a custom, Linux-based operating system that prefers tags to a traditional file system. Every full-grown geek who sees the 7.5-inch screen asks how they can buy one.

For the balance of the article, click here.

I have an application where I am putting 28 small devices into a rack. Can I power them all from one circuit? I want to use a 20 receptacle power strip and a 10 receptacle power strip plugged into the same wall outlet.

Generally speaking, people can fall into a trap by assuming that just because they have a large number of receptacles, that means they can fill up a power strip and not worry. Unfortunately, such is not the case.

A single 15Amp circuit, like the one in your wall at the office or at home, can provide 12 amps of continuous, steady state power. Having two receptacles in the wall does not double the amount of power available, since the wall receptacles are powered from one wire, and represent a single circuit. To tell how many units can be powered by a single circuit, you need to add the amperage that each unit pulls. Once you get to 12, you stop adding units to the power strip. If you go over 12, disconnect the smallest (by power used) component, to get to 12 exactly, or just below. Power strips with current monitors are excellent for helping you determine how much current a group of components is pulling. Any extra receptacles should remain unused. They can be closed off with plastic outlet plugs.

The problem with plugging in too many units is that each unit will be underpowered. It may still appear to operate fine, but it may not be getting the correct power needed to operate properly. If it is a computer or server, less than proper power can cause data loss and other problems.

Putting 28 small devices in a rack is OK, as long as each device averages .428 amps (12 divided by 28) or less. Since there are a lot of devices out there that only require about .4 amps, this should be OK.

Note that if you have a 20Amp circuit, then the continuous amperage available is 16 amps.

Thanks for your question!
Rackmount Ranger

Storage clusters are now a proven commodity, with support from companies such as Oracle, IBM and NetApp. Highly resilient, simplified management, much lower cost. What’s not to like?

Here are some examples:

* The world’s largest data centers, Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, all use storage clusters for 7×24 availability in their advertising operations
* At least a dozen more firms are selling cluster storage, including NetApp, the fastest growing large storage company
* Polyserve and Red Hat’s GFS focus on storage clusters for Oracle and DB2 databases. With Oracle and IBM support.
* Omneon, a company specializing in storage and multi-media support for broadcasters, is selling “Media Grid” storage clusters. TV stations are a real-time 7×24 production environment: if the stuff doesn’t work, the TV station doesn’t get paid. It works.
* A storage cluster company - Isilon - just went public with a $1.4 Billion market cap

Arrays aren’t going away tomorrow, or ever. It took 10 years from the publication of the Berkeley RAID paper before RAID arrays took 50% of the external storage market. Yet storage cluster use has been growing rapidly in some major niches: internet data centers, video and broadcasting and web services. The 85% of enterprise data that is unstructured is the next big market for storage clusters.

For more on this, click here.

See this blog by Luis Suarez detailing finding the Giveaway of the Day website.

Giveaway of the Day - What a Great Idea! And How I Found out about Post2Blog amongst Other Neat Things by Luis Suarez

I am not really sure any longer where I actually got the link from, but I am surely glad I actually bumped into it in the last couple of weeks. I guess that plenty of other folks have already been working their way through it because, according to Technorati, it has been creating a massive buzz over the last few weeks already. So I am thinking that this may be something that most of you probably already know about. But just in case here we go.

As most people who know me would tell you, I have always been very much in favour of free software. Everything that is Open Source I am up for it. Thus when I ended up bumping into Giveaway of the Day I just had to check it out. It is a completely new, and different, approach towards everything that is not free software.

The way it works is every day, and for a limited period of time, you get a chance to try out fully a piece of software that in any other circumstance would have cost you some money. You can then download the software, install it and play around with it. That way, at a later time, you would have a much better, and informed, opinion as whether you would want to purchase future upgrades or not.

And that would be it! The rest is down to you to see how much more involved you would want to get with the folks over at Giveway of the Day, because at their Web site you can rate the software download, you can share your opinions about it (Whether you liked it or not) and you can even place a banner in your Web site showing that you are currently playing around with that tool. Pretty nifty !

To read the entire blog, click here.