Ours is an industry rife with buzz words. They seem to come and go with every passing financial quarter with regularity. Each one gets over used and then forgotten, but they all have a reason and they all start somewhere. I don’t really have much more to say about it…
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Green Computing
So it seems like the magazines and web sites of supposed IT pundits are abuzz with the concept of Green Computing. Lower the cost of your data center seems to be the concept being pitched for the most part. But the thing is, energy cannot be created nor destroyed… So how do we do it? Well we’re packing more and more information into those little chips. This makes them more powerful. And they need to use less electricity as the amount of space on those chips to hold it is reduced. Therefore you end up with more data getting thrown through the chip and them using less power at the…
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Windows XP Is No More… Kindof…
Microsoft has announced that as of June 30th, 2008 Windows XP will no longer be distributed. You will still be able to buy machines that run Windows XP but it will become increasingly difficult in the months that follow. Windows XP will be supported by Microsoft until April 14th, 2014. However, only security-specific patches will be released for XP after June.
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Microsoft Data Centers
Microsoft is shipping servers sealed in a container later this year. This is pretty interesting stuff. You see, they arrive racked and stacked in a sealed container and all you have to do is plug them in and hook them up to air conditioning. Servers are clustered and when enough of the servers start to go out in the cluster then Microsoft just sends you a new container. Management required for hardware: zilch. To be worried about this type of thing taking away if you’re in the field a lot: nope. Why, because as you gain experience you’re hopefully not dealing with hardware any more. Otherwise, move up and over…
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On the Road: Death and Taxes
Be careful with keeping expenses used for work separate from those used for taxes. You see the last thing you want is to have to get IRS help from someone like American Tax Relief. Not that there’s anything wrong with that type of company, but no one wants a IRS problem. They can be timely and costly. So, don’t expense things your job pays you back for…
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OpenXML Draft Approval
The Microsoft Open XML standard is what Microsoft is hoping will be the standard in document formats. The first step in that process is now complete with Office Open XML being accepted as a draft standard by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. ISO is the world’s largest developer of standards and has no governmental affiliation. Office 2007 created a stir by omitting the Open Document Format (ODF), which is already an ISO standard. Many had hoped that ODF would help to spark an uptick in the interest of applications such as OpenOffice.org as a replacement for the Microsoft Office Suite of applications. However, the ODF standard has had slow…
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Sun Datacenter in a Can
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/gallery/index.xml?t=1&p=1&s=1
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SaaS Defined
From Wikipedia: Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced ‘Sass’) is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. Conversely, customers relinquish control over software versions or changing requirements; moreover, costs to use the service become a continuous expense, rather than a single expense at time of purchase. Using SaaS also can conceivably reduce the up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing. From the software vendor’s standpoint, SaaS has the attraction of providing stronger protection of its intellectual…
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Microsoft Gold Partner
Getting to be a Microsoft Gold Partner is like learning to program in some languages. I think there’s a distinct possibility that those who manage the partner program are those who developed FoxPro. When Microsoft bought FoxPro methinks they just moved the people over to a new department…
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Google: The New SourceForge
http://code.google.com