Happy New Year!!! Welcome 2011

Hope you enjoy a day of F3 – Friends, Family, and Football.

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Here is a shot out the front door at 7a. (taken with an iPhone 3GS)

Google changes its home page.

Happy New Year 2011!

My home is almost done, and we can move out of our 850 sq ft cozy beach house.

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Happy New Year!

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Thanks for continuing to visit www.greenm3.com.

I have much more to discuss on this blog in 2011.

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“Good Enough” Photography ends Kodachrome film, Cloud Computing is bringing an end to an Era of overprovision

I’ve known Jay Fry for years and first met Jay when he was with Cassatt.  Jay writes a good perspective on “good enough” being the new normal.


Making 'good enough' the new normal

Posted by Jay Fry at 9:52 AM

In looking back on some of the more insightful observations that I’ve heard concerning cloud computing in 2010, one kept coming up over and over again. In fact, it was re-iterated by several analysts onstage at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The thought went something like this:
IT is being weighed down by more and more complexity as time goes on. The systems are complex, the management of those systems is complex, and the underlying processes are, well, also complex.
The cloud seems to offer two ways out of this problem. First, going with a cloud-based solution allows you to start over, often leaving a lot of the complexity behind. But that’s been the same solution offered by any greenfield effort – it always seems deceptively easier to start over than to evolve what you already have. Note that I said “seems easier.” The real-world issues that got you into the complexity problem in the first place quickly return to haunt any such project. Especially in a large organization.
Cloud and the 80-20 rule

But I’m more interested in highlighting the second way that cloud can help. That way is more about the approach to architecture that is embodied in a lot of the cloud computing efforts. Instead of building the most thorough, full-featured systems, cloud-based systems are often using “good enough” as their design point.
This is the IT operations equivalent of the 80-20 rule. It’s the idea that not every system has to have full redundancy, fail-over, or other requirements. It doesn't need to be perfect or have every possible feature. You don't need to know every gory detail from a management standpoint. In most cases, going to those extremes means what you're delivering will be over-engineered and not worth the extra time, effort, and money. That kind of bad ROI is a problem.
“IT has gotten away from “good enough” computing,” said Gartner’s Donna Scott in one of her sessions at the Data Center Conference. “There is a lot an IT dept can learn from cloud, and that’s one of them.”

MSNBC/NYtimes has an article about the last roll of Kodachrome film, for some the best film for photography.

Demanding to shoot
Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

All 25 Kodak labs are shut down.

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Lanie George pulls off infrared goggles after leaving the darkroom processing Kodachrome film at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kan., on Dec. 28, 2010. The lab is the last one processing the 75-year-old film and will process the final roll on Dec. 30.

Here is a CBS video about the end of Kodachrome.

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Skype joins banned in China–YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter

I have some friends in China and using Skype is convenient to communicate. GigaOm says China is making moves to block Skype.

Will Skype Be Banned in China?

By Ryan Kim Dec. 30, 2010, 9:10am PDT 1 Comment

China has reportedly moved to block private VoIP services such as Skype, and will only allow China Telecom and China Unicom to offer such services, according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It’s unclear when this will take effect, or if it means the outright ban of services such as Skype. China previously banned outside VoIP companies in 2006 for two years to help its homegrown companies compete ahead of the 2008 Olympics. Skype currently partners with Chinese Internet company Tom Online and said in a statementvthat users can still access Skype through Tom.com, though it declined to speculate on future access being blocked.

Doing business in China requires government support if you are big.

Either way, it’s a blow for Skype in particular, and VoIP providers in general, and underscores the difficulty of doing business in China for Internet companies. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are already blocked in China and Google had to move its servers to Hong Kong.

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2011 Data Center Fight Club–Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, & Zynga

In Data Centers a “Fight Club” metaphor can be used to describe the secrecy behind a competitive group.  Where little is said out in the public.  The big fight in 2009 was a Google vs. Microsoft for PUE and efficient data centers.  PUE is now a common term and even used by some to specify data centers. 2010 Facebook has emerged as a competitor, and there are many other companies that tops in their category like Twitter, Skype, and Zynga.

TechCrunch discusses the talent wars for top engineers.  Data Centers are not mentioned in the article, but none of these companies can exist without data centers.

Begun The Talent Wars Have – Why Twitter needs a London HQ: Google Engineers

by Mike Butcher on December 30, 2010

We’ve reported before about how the escalating warfor talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies.

For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like About.me are getting acquireddays after launch; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google’s Eric Schmidt has admitted to this battle.

Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter are hiring like crazy – and this insatiable desire for staff is likely to spill over into other countries. And perhaps the obvious first target outside of the Valley is London: English speaking, and a magnet for existing tech people in Europe working for US multinationals. And the latest to consider extending its reach there is Twitter. Europe is highly attractive to Twitter, since its advertising markets, particularly the UK where Twitter has exploded in adoption, are waiting to be milked.

Twitter’s first office outside of the US, will be headed up by Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s head of international strategy. Stanton was recently in London, where the UK government has been going all out to try to woo tech companies with its ‘East London Tech City’ policy.

What gets little press is the talent battles these companies have to find the best data center staff.

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Signs of success as a platform, targeted for cyberattacks

CNN has an article referencing a McAfee report that iPhone, Facebook and Foursquare are 2011’s cyberattack targets.

2011 cyberattack targets: iPhone, Facebook, Foursquare

John D. Sutter

By John D. Sutter, CNN

December 29, 2010 10:25 a.m. EST | Filed under: Web

Apple products, including the iPhone, will be among the hot targets of cyberattacks in 2011, McAfee says.

Apple products, including the iPhone, will be among the hot targets of cyberattacks in 2011, McAfee says.

(CNN) -- Spamming e-mail is so last year.

Malicious coders and all-out cybercrooks will target newer and hipper forms of digital communication in 2011, according to a report released Wednesday by McAfee, the computer security company.

Noting a "significant decrease" in the total volume of spam messages sent to e-mail, the company's annual "Threat Predictions" report says attacks on instant messaging services, Facebook, Foursquare, URL shorteners, smartphones like the iPhone and even long-protected Apple operating systems will increase in the coming year.

The changes are driven by how people use tech, the report says. As e-mail starts to die, so do e-mail-targeted scams.

Google, Microsoft, and other who are used to be targets will watch as others respond and staff up.  Do you remember how much panic there was for MyDoom.  Here is a wikipedia entry on computer viruses and worms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

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