Grid computing has been around for over 12 years now and its advantages are many. Grid computing can be defined in many ways but for these discussions let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs (e.g. perl scripts, database queries, etc.) across a distributed set of resources instead of one central resource. In the past most computing was done in silos or large SMP like boxes. Even today you'll still see companies perform calculations on large SMP boxes (e.g. E10K's, HP Superdomes).

Dell may soon go the way of the Dodo bird. All the signs are there. Some of their recent announcements are setting off warning signals.

These include:
1) Announcements of additional job cuts (5,600 more jobs in addition to the 3,200 already announced).

A survey from Symantec and Applied Research-West reported by Baseline show that younger workers (those born after 1980) pose a greater risk to corporate networks because of their tendency to want to run almost any device and install almost any software on their work machines.

Marshal, and Email and Internet content security company, analyzes spam traps it has placed throughout the Internet and looks for trends in spam creation, distribution, and origination.

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

Virtualization seems to be the buzz word all in IT are using these days. It can mean a bunch of different things depending on who you talk to. Refer to Wikipedia for many of the latest definitions. For our discussion let's define it as a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources in a way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.

Cfengine is an open source tool that allows system administrators to maintain 1 to thousands of unix based systems. It automates almost every aspect of system administration. Cfengine is a direct competitor to commercial software from Blade Logic and OPsware. Both of these commercial packages come with fancy GUIs and nice features, but they also come with hefty licensing fees (can get close to $1K per server managed + maintenance fees).

Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Here is an innovative way of using your web browser to run a fully functional unix shell. If you go to http://cb.vu you will actually be logging in to a shell terminal on a web server. You can define which commands "www" users will have access to run. For those of you from the Windows world this is like having your windows desktop available over a web browser without the need of any special clients

I believe this site actually launches a shell within a bunch of java scripts. A very nice use of a web browsers capabilities. This type of utility may have some good practical uses.

Ever wonder how Google and Yahoo!

The following is a list of the 100 oldest registered .com domains.

See if your favorites are here:

Rank -- Date Created -- Domain name

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
11= 19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
11= 19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
13= 25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
13= 25-Mar-1986 TI.COM

A study released by M:Metrics claims that iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web, with 85 percent of iPhone users accessing news and information in the month of January. That compares to 13.1 percent of the overall mobile phone market and 58.2 percent of total smartphone owners (e.g. Blackberries). M:Metrics goes on to say that the iPhone is "delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video."

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared that BD+ is so strong that it would not be breached for at least 10 years.

Well a company named Slysoft and makers of AnyDVD claim to have cracked BD+ encryption (only eight months after Doherty's statement/dare) and have included the decryption tool in the latest release of their software. Slysoft claims that Blu-ray owners will now be able to "backup" their disks using AnyDVD.

I came across a service called Twitter a few months back. At first I brushed it off thinking it was probably a fad that would slowly fade away. But after looking at it a bit more closely I think that this idea may have legs especially in a society where information overload has caused our attention spans to shrink.

Twitter is in a category called "microblogging". What is Microblogging? Basically it gives you the ability to send very short (less than 140 characters) messages to family, friends, co-workers, or other people in your network.

The CEO of Red Hat at the recent Open Source Business Conference claimed that open source technologies are benefiting from the unpopularity of the US. He suggests that people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S. in "intellectual property" taxes. He claims that he's talked to governments like China and Russia and they are very keen on deploying technologies that are not tied to any IP laws of the US.