I've literally just watched an advert from PC World, a massive computer selling chain here in the UK.
They were advertising a Packard Bell PC packed with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor and made two claims which just don't ride. What concerns me here is that they are trying to convince the general public of facts which are not only not untrue (or at least misleading).
The first claim was that 'Intels latest processor lets you run two applications at the same time'. This is not exactly untrue, but I don't think the statement applies in the way they expect. Computers have been running multiple applications for years, even since the lowly days of the 8086.
The legal issues that are affecting the Spamhaus are heating up. If Spamhaus were shut down, even temporarily, then the increase in spam that makes it around the Internet would be significant.
Regardless of the figures and the discussions (including those on the Slashdot page for the story), any increase in spam would be a bad thing.
I dont know what your email statistics are like, but for me about 98% of all the email I received in the last year is spam. An increase of any kind would be bad and there's been a recent splurge of spam in my inbox that has required some changes and improvements to my filters and techniques.
The legal issues that are affecting the Spamhaus are heating up. If Spamhaus were shut down, even temporarily, then the increase in spam that makes it around the Internet would be significant.
Regardless of the figures and the discussions (including those on the Slashdot page for the story), any increase in spam would be a bad thing.
I don't know what your email statistics are like, but for me about 98% of all the email I received in the last year is spam. An increase of any kind would be bad and there's been a recent splurge of spam in my inbox that has required some changes and improvements to my filters and techniques.
Back in my college years I applied for a job at a company that provided computing power for a stock trading company. Understandably here, time was money, and so part of their disaster recovery plan was a complete duplicate of their internal setup that was, and I quote, 'kept in the back of a lorry round the corner'.
The intention was that in the event of some sort of failure, they could bring the hardware out of storage and get the system back up and running within a couple of hours.
Sun now provides something similar, but perhaps more off-the-shelf than a custom built setup in a lorry, in the form of Project Blackbox. The concept is interesting -- take a standard-sized shipping container, stack it full of the equipment you want and then provide a single access point on the outside with power, networking and cooling connections to provide a ready to run datacenter.
Back in my college years I applied for a job at a company that provided computing power for a stock trading company. Understandably here, time was money, and so part of their disaster recovery plan was a complete duplicate of their internal setup that was, and I quote, 'kept in the back of a lorry round the corner'.
The intention was that in the event of some sort of failure, they could bring the hardware out of storage and get the system back up and running within a couple of hours.
Sun now provides something similar, but perhaps more off-the-shelf than a custom built setup in a lorry, in the form of Project Blackbox. The concept is interesting -- take a standard-sized shipping container, stack it full of the equipment you want and then provide a single access point on the outside with power, networking and cooling connections to provide a ready to run datacenter.
There's always lots of talk of computers becoming autonomous and self-aware and able to make their own decisions about their environment and operation. Many films and TV shows over the years have based their entire plot around this very fact.
Yesterday I was fully expecting to be able to start a normal day of work, but then I heard the tell tale click-click-click of a dying hard drive. To me, this isn't a problem (it's backed up, afterall, although as a large drive it'll take me a day or so to achieve that).
The link? Yesterday I got confirmation that the new hardware (servers and drive storage) that will be replacing these older components will soon be shipped.
There's always lots of talk of computers becoming autonomous and self-aware and able to make their own decisions about their environment and operation. Many films and TV shows over the years have based their entire plot around this very fact.
Yesterday I was fully expecting to be able to start a normal day of work, but then I heard the tell tale click-click-click of a dying hard drive. To me, this isn't a problem (it's backed up, afterall, although as a large drive it'll take me a day or so to achieve that).
The link? Yesterday I got confirmation that the new hardware (servers and drive storage) that will be replacing these older components will soon be shipped.
I took a brief vacation over the last two weeks, taking days here and there to fit around a range of family events and numerous trips to the outside world. I thought, rather foolishly, that by taking individual days that I'd be able to keep on top of the email, requests and other jobs that take a little time each day, but don't make up the bulk of my typical daily workload.
Unfortunately it's taken me the best part of a week afterwards to go through all the non-urgent emails I hadn't covered and make a new list of things that need to be done. At one point, there were so many, topics I realized that I'd have to build a list of things to do in order to build the final todo list.
I took a brief vacation over the last two weeks, taking days here and there to fit around a range of family events and numerous trips to the outside world. I thought, rather foolishly, that by taking individual days that I'd be able to keep on top of the email, requests and other jobs that take a little time each day, but don't make up the bulk of my typical daily workload.
Unfortunately it's taken me the best part of a week afterwards to go through all the non-urgent emails I hadn't covered and make a new list of things that need to be done. At one point, there were so many, topics I realized that I'd have to build a list of things to do in order to build the final todo list.
There's a whole range of advice here, from ensuring that your physical security is in place and effective, to using encryption.
There are also some less well used solutions, such as ensuring that your backups and archiving solutions are also secure (and the method used to transfer and store tapes is also secure).
Best of all, he argues that ensuring that the mechanisms used are not a barrier to actually using and accessing the data.