Some Attention to The Infrastructure
One of the concepts that often gets people interested in my work at SureTech.com is "The Cloud." Usually people are interested in what it is and how to understand it.
I usually draw a fluffy cloud shape and outline a couple computers and servers on a napkin and explain how the cloud describes the almost infinite wires and connections between computers that is called the internet. And I describe how servers are designed to answer requests from thousands of clients.
In any case, people tend to like pen and napkins when explaining things and usually I get an aha or two.
The NY Times magazine today goes into some more detail, and goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus I'll keep in mind on my next napkin session.
June 14, 2009 - via The New York Times
Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.
But where is “there,” and what does it look like?
“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers.
One of the concepts that often gets people interested in my work at SureTech.com is "The Cloud." Usually people are interested in what it is and how to understand it.
I usually draw a fluffy cloud shape and outline a couple computers and servers on a napkin and explain how the cloud describes the almost infinite wires and connections between computers that is called the internet. And I describe how servers are designed to answer requests from thousands of clients.
In any case, people tend to like pen and napkins when explaining things and usually I get an aha or two.
The NY Times magazine today goes into some more detail, and goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus I'll keep in mind on my next napkin session...
Sharing workspaces with others
Sure, using Office Live Workspace beta to create project workspaces and add documents is convenient. But to share your workspaces with others—now that’s just plain smart.
Daily Notes, Musings and Thoughts Online
Some Attention to The Infrastructure
One of the concepts that often gets people interested in my work at SureTech.com is "The Cloud." Usually people are interested in what it is and how to understand it.
I usually draw a fluffy cloud shape and outline a couple computers and servers on a napkin and explain how the cloud describes the almost infinite wires and connections between computers that is called the internet. And I describe how servers are designed to answer requests from thousands of clients.
In any case, people tend to like pen and napkins when explaining things and usually I get an aha or two.
The NY Times magazine today goes into some more detail, and goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus I'll keep in mind on my next napkin session.
June 14, 2009 - via The New York Times
Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.
But where is “there,” and what does it look like?
“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers.
One of the concepts that often gets people interested in my work at SureTech.com is "The Cloud." Usually people are interested in what it is and how to understand it.
I usually draw a fluffy cloud shape and outline a couple computers and servers on a napkin and explain how the cloud describes the almost infinite wires and connections between computers that is called the internet. And I describe how servers are designed to answer requests from thousands of clients.
In any case, people tend to like pen and napkins when explaining things and usually I get an aha or two.
The NY Times magazine today goes into some more detail, and goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus I'll keep in mind on my next napkin session...
We're Populer, I guess
We had a problem Saturday morning (4/4/09) with all of our websites that use any of our databases. It appears that someone attempted to hack into our site by trying various standard attacks and while, to the best of our knowledge, none of those attacks worked, the number of requests overwhelmed ...Email Best Practices
A client recently went to a meeting where he assumed an email he sent had arrived at his client's inbox. When he learned it did not, he became alarmed and called us. I investigated and found the email in his outbox. I also found that it was over 4MB ...Avoiding Great Service but Bad Value
13 Hours and $1,400.00 To upgrade my Hard Drive?!? We’ve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model. Pretty much the better job you do the less you make. Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about ...Backups, Backups, Backups
I’ve been thinking a lot about backups recently for a variety of reasons. First, I’ve been involved in setting up a fund to honor the high school teacher who first taught me the importance of good backups. He hired me to help with the high school mini-computers and one ...Running Windows Update on Windows Server Core
We're running Windows Server 2008 core on our backup domain controller. I'm not completely convinced this is a good idea yet (even though I'm the one who suggested it). The lack of a UI seems to really hobble some functionality. Today I wanted to run windows update on that machine ...Windows Authentication and IIS - Seems Counterintuitive to Me
I'm working on my first ASP.NET application in Visual Studio 2008 running on a 2008 Server. It's a simple thing, just designed to get some information from our users. I did need them to authenticate themselves against Active Directory prior to visiting the webpage. I turned on Windows Authentication ...Apple Scores on Service
American based, for american customers - and email.
That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days. If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ... - view comments
Einstein Imagined SureTech.com
Who are we to argue with Genius? Einstein was ahead of us on the internet AND SureTech.com! - View Comments
How does my web browser connect to a website?
When you type in somedomain.com your internet service sends a message to a machine called a name server owned by your internet service and asks this machine “hey, where do I find the website for somedomain.com?” - view comments
Happy Holidays 2008 from TopazGroup
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Love, Peace, Joy and all best wishes to you from Topaz Group.
That's NOT What I Meant By "Cleaning Up the Audio"
My church records it's Sunday morning services so we can put the sermon on our website for people to listen to who miss a Sunday. I'm in charge of getting the CompactFlash card out of the recorder, bringing it home, editing the audio down to the sermon, and placing it ...But I am an Administrator
It's annoying when the things designed to protect us just get in our way. Today I was doing some work on our file server and wanted to check out some ways to see how much disk space was being used by certain clients without having access to their folders (I'm ...Book Review: Network Warrior
We've been having some interesting network issues that I've been tracking down and we've been trying to figure out how to set up our clients with our datacenter in Miami. I came across a book whose title looked interesting - Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue. It is an O'Reilly ...Windows System Restore Saves the Day Again
I'm a big fan of Windows System Restore and today reminded me of just how great a feature it is. Hats off to the folks who thought it up and implemented it. I was installing a new VPN client on my main machine and, foolishly I will add, had two ...Cloud Computing: Is It Safe?
Cloud Computing: Is It Safe?
By Alan Cohen from Law.com
Corporate Counsel
October 31, 2008
If there's one tried-and-true way to tackle a problem, it's to make it someone else's problem. It's the strategy that's given us plumbers, fluff-and-fold laundry and lawn services. Yet for a long time, corporate ...IT Trends For 2009
We are pleased to share these trends via Baseline:
Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal ...Google Message Filtering and StartLogic
One of our consulting clients has a huge problem with spam (mostly because their previous website displayed their email addresses for all to see in plain text which made life easy for email harvesters). The other problem is that some of their email addresses are very common and thus also ...What do I do with this email warning me of a virus?
Any mail that has obviously been forwarded as a chain letter warning of just about anything, even if the warning is true is almost guaranteed to be some specie of SPAM. Sometimes messages like this refer to partially true threats, but the goal of the originator of the message ...Sum Ergo Sum
I just picked up “Love is the Killer App” at a café wherein Tim Sanders describes love as the ultimate competitive weapon in business. I have a friend who’s making a go for the fourth year working at home with her husband so they can be close to the kids. ...Startup Business Models: One Chicken vs RocketBoom
There are basically two ways to start a business that I'll call the buy a chicken model and the RocketBoom model. Rocketboom was the first videoblog to roll out a daily show and build a large audience successfully. As the first it commands a fairly permanent piece of popular consciousness ...Xobni for Outlook is awesome except it doesn't work.
Xobni which is inbox spelled backwards is an absolutely terrific plug in for Microsoft Outlook except for the small fact that it doesn't work... - view comments