Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce And Their Ilk
Consider not what your buddy list can do for you, rather what you can do for your buddy list.
Tags: jaiku, pownce, social, twitterSize Matters
The World Wide Web got so big people had to decide what it meant.
Tags: internet, people, www
Apple MobileMe
Well, apparently any day now Apple will be rolling out the upgrade (re-branding) of the old, much in need of a freshen up .Mac Subscription Service. It seems that I can already send mail to my account “@me.com” (not sure I really like that, thankfully “@mac.com” remains) and for a fleeting moment my iDisk reported that I had 2 TB (Two Terabytes) available to me.. alas in my shocked state I neglected to get a screen grab before refreshing, so you’ll just have to believe me, if it matters, after all, it was there merely for a second. It does suggest however that Apple Employees are for one reason or another, messing with stuff.
Not as exciting as a 3G iPhone I’m sure but I don’t have one of those.
I do have .Mac account and I guess soon I’ll have MobileMe.
It’ll be a change of scenery at least.
Selling Virtualisation To Faculties
After spending an afternoon producing an extensive list of the benefits of Virtualisation as a reference to potential probing from corporate management I decided to take the opportunity to share and highlight the parts of this list that would have a direct effect on faculties, this in itself was fairly extensive and perhaps (as will always happen in these circumstances) a little too detailed, the object is, of course a non-technical offering to a primarily non-technical area.
After a little extra thought it looks like there really are just three significant points.
- Low To No-Cost Provisioning
- Increased Development Time
- Raising The Bar On Quality For Support
Let’s look closer..
Low To No-Cost Provisioning
A faculty can request a service, a vanilla virtual server can be added to the physical resource and fired up, the service/application is installed and configured. A snapshot of this virgin service is taken and moved to storage as a backup.
Increased Development Time
Purchasing physical hardware can be a time consuming task, pricing, requesting competitive quotes and passing through the corporate infrastructure for approval. Then we wait for Manufacturer X to deliver Product Y on time, provided of course they have the type and/or amount of memory required in stock.
The time saved here allows for the actual development of the service within the faculty that has requested it, this is performed either under total ownership or with a support agreement from relevant technical services.
Raising The Bar On Quality For Support
Again, the key factor here is time. Consistent management tools and interfaces for Virtualisation solutions allow greater time for actual development support. Backup and restoration time is reduced by almost comical levels due to the ability to trash a faulty “machine” and replace it with another identical (sans faultiness!) Virtual Machine.
Often we are in a situation where we can save time or money.
Consider a world where we can do both.