Information Technology Blog - Galido.net

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.

Project Honey Pot was created by Unspam Technologies, Inc — an anti-spam company with the singular mission of helping design and enforce effective anti-spam laws. We are always looking to partner with top software developers and enforcement authorities. If there is some way we can help you fight spam, please don't hesitate to contact us.

To learn more or become a member, go here: www.projecthoneypot.org

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Codecademy is a fun and easy way to learn how to code. Learning with Codecademy will put you on the path to building great websites, games, and apps. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

Learn to code here

Check out available courses here

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$900 keyboard is self sanitizing and approved by the FDA for healthcare use.

Vioguard, a company started by two Microsoft Hardware veterans and their business partners, says it has received U.S. Food & Drug Administration approval for use of its self-sanitizing computer keyboard in hospitals and other healthcare settings.

The keyboard can be retracted automatically into an enclosure to be bathed in germicidal ultraviolet light from two 25-watt fluorescent lamps. The enclosure can double as a monitor stand, and the mechanism for retracting and ejecting the keyboard works hands-free via sensors.

Vioguard says the technique has been proven effective in killing a minimum of 99.99% of harmful bacteria and viruses, including flu, MRSA and other nasty stuff that can spread through hospitals. The intent is to provide healthcare facilities an alternative to manual cleaning.

Executives at Vioguard include former Microsofties Craig Ranta and John Sharps, both co-founders. The company, based in Kirkland, had previously sold the keyboard for consumer use, offering it for $900 on Amazon.com.

Vioguard announced the FDA approval for medical use this morning and says it’s seeking partners to help bring the keyboard to market.

Source: Self-sanitizing keyboard wins FDA nod for healthcare use

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Microsoft yet again has a new OS in store for us. New features abound: a brand new user interface with an entirely new application model, support for a new architecture that enables Windows to run on smaller form factors, new touch-focused features, huge leaps in Hyper-V capability way beyond the competition, huge enhancements in remote desktop capabilities, new priorities for managing many servers as if you were managing one, new ways to secure data and grant access—and the list goes on.

The Windows 8 Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview Downloads

Note: You can't uninstall the Windows 8 Developer Preview. To go back to your previous operating system, you must reinstall it from restore or installation media.

More:
In-Depth Course: Windows 8 Beta Server and Client
Windows 8 Launching In Autumn 2012?

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Guaranteed savings! Save money and the environment with solar power panels for your home. For a free estimate, please contact us. Please be ready to provide a copy of your power bill and your address.

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'MITx' will offer courses online and make online learning tools freely available.

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

When will MITx go live?
MIT plans to launch an experimental prototype version of MITx in the spring 2012 timeframe. Once the open learning infrastructure is in stable form, MIT will also release the open-source software infrastructure and will establish ways for other universities, as well as interested individuals, to join MIT in improving and adding features to the technology.

MITx online learning tools to be freely available
MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.

“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

Sources:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219.html
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html

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Most server and storage computers sit in rooms cooled to a brisk 64 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit (18 to 21 C), an effort to avoid hot spots that might cause equipment to malfunction. All that air conditioning contributes to electricity costs of $26 billion a year. The facilities use 1.5 percent of the planet's power, and that's set to double by 2014, Intel says.

By using new software and hardware to get a more detailed picture of what's hot and what's not, data centers can spread work around to different computers to keep them cool, says Jay Kyathsandra, an Intel marketing manager. That approach, together with a range of other technologies sold by Intel, could let technicians eventually turn the heat up past 100 degrees. The challenge is convincing customers, which count on servers to keep their businesses running, that the approach is safe.

“For a long time people just kept the data center running at what's comfortable for humans, because that's our frame of reference, but servers can handle a lot more than that,” said Katie Broderick, an analyst at Framingham, Massachusetts-based research firm IDC.

For Intel, the new technologies may generate a fresh source of revenue and help keep computer manufacturers loyal. The Santa Clara, California-based company, whose chips run more than 90 percent of the world's servers, cut its fourth-quarter sales forecast by about $1 billion yesterday. Intel blamed a shortage of disk drives.

Getting Comfortable

Allowing the average temperature in data centers to rise by 9 degrees would cut $2.16 billion in annual power budgets, saving the amount of power Spain or South Africa uses in a month, according to Intel's research.

Companies such as Facebook Inc. have already started operating some of their computer centers at higher temperatures, helping them save money. Intel wants them to go further. To prove the benefits of technologies it's trying to sell, the company is running one of its own data centers in New Mexico at 92 F. The move has produced an estimated 67 percent in power savings, Intel says.

The approach would mean data centers don't need air conditioning -- outside air alone would do the trick -- in more than 95 percent of the world, according to Intel.

Warranty Concerns

Still, server owners are reluctant to dispense with cooling, fearing it might void the warranty on their machines, Intel's Kyathsandra says. To allay those concerns, Intel is working with computer makers, including Dell Inc. and NEC Corp., to change their policies. Those companies now sell machines certified to operate at higher temperatures, he says.

More cooperation will be needed, says Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, an information-technology advisory firm based in Milford, Massachusetts. Moving to higher operating temperatures requires a commitment from other component suppliers, not just Intel, he says.

“Perhaps the likes of Intel have designed their chips to run at hotter temperatures without an increased risk of failure, but historical components haven't done so yet,” Peters said.

Intel's software and hardware will let customers monitor the amount of power individual racks of computers are using and how much work they're doing, and then balance those loads out to keep that machinery working at its most efficient level. While current software allows monitoring of work levels and power use, it doesn't help managers make changes on the fly, he says.

“What's happening is you don't have a good sense of what's going on at any one point, so you might as well just cool things across the data center,” Kyathsandra said. “It's a huge inefficiency.”

Source: Intel Tells Data-Center Customers That 100 Degrees Isn't Too Hot

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(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have set a new world record for data transfer, helping to usher in the next generation of high-speed network technology. At the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle during mid-November, the international team transferred data in opposite directions at a combined rate of 186 gigabits per second (Gbps) in a wide-area network circuit. The rate is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all the extras—in a day.

Source: 186 gigabits per second: High-energy physicists set record for network data transfer

www.readwriteweb.com's Best of 2011

Top 5 Internet Devices of 2011 (Kinect, TV, iPad2, Kindle Fire, iPhone 4S + Siri)

Top 10 Enterprise Products and Trends of 2011 (Oracle buys Pillar Data, Endeca, Fatwire, RightNow Technologies, and Ksplice; The iPad is the new executive dashboard; Yammer becomes the go-to corporate microblogging platform; Better tools to handle business video streams with YouTube; Socialization of email listservs with Lyris; Box.net BIN takes off; IBM's Connections solidifies its position; Your corporate training department is now showing Stanford.TV; BYOD means more mobile device management tools with Accellion, MobileEcho, Rover, Sybase and Mobi Wireless; Solid-state drives move into the datacenter)

Top Web Developer Tools of 2011 (jQuery and jQuery Mobile, CSS3 PIE, Bootstrap, LESS, Chrome Developer Tools, SourceKit and Ace, PhoneGap, Popcorn and Popcorn.js, Waterbear)

Top 10 Mobile Products of 2011 (Square, Nuance & Swype, Facebook Mobile + Messenger, Google Wallet, Angry Birds, Pulse, Google+ For Android, Foursquare, Opera Mobile, Lookout

Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011 (Chrome, Dropbox, iCloud, Kindle, Evernote, Spotify, Instapaper, Flipboard, Google Maps, Siri)

Top 10 Social Web Products of 2011 (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, reddit, SoundCloud, LinkedIn, GetGlue, Instagram, Meetup) with honorable mention of Quora, Foodspotting, Foursquare, Pinterest

Top 7 Epic Tech Fails of 2011 (Qwikster... Er, Netflix, Google Axes, Google Redesigns, Color, Sony PlayStation Network Security)

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