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Showing posts from August, 2011

Transformational Change Underway

Monumental technology implications for the way we interact and work into the future By Ken Garen, CPA Transformational change is all around us, compliments of rapid advancements in technology.  This monumental change is no secret; one does not need to look far beyond the incredible rise in popularity of downloading any of your favorite apps to access or run a business, or reading a daily update on the well-publicized decline of the U.S. Postal Service - which recently announced it could default , while also announcing they were cutting 120,000 jobs and pulling out their health-care plan and the potential stoppage of Saturday mail delivery . Practitioners need to get infrastructure in place to take advantage of the amazing changes that have begun to impact even the most common workday tasks such as receiving and sending information to and from clients, and searching the Internet given the ongoing browser wars - as search effectiveness can speed or slow business productivity

IBM's 120 petabyte drive could help better predict weather

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Massive drive would store up to 1 trillion files (video below) Lucas Mearian August 30, 2011   (Computerworld) The development of the world's largest single-file name data repository could help predict weather and prevent overhyping of hurricanes like Irene. Forecasters had predicted Irene could devastate cities such as Washington and New York, but instead some of the most severe damage occurred far further inland in states such as Vermont, which was drowned in tropical-storm downpours. Several post-Hurricane Irene reports pointed to inaccurate forecasts as problematic. As the UK publication,   The Guardian, wrote : The "storm surge that could have swamped [Manhattan] failed to materialize." And many   New Yorkers were unhappy   about having prepared for the worst only to experience little to no damage. Enter   IBM 's Data   Storage   Group at Almaden, Calif., which has proved it can build a 120PB data system by using 200,000 SAS (serial SCSI) drives -- all config

Death by Morto A? It's your own fault, says Microsoft

Only machines using famously weak passwords will succumb, company says By Tim Greene, Network World August 29, 2011 05:20 PM ET   The Morto A worm is having continued success despite its reliance on a list of lame passwords to take over victim machines. In order for the worm to be effective, the administrative password for a machine under attack has to be one of 37 of the worst passwords ever (see below) that it carries in a weak brute-force library. Yet the worm, which takes over control of remote computers by guessing the password for Microsoft Remote Desktop, continues to spread, according to security watchdogs. Once attackers gain control of machines they can be used for denial of service attacks, according to a Microsoft alert about the worm. In addition targeting only the lowest hanging fruit, Morto A is notable for being a rare Internet worm, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure, in a blog post. He says it is groundbreaking in that it attacks via rem

10 Unusual Things You Didn't Know About Steve Jobs

By James Altucher, Huffington Post I was standing right next to Steve Jobs in 1989 and it was the closest thing I ever felt to being gay. The guy was incredibly wealthy, good looking enough to get any girl, a nerd super-rockstar who had just convinced my school to buy a bunch of NeXT machines (which, btw, were in fact the best machines to program on at the time) and I just wanted to be him. I wanted to be him ever since I had the Apple II+ as a kid. Ever since I shoplifted Ultima II, Castle Wolfenstein, and half a dozen other games that my friends and I would then rip from each other and pretend to be sick so we could stay home and play all day. I don't care about Apple stock. (Well,   I do think it will be the first trillion dollar company ). Or about his business successes. That's boring. The only thing that matters to me is how Steve Jobs became the greatest artist that ever lived. You only get to be an artist like that by turning everything in your life upside