This is a very funny song, using the same music of the very popular old song from Billy Joel "We didn’t start the fire", now we have the song "Here comes another bubble", inspired over the frenzy of investments in TI industry this 2007. So again the same story of burst and blown. Enjoy the video:
Here a very funny videos parody Mac vs. PC commercials:
More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages (despite the social-networking site’s rule against such ads)
They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social-networking profile pages.
Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.
Weblo shares ad revenues with the people who let it place ads on their pages. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook allows them to carry on. Facebook clearly would not want to alienate even more users now, after its Beacon debacle over the past month.
The huge retailer store based in Dallas (Texas), is going out of business at the end of this year, announced Gordon Brothers Group LLC. CompUSA is private held by the Mexican financier Carlos Slim, who could lost around $ 2 billions. Gordon Brothers will also try to sell the company’s technical services business, CompUSA TechPro, and its online business, CompUSA.com. It would be up to the buyers whether to continue the CompUSA name.
The spring of this year, CompUSA closed half of its store and received and cash infusion of $440 millions, but looks like that plan doesn’t solve the structural problems of the company. Also we have to considerer that the economy slowdown, could play a key role in the decision to go out of business.
If the USA economy doesn’t turn back to growth path, probably it will be the first of a chain of close or restructure business season.
A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal, and it’s converted a mainframe believer. Scott Thompson, the former executive VP of technology solutions at Inovant, ran the Visa subsidiary responsible for executing Visa credit card transactions worldwide. The VisaNet system was strictly based onIBM mainframes.
In February 2005, Thompson became chief technology officer at the eBay payments company, PayPal, where he confronted a young Internet organization building its entire transaction processing infrastructure on open source Linux and low-cost servers.
“I came from Visa, where I had responsibility for VisaNet. It was a fabulous processing system, very big and very global. I was intrigued by PayPal. How would you use Linux for processing payments and never be wrong, never lose messages, never fall behind the pace of transactions,” he recalled in an interview.
He now supervises the PayPal electronic payment processing system, which is smaller than VisaNet in volume and total dollar value of transactions. But it’s growing fast. It is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies. In 2006, the online payments firm, which started out over a bakery in Palo Alto, processed a total of $37.6 billion in transactions. It’s headed toward $50 billion this year.
Paypal recently added such business as Northwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, U.S. Airways, and Overstock.com, which now permit PayPal payments on their Web sites.
Thompson supervises a payment system that operates on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux in the same manner that eBay and Google conduct their business on top of a grid of Linux servers. “I have been pleasantly surprised at how much we’ve been able to do with this approach. It operates like a mainframe,” he said.
As PayPal grows it’s much easier to grow the grid with Intel-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% “is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In PayPal’s world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions,” he said.
PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal’s 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal’s needs faster because they’re working in the target environment. That’s harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.
In the Ina Fried blog, you can read about Microsoft current plan to support the new XO from the OLPC project, in this article you can read:
“Microsoft said Wednesday that it is working to develop a version of XP that can run on computers without a hard drive, including the XO computer from One Laptop Per Child.
In a statement, Microsoft said that it will start “limited field trials” of XP running on the OLPC computer in January. If all goes well, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of next year. However, it cautioned folks in North America, particularly those taking part in the Give One, Get One program, that it has no plans to offer that version of XP to folks in the U.S. or Canada.“
Here a very nice video tutorial about how to add AdSense to make money with your blog, and Google Analytics to get statistics from your blog. Both are free services.
AMD’s quad-core Opterons have been notably difficult to find since their introduction two months ago, and there are many reports about a chip-level problem has impacted the supply of these chips to both server OEMs and distribution channel customers.
AMD refer to chip-level problems as errata. Errata are fairly common in microprocessors, though they vary in nature and severity. This particular erratum first became widely known when AMD attributed the delay of the 2.4GHz version of its Phenom desktop processor to the problem. Not much is known about the specifics of the erratum, but it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor’s L3 cache. The erratum can cause a system hang with certain software workloads. The issue occurs very rarely, and thus was not caught by AMD’s usual qualification testing.
An industry source at a tier-two reseller told that the TLB erratum has led to a “stop ship” order on all quad core Opterons. When asked for comment, spokesman Phil Hughes said AMD is shipping quad core Opterons now, but only for “specific customer deals.” Industry sources have suggested to TR that those deals are high-volume situations involving supercomputing clusters. Such customers may run workloads less likely to be affected by any workarounds for the erratum that reduce L3 cache performance, and those customers could potentially consume hundreds of thousands of CPUs. The current availability picture would seem to confirm, that quad-core Opterons are not shipping to OEMs or the channel more generally.
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