I'm a long-time user of Movable Type, and used it to build a number of high-traffic blogs. But in the past two years my new development efforts have all been on Wordpress. The reason is simple: I'm not a designer, and there are tons of great-looking themes available for Wordpress. This is the advantage of open source - the Wordpress community has built themes and plugins to address virtually every need a blogger may encounter. Six Apart has simply never been able to create the same kind of ecosystem around its paid versions of MT. There are enough quality theme repositories for Wordpress that people can have top 10 lists of their favorite collections. There is a growing ecosystem of blogs that focus on Wordpress themes and design (check out the Weblog Tools Collection, WPDesigner andWPCandy for examples).
There is simply nothing like this available for Movable Type. They've changed the templating system in the new version, making it harder to migrate blogs without a redesign. Earlier upgrades within the 3.x version changed the database structure or forced many bloggers to change their URL structures. I was a huge fan of MT and invested countless hours in customizations, but the product has been undersupported while Six Apart focused on Typepad, Vox and its other hosted offerings. I understand the reasons for this. But Six Apart waited too long to go open source with MT and build the same kind of powerful open source ecosystem that has made Wordpress such a huge success. This would have been great two years ago, but it hardly matters now.
While some folks are chasing power and space, many data center builders still follow the business customers. That's why there's been a data center building boom in the Chicago area in the past two years. The biggest driver has been demand from financial companies associated with futures trading in Chicago, which store lots of data and have seen strong growth in high-speed trading. Essentially, companies that can execute program trades faster than their competitor have an advantage. As low latency network technologies have improved, these companies' primary means of gaining a speed advantage is by placing their data center or cages closest to the exchange's systems - which is why this is sometimes known as "proximity trading." This is a strong business for Equinix which just opened a 250,000 square foot center in Chicago.
Hosting companies have also had strong growth in Chicago, which is similar to Dallas in that demand comes from a number of business sectors. Hostway, IDC Global, AT&T, Internap, FastServers and Gigenet have all built or expanded data centers in Chicago in the past two years.
The InfoBunker, the Iowa site mentioned in TFA, is one of a number of cold war missile and/or communications facilities being used as data centers. The PJM Interconnection, which runs the East Coast power grid, is setting up a data center in a Pennsylvania site once used for White House-to-Kremlin communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bunker in the UK is in a former Ministry of Defense command-and-control center. Ask.com is building a major data center in the Titan building in Moses Lake, Washington, a former missile control facility.
Randi has also been prominent in debunking the prophecies of Nostradamus. I spoke with him in 1999 when I was working at a newspaper and got assigned a story on whether Nostradamus predicted a disaster connected with the spacecraft Cassini (believe it or not, this topic was big on the Internet that year... the same text was later used to suggest that Nostradamus predicted 9-11). Randi was enormously quotable.
"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi said. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."
Not sure what kind of speakers Nostradamus may have been using, tho.
Back in May Google launched on online security blog as part of a broader effort to detect malware sites, presumably to exclude them from the SERP results. They're clearly behind the curve. But this post offers an overview of Google's efforts and ambitions in this area.
Sarokin estimates the U.S. energy consumption of data centers (including cooling) at 45 billion kWh. The EPA Report to Congress in August on IT energy efficiency estimated that U.S. data centers used 61 billion kWh in 2006, so that part of the report missed by about 35 percent on the low side. Sarokin used a slightly older estimate from AMD.
Interesting data nonetheless. My firm conviction is that the Internet saves money on every front. If you try to get the same level of productivity by any other means, it would cost you more. Just ask newspapers, who are still using newsprint, printing presses and trucks to deliver the news.
Researcher Nick Yee runs the Daedalus Project, which researches the psychology of MMMORPGs. Here's his findings on gender-bending:
Men are 3-5 times more likely than women to gender-bend in MMORPGs. The demographic that is most likely to gender-bend are men over the age of 25. We know that 85% of MMORPG players are male, so if you do the math, at any given moment, half of all female avatars are actually being played by men.
Actually, dams are serving as magnets for data center development, since hydro power is cheaper than other sources and provides the public relations advantage of being "greener" than coal or nuke power. That's why more than 2 million square feet of data center space is being planned in and around Quincy, Washington, a farm town of 5,000. Meanwhile, in northern NY state, HSBC is locating a $1 billion data center project in Cambria (another farm town of 5,000), where it will use hydro power from the Niagara river.
In his book about MMOs ("Synthetic Worlds") researcher and "virtual economist" Edward Castronova predicted that terrorists could use virtual worlds as meet-ups for planning and training purposes. The possibility has been discussed at the TerraNova gameblog (with plenty of skepticism) as well as MetaSecurity, which tracks extremist behavior within games and the "security implications of virtual worlds." The guy who runs MetaSecurity, Roderick Jones, has published some research on terrorism and MMOs at a site called MetaTerror.
Yeah, it seems goofy and far-fetched, but there seems to be no end of surprises about the way folks interact in/with virtual worlds.
Poker bots have been deployed at major online poker sites for years now. There was media coverage of this trend back in 2004 and 2005. The real issue is that the online poker sites have to ensure they aren't American poker bots, lest they run afoul of Bush administration policy.
FWIW, Duncan Riley cites Justin Hall as the first regular blogger with a start date of Jan. 1996. The disagreemnent about the first blogger will probably continue, but between Riley's documentation and the other examples cited here, it's clear that Barger was not the first and the Wall Street Journal did almost no research on the story. It's idiotic, since they could be certain the story would be fact-checked quickly by the blogosphere.
What Jakob Nielsen doesn't seem to have fully grasped is that there are plenty of bloggers creating quality, thorough articles and delivering them via blogs. Bloggers like Brian Clark at Copyblogger, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and Chris Garrett have proven the value of what's become known as "flagship content" - authoritative, in-depth articles from writers with strong niche expertise. Done correctly, these articles/posts create exactly the kind of long-term value Nielsen is advocating.
It's really not about blogs vs. "web sites" but about the quality of the content and the expertise of the author. The signal-to-noise ratio in the blogosphere may be high, but that's increasingly true of "mainstream media" as well.
Here in NJ there are still console shoppers staking local game stores for new arrivals of the Wii. I was just at a local gaming store, and in the 10 minutes I was there, two shoppers came in and asked "if they had any in yet." No such luck. No inventory shortages for the PS3, tho.
Demographics is a major factor in the demand for gold exchanges and growth of power-leveling services. As the player base has expanded beyond hard-core young adults, many new players are older and have careers and families - leaving less time available for grinding through levels. A C/Net story last fall noted that in some cases, parents wanted to play Warcraft with their kids, and paid to have their character leveled up.
Sony did a white paper on the Station Exchange economy which noted that the largest sellers were 22-year-olds (who have plenty of time but not a lot of money) and the largest buyers were age 34. These older players have more money than time, and that fact drives the demand side of the virtual economy, creating a sustainable market for both power-leveling and game accounts.
The article missed an important anti-phishing Firefox extension: The Netcraft toolbar which is free and has been a top performer in third-party comparisons of toolbar effectiveness.
CA Cert gets much of the attention in the discussion of open source CAs, but StartCom has made more progress in gaining browser support (and hence market acceptance). StartCom certs are supported by Firefox 2.0. CACert has been working on inclusion in Firefox for several years, and appears to be getting close. Mozilla has stepped up its staff effort to review certificate authorities for inclusion in Firefox/Mozilla, including CACert.
It isn't mentioned until well down in the article, but many Slashdot readers may remember Ryan Lackey as part of the team that founded Sealand/HavenCo, the offshore data haven that was featured on the cover of Wired in 2000. Sealand's launch and struggles were discussed here on/. The guy clearly has an appetite for adventure.
Actually, it wasn't even new when folks started noticing it 2 years ago. It actually started as early as 2001, as documented in a history of name tasting posted by veteran domain professional Frank Schilling over at Circle ID. Changes in 2004 made it easier, which is when the huge volume kicked in. But the earlier activity established a precedent for the practice.
The method for squashing "name tasting" (the expoitation of the five-day grace period) is well known: impose a small fee for each returned domain. The Public Interest Registry (maintainer of.org) recently became the first registry to impose such a fee of 5 cents per name. VeriSign has not followed suit. Some argue that this is because enough "tasted" domains are registered that the sales benefit from the practice outweighs the stress on the infrastructure. ICANN is requesting a position paper from a coalition of registrars on the topic.
An excerpt from a demo by the Munich-based THG lab: "Not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components."
TechCrunch has an April Fool's Day post that it has bought FuckedCompany.com, with Pud at FC and perhaps even Valleywag aiding and abetting the joke. Based on the comments and posts elsewhere in the blogosphere, many appear to have not caught on at first.
It seems that the April Fool's 2.0 strategy is to launch the joke a day early.
The folks who are really happy today are Akamai, Limelight Networks and Equinix, who supply content distribution network (CDN) and video peering services for NBC/Universal and MySpace. Lots and lots more big video files will be moving to anf from through their networks.
Slashdot Mirror
There is simply nothing like this available for Movable Type. They've changed the templating system in the new version, making it harder to migrate blogs without a redesign. Earlier upgrades within the 3.x version changed the database structure or forced many bloggers to change their URL structures. I was a huge fan of MT and invested countless hours in customizations, but the product has been undersupported while Six Apart focused on Typepad, Vox and its other hosted offerings. I understand the reasons for this. But Six Apart waited too long to go open source with MT and build the same kind of powerful open source ecosystem that has made Wordpress such a huge success. This would have been great two years ago, but it hardly matters now.
Hosting companies have also had strong growth in Chicago, which is similar to Dallas in that demand comes from a number of business sectors. Hostway, IDC Global, AT&T, Internap, FastServers and Gigenet have all built or expanded data centers in Chicago in the past two years.
The InfoBunker, the Iowa site mentioned in TFA, is one of a number of cold war missile and/or communications facilities being used as data centers. The PJM Interconnection, which runs the East Coast power grid, is setting up a data center in a Pennsylvania site once used for White House-to-Kremlin communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bunker in the UK is in a former Ministry of Defense command-and-control center. Ask.com is building a major data center in the Titan building in Moses Lake, Washington, a former missile control facility.
"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi said. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."
Not sure what kind of speakers Nostradamus may have been using, tho.
Back in May Google launched on online security blog as part of a broader effort to detect malware sites, presumably to exclude them from the SERP results. They're clearly behind the curve. But this post offers an overview of Google's efforts and ambitions in this area.
Sarokin estimates the U.S. energy consumption of data centers (including cooling) at 45 billion kWh. The EPA Report to Congress in August on IT energy efficiency estimated that U.S. data centers used 61 billion kWh in 2006, so that part of the report missed by about 35 percent on the low side. Sarokin used a slightly older estimate from AMD.
Interesting data nonetheless. My firm conviction is that the Internet saves money on every front. If you try to get the same level of productivity by any other means, it would cost you more. Just ask newspapers, who are still using newsprint, printing presses and trucks to deliver the news.
If you're interested, you can read the details of Nick's research, along with an earlier study of gender switching in Everquest.
... for the Aurora guys to look at gamer girls on their webcams.
Gervase Markham from the Mozilla Foundation suggests using excess heat to power data center jacuzzis.
Actually, dams are serving as magnets for data center development, since hydro power is cheaper than other sources and provides the public relations advantage of being "greener" than coal or nuke power. That's why more than 2 million square feet of data center space is being planned in and around Quincy, Washington, a farm town of 5,000. Meanwhile, in northern NY state, HSBC is locating a $1 billion data center project in Cambria (another farm town of 5,000), where it will use hydro power from the Niagara river.
Yeah, it seems goofy and far-fetched, but there seems to be no end of surprises about the way folks interact in/with virtual worlds.
Poker bots have been deployed at major online poker sites for years now. There was media coverage of this trend back in 2004 and 2005. The real issue is that the online poker sites have to ensure they aren't American poker bots, lest they run afoul of Bush administration policy.
FWIW, Duncan Riley cites Justin Hall as the first regular blogger with a start date of Jan. 1996. The disagreemnent about the first blogger will probably continue, but between Riley's documentation and the other examples cited here, it's clear that Barger was not the first and the Wall Street Journal did almost no research on the story. It's idiotic, since they could be certain the story would be fact-checked quickly by the blogosphere.
It's really not about blogs vs. "web sites" but about the quality of the content and the expertise of the author. The signal-to-noise ratio in the blogosphere may be high, but that's increasingly true of "mainstream media" as well.
Here in NJ there are still console shoppers staking local game stores for new arrivals of the Wii. I was just at a local gaming store, and in the 10 minutes I was there, two shoppers came in and asked "if they had any in yet." No such luck. No inventory shortages for the PS3, tho.
Sony did a white paper on the Station Exchange economy which noted that the largest sellers were 22-year-olds (who have plenty of time but not a lot of money) and the largest buyers were age 34. These older players have more money than time, and that fact drives the demand side of the virtual economy, creating a sustainable market for both power-leveling and game accounts.
The article missed an important anti-phishing Firefox extension: The Netcraft toolbar which is free and has been a top performer in third-party comparisons of toolbar effectiveness.
CA Cert gets much of the attention in the discussion of open source CAs, but StartCom has made more progress in gaining browser support (and hence market acceptance). StartCom certs are supported by Firefox 2.0. CACert has been working on inclusion in Firefox for several years, and appears to be getting close. Mozilla has stepped up its staff effort to review certificate authorities for inclusion in Firefox/Mozilla, including CACert.
It isn't mentioned until well down in the article, but many Slashdot readers may remember Ryan Lackey as part of the team that founded Sealand/HavenCo, the offshore data haven that was featured on the cover of Wired in 2000. Sealand's launch and struggles were discussed here on /. The guy clearly has an appetite for adventure.
Actually, it wasn't even new when folks started noticing it 2 years ago. It actually started as early as 2001, as documented in a history of name tasting posted by veteran domain professional Frank Schilling over at Circle ID. Changes in 2004 made it easier, which is when the huge volume kicked in. But the earlier activity established a precedent for the practice.
The method for squashing "name tasting" (the expoitation of the five-day grace period) is well known: impose a small fee for each returned domain. The Public Interest Registry (maintainer of .org) recently became the first registry to impose such a fee of 5 cents per name. VeriSign has not followed suit. Some argue that this is because enough "tasted" domains are registered that the sales benefit from the practice outweighs the stress on the infrastructure. ICANN is requesting a position paper from a coalition of registrars on the topic.
An excerpt from a demo by the Munich-based THG lab: "Not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components."
Paul Vixie maintains a directory of services providing personal colo for power users. You might find something there to fit your needs.
It seems that the April Fool's 2.0 strategy is to launch the joke a day early.
The folks who are really happy today are Akamai, Limelight Networks and Equinix, who supply content distribution network (CDN) and video peering services for NBC/Universal and MySpace. Lots and lots more big video files will be moving to anf from through their networks.