Especially if you are not already running an antivirus solution, this may be a good time to help them test.  It’s a novel concept, at the least . . .

http://www.nixtutor.com/linux/off-site-encrypted-backups-using-rsync-and-aes/

Good article, even if he is behind on his WP security

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Now playing: Primus – Sinister Exaggerator
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Here’s how to get a fast, graphical remote login capability rolling quickly for your own Debian / Ubuntu box :

Server install info : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeNX

The NX Client side : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=736509

Essentially, you’re heading into using an app that is a lot better than the old style Xserver.

With a client that can also handle MS RDP, etc.

And it’s very fast.  And secure.  And free.  What’s not to like? (underlying technology link)

Now I just need to find that elusive Android client for the HTC Hero !

Have a grand day . . .

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Based upon the statements on their page at http://www.rsync.net/ they have a company philosophy that is awfully hard to argue with.

True tech support by fellow engineers, options on single or multiple site data, urging you to encrypt before transmission, and especially the canary.

Very, very nice.  And a ton of options, for the less technical all the way to API writers.

The EFF would approve I bet !

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Besides the new addiction here (Android-powered!) I saw a new bit o’ Google this evening, well, new to me.

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“Discover and install new services from 3rd-party developers that integrate securely with data in the cloud and behind your firewall.”

http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home

“The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google’s universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain’s data.”

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OnLive Cloud Gaming Service to Launch in June

Matt Peckham

Mar 10, 2010 1:37 pm

For the price of a low-end PC plus a monthly fee you’ll soon be able to play ultra-high-end games like Borderlands, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Crysis. According to VentureBeat, the service, dubbed OnLive, will launch in June after eight years of research and development, offer up to 720p-caliber high-def gameplay, and cost $14.95 a month.

Billed as a games-on-demand service, OnLive handles all the intensive game processing on the server side, so your local computer doesn’t have to. What you see is tantamount to a “screen-scrape” video feed send to your client device. All the intensive computing that might normally convert the insides of your homebrew rig into a mini-bake oven renders instead in the cloud.

It’s an ancient concept in computing terms–the model’s existed since mainframes and green-screens, in fact–but until recently, no one’s come up with a system to transfer high-bandwidth video with low enough latency to pass muster with gamers.

(for more, see the full article @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/191197/onlive_cloud_gaming_service_to_launch_in_june.html/)

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Now playing: Primus – Del Davis Tree Farm
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Eric Hammond did some pretty neat work here.

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1 TB of Memory in 1 Minute with 1 Command – By Eric Hammond on October 27, 2009 1:38 AM
Amazon Web Services just announced the release of two new instance types for EC2. These new types have 34.2 GB and 68.4 GB of RAM with a decent amount of CPU capacity on modern CPUs to go along with it.

But when it comes to flexing the raw power at my fingertips with AWS, sometimes I can’t help myself. So…

sitting on my couch with my laptop watching an episode of “Lie to me” on TiVo I just typed:

ec2-run-instances            \
–instance-type m2.4xlarge \
–key KEYPAIR              \
–instance-count 19        \
ami-e6f6158f
and in under a minute and about $45 later, I had ssh access to well over 1 TB (1,000 GB) of free memory. To be sure, it was spread over 19 Ubuntu servers, but still, there’s gotta be something I can do with that, no?

(click here to view more of Eric’s explorations . . .)

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Now playing: Thomas Dolby – My Brain Is Like A Sieve
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I’m still happy with the capabilities of torrent-for-business models – with many downloads now weighing in at multi-gigabyte levels, it makes sense, even for World of Warcraft updates / installs, which have long used the technology. But things are changing with the relative need for even centralized “trackers” :

The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.

By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:

• With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
• With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don’t need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

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I can even imagine this extended a bit to house educational video clips, distributed. Perhaps not as easily streamed, but certainly viable as a file-based video download approach. c.f. http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/word-camp.aspx for an example; not sure how much they captured, but as I’ve said there is little reason these days not to capture the vast majority of it these days, given low space costs and the huge userbase of WordPress.

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Two recent articles about Cisco have hit home :

The deal between Cisco, EMC and VMware announced last week may look familiar enough on paper. Technology companies join forces all the time, and in the vast majority of cases it never amounts to anything except a press release and a “free” lunch for anyone brave enough to sit through the initial presentation.

This one may be different, though, and it’s not just because of the players involved. It’s the technology itself–the maturity of enough pieces to make everything work together–coupled with a real business need for change within data centers. Timing is everything, and this one looks like a bulls-eye. Good timing is what made the deal between Intel ( INTC - news - people ) andMicrosoft ( MSFT - news - people ) so significant for the PC. It’s also what made the combination of AT&T ( T - news -people ) and Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) work so well for the iPhone.

The business case is simple enough. Many IT departments have been stockpiling technology for decades. Some of it is incompatible, some of it is unnecessary, and rarely does any CIO know exactly what everything does or how it interacts. Even worse, most of it is incredibly inefficient, which has raised the operating expenses to the point where even the CFO has to take notice.

This is why almost every CIO on the planet is looking at virtualization, cloud computing (private or public) and anything else that will simplify the internal mess, reduce redundancy and improve security. And after nearly a decade, all of these technologies have been banged around enough to attain a reasonable level of confidence.

What’s new in this whole scheme is flexible utilization, and it’s been a piece that has been sorely lacking. Amazon’s cloud approach is a great example of this. A customer can provision servers or turn them off within minutes, rather than the usual weeks or months it takes for an internal IT department. Cisco‘s( CSCO - news - people ) approach is to do just that with its Vblock technology, which can add virtual machines as needed and lop them off when they’re not needed.

“Storage is underutilized 40% to 60%,” said Gary Moore, senior vice president for services at Cisco. “And when you go to provision new applications, it takes four to six months. We can do 250 applications in a weekend.”

(click this link for the full article)

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If Cisco wasn’t making enough enemies with its string of bold acquisitions and a brazen push into the server market last spring, it’s now picking a software fight with several more tech heavyweights: Microsoft, Google and IBM.

On Monday, Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ) plans to announce a broad set of new collaboration software tools for instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, videoconferencing, document and video sharing, many of which go head to head with similar offerings from Microsoft‘s (MSFT - news - people ) Live Meeting and Exchange messaging products, as well as enterprise collaboration tools from IBM (IBM - news - people ).

Most threatening to Microsoft among those announcements, according to Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, may be a new online e-mail offering that Cisco calls Webex Email, an integration of the Postpath e-mail service it acquired last year with the Webex online conferencing platform it bought in 2007. The goal: to catch Microsoft customers in the middle of their move from the on-premises to cloud-based e-mail offerings and woo them to Cisco’s platform. “If Cisco can catch users in the middle of this transition, it gives them a real shot at this market,” Kerravala says.

Google ( GOOG - news - people ) and IBM have both launched their own attempts to own the Web-based mail box of the future with Gmail and IBM’s iNotes (See: “IBM Aims To Undercut Gmail“). But Cisco has a new trick: Its software-as-a-service e-mail uses the same protocol as Microsoft Outlook, allowing users to read their e-mail through the same interface that they’re accustomed to, despite the fact that their e-mail will now be hosted on the Web and also viewable through Cisco’s online software from any location. “Users can rip out their exchange server and retain the same experience,” says Murali Sitaram, a Cisco vice president for collaboration products. Cisco declined to reveal the pricing for any of its products ahead of their official launch.

Cisco’s wide-ranging launch extends well beyond e-mail. The company is planning to offer what it calls internally an Enterprise Collaboration Platform, a shared workspace that can be hosted online or within a company’s firewalls for security purposes. The platform will function as a sort of hybrid of Google Apps and Facebook, allowing users to blog or share documents, instant message and video conference.

Like Facebook or other social platforms, the real value of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform will come when third-party developers create more applications for the service, says Burton Group ( BURUY.PK - news - people ) analyst Mike Gotta. Cisco is offering an application programming interface to programmers who want to sell their apps through the platform. “Right now it’s really just a plate,” says Gotta. “We’re waiting for the food.”

(click this link for the full article)

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Lastly, the article was fine but the comments at Google trying not to cross ‘the creepy line’ were pretty entertaining