Category Informational

Psst, did you know we’re in a recession?  Yea, can you imagine that? Now is the time to take every dollar we can from every person just to snake on by, right? Err, no.

No, this is a time to band together, and raise the bar together not only as individuals but more importantly as a community.   The Technology community is a particularly strong one, where we reach out and help each other, even in cut-throat situations where we’re against each other, we want to help.

Enter the newest innovation in this from Microsoft.

This is just one in a series of Community Investment opportunities which will be announced in the market (and by announced, I mean I will search and track them down and tell you about them :))

This is particularly cool as in the “Basics” section, it has just that – the basics to get someone to be digitally literate.  Perfect for those with no current knowledge or minimal knowledge and skill-set in the digital age.  An excellent starting point.

I also particularly like this offer, for those trying to be employed or want to remain more relevant in their current positions:

I encourage you to check out all of the resources, whether you’re looking for work, currently employed or interested in pursuing a career in technology.

Truly, do yourself a favor and elevate yourself, the free parts certainly hit the right price point!:)

So seriously, if you haven’t seen this post by Steve or Val, well.. until things are released I cannot say much more than them! But once I can, you’ll get the motherload of it!

What can I say, which has already been said though…

For those of you who manage NetApp filers, you likely are familiar with the Command Line (CLI) or FilerView.   I’d like to say “Welcome to the change to that experience” and that change comes in the form of an MMC snap-in which looks a bit like this!

Believe me, if I didn’t fear for my own disclosure, I’d say more!

One of my favorite bits of this, is the fact that I can manage multiple filers from this single interface – Add them in and they’re ready to go.  The same can be said for multiple members of a cluster.  What? It knows who its cluster pairs are and can tell you about issues? no that’s far too cool to be true.

There’s so much more… which I look forward to disclosing when this officially launches, but just do know that it is really-cool and will improve your management experience even more-so than you currently have today!

I will say nothing more on this! :)

Firstly, let me commend Beth Pariseau for this great article and interview with Fusion-io, including the deep-dive discussions with them!

Now that the formalities are out of the way… time to be not so nice ;)

I like the idea of the Fusion-io devices, I even mentioned them last June, so I’ll call it like it is!

What Fusion-io brings to the table is indeed a nice comprehensive solution to provide high-speed data access in a very small foot-print.  This is indeed a fact, I’m sure none of us will argue that they are indeed providing you to have very FAST storage operating in a distributed model, which works out perfectly in a one-off scenario in ways hard to even address!

The business challenges which Fusion-io solves is the difficulty of getting high-speed disk closer to very specific applications (such as grid-computing in ‘x’ number of boxes or OLTP) and it does a pretty good job of that, allowing me to insert their solution into my existing commodity servers!

However, for the one challenge this solution solves it still leaves all of the other pressing issues as this forces us into a distributed fashion, almost contradicting the consolidation efforts which Virtualization, FCoE and and Virtualized storage bring into the Datacenter.

So, I commend the effort, however the implementation of distribution not only increases my risk but it raises question of my scalability of this as a long-term viable implementation.   Here’s a top down list of challenges addressed and non-addressed with this implementation.

Infact, when you think about it, the Fusion-io introduction is a clear replacement for DAS in the current datacenter, but it lags so behind conventional (and even archaic) models of SAN implementations that it’d be hard-pressed for any Data Center or Enterprise Architect to use this in any extensive deployment with the lack of scalability, DR/BC sensitivity, HA application and short and long-term backup and archival.

On it’s own, it’s a challenge to see it last and take a significant portion of the Enterprise Storage market as a whole but as a niche player it is king.   With offerings like TMS – RAMSAN, the NetApp V-Series RAMSAN Bundle, and other SSD/EFD solutions premiered by the larger storage vendors this will not only continue to be an aggressive play in the future but will set a precedent of things to come.

It just goes to show, storage is dumb – It is how you use it and the intelligence into managing it which is the clear differentiator, and these differentiators will set the dogs apart from the wolves. (or lolcats if preferred)

I did a quick search on this (before writing this) and didn’t find anything so I thought “Maybe I’m not the only one wondering about the special loot, Collections and the Vault on Mafia Wars!

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

First: Special Jobs!

If you’ve been playing Mafia wars at all (I blame Jeff and Aviva for asking me to join)  You will notice there are tiers of skill-sets in the Jobs you are to pull off.

And as you go through these ranks you’ll eventually finish out at level 3 with 3 Stars!

So, what good does this do? What’s the purpose behind actually finishing all this BS on these levels?  Well, here are your winnings!

	This gives you +4% damage dealt in fights. (I thought it was just +4, didn’t even notice the %, omfg!)
	-7% damage received in fights
	A 30 second reduction on your health regen timer
	A 5% discount on property purchases

Additional collectables, based upon comments by Johnny! And Special thanks to Keith for providing the images!

	a 30 second reduction on your stamina regen timer
	a 5% discount on property repairs
	A 30 second reduction on your energy regen timer
	a 5% bonus on job experience
	2x the energy regenerated per regen period

Once you’ve gotten past that… you’ll eventually find yourself winning various prizes while you do your jobs and missions.  The list will look similar to this: (These are your collections)

Eventually while you develop your collection, you’ll obtain 7 of a single type, and you can then vault it.   The two things I’ve vaulted look like this:

If you cannot make that out, that is +6 energy, +2 energy and +5 defense.. all for playing the game in general.

So, nothing special otherwise has been revealed.

Okay – Some updates! Also if you happen to have the entries which are missing, let me know and I’ll be sure to update the list here!

I’ve also included what I have so far as Cuba stuff, and the other added NY things!

Also, the new Cuban Business Model is interesting

Be sure to invest your money in cuban businesses early and sell often if it nears filling up, because money is very difficult to come by in Cuba, even the top missions pay out at around a 3k max.

Though, here is a little ‘tip’ for those of who you get bored of constantly fighting and having to search/click.   Right click on an opponent who has a listing which you can defeat.  Copy the url, then open a new tab,  paste it, and keep click/entering on the url until you need to visit the hospital or are out of Stamina.   Yes, I am lame, but hey a lot of stamina gets boring!

Let me know if this is helpful, and when I come across other cool revelations I’ll list what those are here.

Also, if you’d like to join my Mafia in Mafia wars, or be my friend on Facebook in general, feel free to add me ;)

Also, if you’re on twitter, I love friends there too :) @cxi on twitter!

And for more information, check out my updated post

What’s new in Zynga’s Mafia Wars

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

Wow, Seattle is a long walk from Chicago, so I wasn’t able to attend!

But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be involved!

However in hind-sight I do want to be able to catch up on the resources, and I know others will, so here is a listing of some resources which were available and accessible for the CloudCamp Seattle event!

For those of you who are on Twitter, there was definitely some activity out there on the Tweetosphere!  Lots of activity on the hashtag #cloudcamp which was actively hit up by these folks as well. – @DanielleMORRILL @SecureSun @krishnan @mediaphyter @bmw

Special thanks to @DanielleMORRILL and @bmw for the live feed and moderation as well :)

The links! The links!  Some must visit links are…

Video Feed from the back of the room (This has direct links to the video :))

A similar feed on that was found here

Danielle Morrill’s live feed during Cloud Camps

Special thanks to  :)

And ofcourse, :)