The Azure solution has been designed to help developers deploy web-based services centred around Visual Studio quickly and easily by not having to worry about the infrastructure costs or overhead that are typically associated with application delivery.

Once a you are ready to deploy you can select how many nodes you want to use in the Microsoft cloud of computing power, you reserve a those nodes and pay for just those node.  As your web service becomes more popular, you can log in to the management web site and increase the node count with just a few clicks.
Windows Azure pricing is based on how much storage, bandwidth and computing time an application uses.

Visit the Windows Azure Community Technology Preview

Read the Microsoft Press Release

The Microsoft service is playing catch up to the Amazon.com service that has been around for quite some time, called Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2).

The major difference that pushes Amazon.com’s solution ahead of Microsoft is the fact that it is no based on one solution.   With just a few clicks you can deploy a Linux, OS X or a Windows solution with prebuilt images. 

Amazon’s solution is priced according to how much storage (cheap), bandwidth (not as cheap) and computing time (relatively cheap).
To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
• Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

You can read more about Amazon EC2 here.

I’m not going to comment on the quality of the images, you can determine that for yourself.  You can go straight to Yahoo Images by clicking here.   You can also search for multimedia files such as videos.

As you type a search in the box, an AJAX like box pops up and autocompletes your search based on the keywords in their database.

It is a nice addition and I’m sure Google will follow suit soon.

According to the recent news coming out of the Sillicon Valley, Oracle is going to follow ]]> http://www.goitexpert.com/databases/oracle-to-offer-hardware-for-their-database-servers/feed/ 0 http://www.goitexpert.com/disaster-recovery/domplayer-3wplayer-fix/ http://www.goitexpert.com/disaster-recovery/domplayer-3wplayer-fix/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:38:00 +0000 admin http://www.goitexpert.com/entry.cfm?entry=DomPlayer-3wPlayer-Fix Recently a bunch of hose bags have been upping files on Torrents sites that require a “special player” to see the video.  This player is full of spyware, Trojans, viruses and crap!  Often the video is still the original, or decent quality.  Here is how to decrypt these videos and watch them without this crap special player.

Recently a bunch of hose bags have been upping files on Torrents sites that require a “special player” to see the video.  This player is full of spyware, Trojans, viruses and crap!  Often the video is still the original, or decent quality.  Here is how to decrypt these videos and watch them without this crap special player.

When you play the video you’ll be presented with a screen telling you that you don’t have the appropriate player and that you need to visit a particular website to get the player.

http://download.domplayer.com/

Once you download it, it will most likely say that you are not in a country that they can accept payment from!  Bullshit!

They then redirect you to another site.  The 3wPlayer.  This is the spyware laden piece of crap.

Often the files themselves are pretty good, it’s just the header information that is being incorrectly read.  There are two tracks for video in an AVI file and most player read one of them.  This player picks up the other one, making the file play a few seconds and the rest appear to be garbage.

You can download a utility from Wildman Productions that will remove the crap and allow you to play the video normally.

It is mirrored on our site here.

Once you download it, just simply run the file.

In the Input File click the browse button to locate the file.

Click corresponding button in the Output File section to specify where you want to save the file.

When you are ready click Convert.

In about 20 seconds your file will be repaired and you can play it in Windows Media, VLC, Quicktime….whatever you want!

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You can use HTML, Flash, Video, the formats are endless to support your advertising campaign. The Openads administrative interface lets you choose to enable or disable a campaign at any time and even schedule times and dates that an advertisement is displayed, and even target specific Geographic Territory with targeted ads.

Openads lets you run campaigns from many advertisers at the same time. By loading ad program tags into Openads, rather than directly on your website, you can run campaigns from many different sources side by side.  Openads supports Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher, DoubleClick, Advertising.com and many more.

There are several new and upgraded features in Openads.  Among them are;

Enhanced Power & Simplicity:
            Optimized delivery engine increases number and speed of ads delivered – Openads is now capable of serving billions of ads each month.
            Improved installation process makes new installations easy and upgrades on existing systems seamless.
            Better ad campaign prioritisation.
Easy Integration with Industry Leading Applications:
            Ability to track clicks sent to Google AdSense & Yahoo! Publisher Network
            Enhanced click tracking of Flash ads and support for backup GIFs
            Documented code for easy customisation
Enhanced Targeting & Campaign Management:
            Targeting statistics screen gives users a holistic view of ad campaigns to determine which are performing well or not meeting required impressions
            Direct selection allows publishers to specify keywords against tags, providing better targeting across the entire site
            Campaigns can be capped in the same way as a banner
            Zones can be capped in the same way as a campaign
            When there are no ads to be shown for a particular zone, ads are automatically grabbed from a linked zone
Improved Reporting
            Reports automatically generated at pre-set times when publishers, admins and advertisers need information
            Revenue maximized by tracking visitor behaviour from click-through to transaction and reports produced using real-time information
            Basic reports simplified, including graph creation

You can download Openads here;

http://www.openads.org/downloads.html

The newly-released Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard includes embedded Linux that can be booted in under five seconds. The embedded operating system also includes a stripped down Firefox browser and Skype, so within seconds of booting you can be on the Internet.

With a fast bootup speed of only 5 seconds, the ASUS Express Gate offers an optional Linux OS bootup that allows you to enjoy instant access to commonly used functions like accessing the Internet, VoIP, and Web emailing without entering the OS.

The Asus Express Gate is based on a flavour of Linux called SplashTop. With Splashtop your computer is ready to use seconds after you turn it on. Instead of waiting for a full boot, you have Web access in mere seconds. Chat, surf, play a game – all one click away.

Splashtop is a secure Web-surfing environment. You can surf the Web while staying immune to many of the attacks that plague Windows.

It also includes a range of plugins for popular music ratings sites and blogs that add to your music listening pleasure.  Songbird is not yet available in Ubuntu repositories yet but you can use this script to install it.

Download the script here.  Type the following commands in terminal;

cd ~/Desktop
chmod +x installsongbird.sh
./installsongbird.sh

And we are done!  That’s it. Nice and simple!  To launch Songbird go to Applications – Sound & Video - Songbird.

The first time you launch Songbird, Agree to the License.

Then select the music device support (if any) you would like and click ok.

Removing Songbird
If you wish to remove Songbird, download this script to your desktop and paste these commands in the terminal:
cd ~/Desktop
chmod +x removesongbird.sh
./removesongbird.sh

As of June 2007 Lighty (or LightTPD) has just under 1.5 million sites

Jan Kneschke began work on lighttpd in 2003, when he wanted to develop a fast and lightweight alternative to Apache. Since then, a community has grown around lighttpd, which has its own home (with a blog, a wiki and a forum) at lighttpd.net. The description there goes:

lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant and very flexible Webserver that has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other Webservers and takes care of CPU load. Its advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) makes lighttpd the perfect Webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Meanwhile, Apache (in April 2007) stood at a 58.63% share of the Netcraft surveyed sites, running roughly flat month to month after it dropped about the same 5% that Microsoft servers gained in April of last year. Don’t be surprised to see lighttpd and Apache combine to increase open-source server market shares, while also increasing choice.

The company said it hopes Google Gears will emerge as a standard for delivering offline Web applications. Google is offering the technology under the extremely permissive New BSD license (which in practice makes it almost public domain) and has released a Gears-enabled version of its Google Reader to showcase the offline capabilities.

Google’s unstated aims are to make its Web-based apps more competitive with locally installed software and slow the growth of non-Ajax platforms, such as Adobe Apollo, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.

Gears could be used by any Ajax application, and Google will probably get its wish of making Gears into an industry standard: There’s no reason for Ajax developers not to adopt it, though enterprises building Rich Internet Applications should still carefully consider whether Ajax is the best platform.

JEDEC, the memory standards association, expects the new standard to be widely adopted. DDR3 is a standard for SDRAM — Synchronous Dynamic Random Access — memory and specifies a 1.5 volt power supply. DDR1 drew 1.8 volts and DDR2 2.5 volts. DDR2 clocked the memory bus at twice the memory cell speed to trade off an increase in memory cell latency against an overall increase in memory throughput. DDR3 clocks the memory bus at four times the memory cell speed to make the same trade-off but this time with a lower power consumption. DDR3 has an 8-bit wide prefetch buffer; DDR2’s is 4 bit; and DDR’s is 2 bit. DDR3 should win out over DDR2 where large amounts of data have to be transferred in and out of memory.

Joe Macri of AMD, the relevant JEDEC group chairman, said: "The DDR3 standard represents the culmination of countless hours of collaboration between memory device, system, component and module producers. This standard will permit emerging systems to achieve greater performance, storage and functionality, consistent with the needs of an increasingly information-intensive world community."

The DDR3 standard is intended to operate over a performance range from 800 to 1600 MT/s (million transfers per second) and device densities from 512MB to 8GB in monolithic and stacked packages. These could dramatically increase RAM capacities in PCs and mobile phones, better supporting, for example, a move to 64-bit PCs.