We Need Wireless Power

New Hampshire was hit by a major ice storm last Thursday night. The power at my house went out initially around 7:30PM but my UPS system kept the Internet modem and Wi-Fi access point up for a while. The power came back briefly around 10PM but went out for good at midnight. This time the storm took out the cable so there was no Internet. After almost 36 total hours without power or heat (it dropped to 20F or –6C outside) the power finally came back Saturday morning. Now on Monday there is still no cable or high speed Internet at home. I was able to get to the Internet on my cell phone using EDVO and also make phone calls. The wireless networks were a lot more resistant to the effect of the storm than the other utilities. If only Tesla had been more successful with his research on the wireless transmission of power.

Schools are pretty much closed state-wide in New Hampshire as much of the state is still without power. The north side of my town is still without as are several near by towns. You really don’t realize how dependent we are on electric power until you have to go without it. The same is true for the Internet. I found myself stopping several times a day thinking “Oh I’ll look that up on the Internet.” only to catch myself with the memory that the Internet was not available. No looking up bank balances. No looking up that company someone told me about. No ordering that Christmas gift. It felt weird.

How did we get along before? Well my neighbor who has a very old house had a gas stove that didn’t need electric power and a fireplace. We were able to cook and stay warm there. But somehow I don’t see us going back to encyclopedia in place of the Internet. Not for full time at least. And have you seen a typewriter lately? I saw some in a store recently and they were clearly labeled for collectors rather than for people who wanted to use them. Long term there is no going back.

Well that is my observation for today. More useful posts once I have had time to tap the network for a while.

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Microsoft, Michigan Department of Education and Michigan Virtual University offer CareerForward to help students prepare for a 21st-century workplace.

SEATTLE — Dec. 2, 2008 — With financial support and assistance from Microsoft Corp.’s U.S. Partners in Learning, students across the nation now have access to CareerForward, a powerful, free online course covering globalization, career planning, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. CareerForward empowers students at any grade level in middle and high school to take charge of their own education, career path and future prosperity. Global education leaders from more than 30 nations are learning how to implement this program in their home countries this week at the School of the Future World Summit in Seattle hosted by Microsoft Corp.

Increasingly, multinational corporations are seeking young people who possess a global perspective and an appreciation that their academic preparation is vital to their future. Students who take the new online CareerForward course will better understand the crucial importance of their education and have the ability to improve their motivation and choices in high school and college. Students, parents and teachers can access the course at http://review.careerforward.org/careerforward.

“This course will help students understand how to thrive in a global economy,” said Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. “It also will teach them to learn online — something they’ll need to do throughout their work lives.”

Michigan ranks No. 2 in the nation for its online learning policy and practice according to The Center for Digital Education. CareerForward first launched in Michigan two years ago when the state became the first in the nation to require online learning as a requirement for high school education. This year alone, 18,000 Michigan students have pledged to complete the course.

“Students and the career choices they make are critical to the talent pipeline and future business prosperity in the U.S.,” said Anthony Salcito, general manager of U.S. Public Sector Education at Microsoft. “CareerForward encourages the development of a skilled work force, as it helps young citizens explore global opportunities and recognize the importance of technology in jobs of the future.”

CareerForward is a media-rich online learning program, developed through a unique public-private partnership between the Michigan Department of Education, Michigan Virtual University and Microsoft. The program helps students wrestle with some of the burning questions about their futures: What am I going to do with my life? What is the world of work like? What will I need to succeed? What’s next for me? Using a variety of multimedia, course topics explore these questions and more. Throughout the course, students are asked frequently to reflect on what they’re learning, to write their thoughts down as a continual refinement of their thinking, and to discuss their thoughts with other students, either in-person or online.

Students can work with local educators to access the online course, which takes about four to six weeks or approximately 20 hours to complete. The course is designed to be facilitated by a local teacher and can be used independently or as part of an existing face-to-face course in career planning, business or global studies.

“This course helps students realize the crucial importance of education to their future,” said Mike Flanagan, Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. “By integrating technology into every student’s education, this allows them to experience their education outside of the classroom — in the world of technology. It helps bring relevance to their learning.”

“We are excited about the national launch of CareerForward,” said Jamey Fitzpatrick, president of Michigan Virtual University. “This innovative online course is something that every parent in the country will want their son or daughter to experience.”

Further information on CareerForward is available at http://review.careerforward.org/careerforward. More information about Michigan Virtual University is available at http://www.mivu.org. More information about Microsoft U.S. Partners in Learning is available at http://www.microsoft.com/education/pilus.mspx.

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Free Online Career Development Course Now Available to 16 Million Students Nationwide

Do you know students who are wondering “What do I want to be when I grow up?” It’s a hard question and students look in all directions for answers. Recently Microsoft and the Michigan Virtual University released an online “course” for students to use to do some self evaluation to try to help answer that question. The course covers a number of topics that includes things like globalization, career planning, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. I don’t usually copy complete announcements but I did today. Check out CareerForward today.

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Teacher Tech Tuesdays January 2009

The Teacher Tech Tuesday program (last blogged about here) is dedicated to helping teachers and academic administrators get more out of Microsoft products. The goal is to help bring technology in to classrooms as a tool to teach other subject and not just to teach technology for the sake of technology. I just received the schedule for Teach Tech Tuesdays for January 2009 and they look interesting. Podcasting in history class, getting more dynamic content using MS Office, increasing collaboration using OneNote and using Microsoft Math in math classes. And if you need more incentive there are special offers for each program. Yeah, free, is a good price. :-)

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Free EBooks From Microsoft Learning

I was checking the Microsoft Learning blog the other day and saw this announcement of some free eBooks as Microsoft Press continues its 25th Anniversary eBook giveaway. The books below are only available until December 24th so grab them now if they look interesting. I’ve grabbed a copy of Writing Secure Code for Vista myself. Writing secure code is something I think is very important and something that I think students should at least discuss from their earliest programming experiences.

Understanding IPv6, by Joseph Davies
Writing Secure Code for Vista, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

Also you can sign up for a newsletter that will let you know as soon as additional free eBooks become available. Visit one of those book links for more information.

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3Leaf Systems to Demo Silicon Enabled Server Virtualization Technology at Supercomputing 08

3Leaf Systems (www.3leafsystems.com), a provider of next-generation virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced that the company will showcase new silicon enabled virtualization technology enabling dynamic resource utilization using commodity servers from Super Micro Computer Inc. 3Leaf will demo the solution at Supermicro’s Booth# 1033 at SC08 being held in the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas from November 15-21.
Virtualization within high performance computing (HPC) environments presents particular challenges to today’s enterprises. HPC environments require ultra high speed message passing between applications in order to operate in high computing environments, and many of today’s virtualization solutions fall short in providing this capability. In addition, CPU and memory demands from HPC applications continue to drive over-provisioning of servers within the data center.

Now, rather than having to overbuild their infrastructures to allow for high compute or memory intensive jobs, and/or sacrificing performance to achieve virtualization, enterprises have another choice. 3Leaf’s silicon enabled technology demonstrates how enterprises can pool CPU and memory resources across multiple x86 servers to create a cloud environment, enable up to one terabyte of DRAM for memory intensive applications, and achieve low-latency messaging between applications.

“Virtualization, along with compute and memory constraints within today’s scale-out servers, provides many challenges for HPC environments,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, CEO and president, 3Leaf Systems. “With this technology, working together with companies like Supermicro, 3Leaf helps enable virtualization for HPC environments while lowering the capital and operational costs of their HPC infrastructures. Supermicro shares our vision and we are pleased the company is an early adopter of this revolutionary technology.”

“We recognize the strong, unique value that the 3Leaf technology achieves, and are excited to partner with 3Leaf to help enterprises overcome pain points in their HPC environments by optimizing resources and dramatically reducing data center costs,” said Charles Liang, CEO and president, Supermicro. “With the 3Leaf enabled Supermicro servers, enterprises can achieve a terabyte of DRAM at a dramatically low cost and enable low-latency messaging for fast performance.”

About SC08

SC08, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. This premiere international conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. For more information, please visit http://sc08.supercomputing.org/.

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rPath's Billy Marshall Interviewed on how Enterprises can Virtualize Applications as a Precursor to Cloud Computing

Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of rPath, recently spoke with Dana Gardner to find out more about how enterprises should begin moving to application-level virtualization that serves as an onramp to cloud benefits.

Many enterprises are factoring how to bring more applications into a virtual development and deployment environment to save on operating costs and to take advantage of service oriented architectures (SOA) and cloud computing models.

Finding proven deployment methods and governance for managing virtualized applications across a lifecycle is an essential ingredient in making SOA and cloud-computing approaches as productive as possible while avoiding risk and complexity. The goal is to avoid having to rewrite code in order for applications to work across multiple clouds -- public, private or hybrids.

The cloud forces the older notion of "write-once, run anywhere" into a new level of "deploy correctly so you can exploit the benefits of cloud choices and save a lot of money."

Here are some excerpts from that interview:


We're once again facing a similar situation now where enterprises are taking a very tough look at their data center expenditures and expansions that they're planning for the data center. ... The [economic downturn] is going to have folks looking very hard at large-scale outlays of capital for data centers.

I believe that will be a catalyst for folks to consider a variable-cost approach to using infrastructures or service, perhaps platform as a service (PaaS). All these things roll up under the notion of cloud.

Virtualization provides isolation for applications running their own logical server, their own virtual server. ... Virtualization gives you -- from a business perspective -- an opportunity to decouple the definition of the application from the system that it runs on. ... Then, at run-time, you can decide where you have capacity that best meets needs of the profile of an application.

I can begin sourcing infrastructure a little more dynamically, based upon the load that I see. Maybe I can spend less on the capital associated with my own data center, because with my application defined as this independent unit, separate from the physical infrastructure I'll be able to buy infrastructure on demand from Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, these folks who are now offering up these virtualized clouds of servers.

That's the architecture we're evolving toward. ... For legacy applications, there's not going to be much opportunity. [But] they may actually consider this for new applications that would get some level of benefit by being close to other services.

[If] I can define my application as a working unit, I may be able to choose between Amazon or my internal architecture that perhaps has a VMware basis, or a Rackspace, GoGrid, or BlueLock offering.

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