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Black’s the colour to help save energy, says Andrew 22/ 9/2008
A 13-YEAR-OLD boy has set up a search engine website that can help people save energy.

Andrew Davey, who lives in Knaphill, got the idea after reading a blog by Mark Ontkush, a green computing specialist based in Boston, USA.

Mr Ontkush had calculated that an all-white web page used 74 watts of electricity to display, whereas an all-black screen uses only 59.

He said that on a website such as Google, which deals with approximately 200 million queries per day, the change from a white screen to a black one would save 15 watts each time it was displayed. That would add up to a significant amount of energy saved per day.

Andrew said: “After reading the article I thought it was quite amazing that it hasn’t been done already. It’s so simple but very effective.”

The youngster set up his own energy-saving black web page alternative to Google called ecosmartsearch, which took him about a week to do.

He said: “It works with the Google search engine and gets the same results as Google. I’ve always been good at computers and I turned my talents to website design, not something easy at all.

“My friends really like it. I’m just trying to get them out of the habit of using Google. I showed a couple of teachers and they think it’s really good. They are really impressed and have started to use it.”

Andrew had previously made a website for his dad’s medal business.

He said: “I wanted to make my own website in which I could gain some income and become better at website design. I decided to put the writing into green to associate it with energy-saving.

“I also wrote: ‘We are saving energy, now it’s your turn,’ on the home page, hoping that people will think about that light they left on and go and turn things off.

“I have a couple of ideas to make things that save energy. I would like to be an entrepreneur and have my own web design company.”

Andrew has also been part of the green team at Woking High School.

He said: “We were looking at energy-saving issues. I think helping the environment is a great thing to start doing. Every little helps.

“I’m really proud of myself for what I’ve done as I don’t think many people of my age have made a proper website and got it on to the web.”

To use Andrew’s search engine and save energy, go to www.ecosmartsearch.com.

© S&B media 2008

Posted by Solmn at 11:48 PM View Comments 

Filtering Viruses Through The Cloud » Full Story on Forbes.com Andy Greenberg,

09.22.08, 6:00 AM ET

To fight an epidemic of malicious code, security software vendors are heading to the data center.


Anti-virus programs are notorious for acting suspiciously like the malicious software they're meant to eradicate, hijacking your PC and choking its resources by scanning files endlessly.

Now, security software vendors are hoping to solve that parasitic problem with the same information technology transformation meant to make all software cheaper, more efficient and less resource-intensive: the move to the "cloud."

In the past months, cybersecurity vendors including F-Secure, McAfee (nyse: MFE -news - people ), Symantec (nasdaq:SYMC - news - people ) and Trend Micro have all released new versions of their software designed to move more of the work of identifying viruses, Trojans and other forms of "malware" off of desktop PCs and onto faraway servers connected by the Internet. Beyond lightening the load on their customers' machines by performing more analysis as a networked service, they also claim that cloud-based approach may be a more effective strategy for keeping up with the ever-faster flood of new malicious code.

By all appearances, more desktop machines are becoming infected with malicious software than ever before. Over the past year, the number of PCs ensnared in botnets--herds of users' computers infected with malicious software that sends spam or performs click fraud--has more than quadrupled, according to cybersecurity researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation.

One element of the problem, says Trend Micro's vice president, Carol Carpenter, is the acceleration of malware's mutation into new, as-yet-undetected strains. "Three or four years ago, we saw 50 new threats a day. Now we see 50,000 threats a day," she says. "The order of magnitude has changed dramatically."

That means protecting users from newly discovered malware is no longer a matter of days or hours but seconds. Updating a customer's anti-virus software three times a day, as the 2008 version of Symantec's Norton software advertises, or even 10 times a day, as F-Secure boasts, is no longer enough.

The cloud-based solution announced by Trend Micro in June and implemented earlier this month by McAfee and F-Secure is designed to cut that vulnerable period to seconds. Rather than wait for a database of newly identified malware signatures to be downloaded to a PC, the upgraded software takes a "hash"--an identifying number that doesn't reveal the file's contents--of every new application running on a machine and compares that identifier to the software vendors' continuously updated database of threats on in-house servers. If the application doesn't match anything in the vendor's database of safe files, the software issues a warning to the user and performs a closer scan of the file for suspicious characteristics.

That communication between the PC and the database over the Internet, say researchers at F-Secure and McAfee, takes as little as 100 milliseconds. And by pulling the process off the desktop and into the cloud, it uses just a fraction of the computing resources of a traditional anti-virus scan.

Software developers have different approaches to the cloud-based anti-malware system. F-Secure, for instance, scans every application, while McAfee uses an initial filter based on size and how hidden a file's source code is to determine whether it needs scanning in the cloud. Jon Oltsik, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, points out that Trend Micro was the first to announce the technology, but balks at picking which company's approach is most effective. "From a technology perspective, they're all pretty close," he says. "This is not a game of leapfrog. It's a change in the way we have to do things to keep up with the monumental growth in the number and sophistication of attacks."

Security offerings in the cloud aren't strictly new. The security firm Postini, for instance, offered to scrub e-mail for spam and viruses as early as 1999, filtering e-mail before it reached a user's computer without any software on his or her desktop. In July of 2007, the firm was purchased by Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) to be integrated into the search giant's software-as-a-service applications.

In fact, none of the major software vendors implementing malware-detection in the cloud are offering "cloud computing" in that pure form: Each application still involves installing software on the desktop to more easily scan a client's machine and also to detect threats that come from sources other than the Internet, such as a USB drive.

Still, that incomplete move to the cloud holds the potential to act as a kind of collective intelligence, says Oltsik. A software vendor like Symantec, for instance, asks its users to opt in to what it calls the Norton Insight system, which currently assembles data from 17 million customers and uses it to better understand when a new strain of malicious code has appeared. Security researchers liken that approach to a "neighborhood watch" strategy.

Even so, cybersecurity isn't likely to overtake the extraordinary evolution of malware, says Rich Mogull, a security consultant and blogger. Even with malware detection performed over the Internet and piped out at faster speeds than ever before to client computers, no company offers anything beyond "signature-based" filtering, or filtering by characteristics in the program's code, says Mogull. In other words, new malicious files can only be detected after they've been found elsewhere in a company's anti-malware network.

Because malware will appear in forms that even a company's Internet-hosted database doesn't recognize, outbreaks will still occur even among "protected" computers, he says. Given that some cybercriminals are now writing custom malware targeted at single organizations, that's not enough, he says. "No matter how fast we react in this cloud-based scenario, it's still reactive," he says.

But the next generations of anti-malware software may go beyond signature-based detection. Researchers have been working for years on "behavior-based" malware detection, watching what applications do rather than looking at their characteristics to determine their intent.

Symantec's vice president of research and technology, Carey Nachenberg, says its software, possibly in the next year, will try a "reputation-based" approach. He declines to share details of the new strategy but says that one simple element of reputation is simply how many times an application has been seen before--newer, unique applications will be automatically less trusted than common, tested ones. He says the system is closer to Google's Web page ranking algorithm than traditional anti-virus programs.

"Right now, our fingerprinting is faster than ever before," Nachenberg says. "But in the future, the fingerprints disappear completely."


2008 Forbes.com LLC™ All Rights Reserved

Posted by Solmn at 8:31 AM View Comments 

CherryPal Delivery Update Good News From CherryPal Center:
"The CherryPals had gone back to the manufacturer to fix a firmware issue. We were surprised ourselves about the software issues.  The delay was caused by a software bug in the graphics core of the processor. We started a joint project with Freescale and got the graphics core issue resolved. It is fixed now. We are doing final testing right now.
"We expect to start shipping the C100 in early October."
Here at CherryPal for Everyone we have been very patient waiting, hoping, and learning about cloud computing, green computing, and the competitive space.  Stay tuned to http://cherrypal.blogspot.com to get first tastes!
Posted by Solmn at 12:16 PM View Comments 

Everything’s Gone Green

The Information Center of the I.T. Industry


Posted by Admin on September 16, 2008

Users Are Confused About the Issues and Solutions Surrounding Green IT - Gartner
by: Jerry Liao

Nowadays, most computer companies are talking about virtualization, VoIP, cloud computing, mobility, SaaS, and Green I.T. But it seems the industry made a mistake as somewhere in terms of explaining to users what these technologies is all about. Particularly, Green Computing. What is it really? In general, green computing relates to the use of computing resources in conjunction with minimizing environmental impact, maximizing economic viability and ensuring social duties. But how many I.T. users actually understand what green computing is all about?

As pointed out in a recent study by Gartner Inc, IT users are unsure of the implications of green IT and where to invest their technology budgets. Gartner analyst said this confusion will continue for some years to come in what is a rapidly changing segment of the industry.“The IT industry is saturated with green IT talk,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. “Conferences, presentations and consultants are springing up to provide guidance and advice on a range of issues that are being codified under the generic term of green IT. Unfortunately, with so much hype, users are left with a sense of confusion about where and when they should invest their time and money.”

There is a great deal of uncertainty about which green technologies and products are actually available today and which may become available in the future. The future “productization” of technologies will not just depend on the maturity of the design but also on the prevailing market conditions and the possibility of future legislation.

However, Gartner research shows that the spectrum of green technologies, services and legislation that users need to focus on can be broken down into short-term (immediate), midterm and long-term activities. The immediate issues affect the next 24 months and need to yield a quick return on investment while the midterm category covers the next five years. The long-term category covers products and activities that are, by nature, rather esoteric and may never become mainstream.

Immediate Green IT Issues for Users to Focus OnImmediate Green IT issues center around power, cooling and floor space problems in data centers and office environments. With this in mind, Gartner has identified eight important areas for users to focus on during the next 24 months:

- Modern data center facilities’ design concepts
- Advanced cooling technologies
- Use of modeling and monitoring software
- Virtualization technologies for server consolidation
- Processor design and server efficiency
- Energy management for the office environment
- Integrated energy management for the software environment
- Combined heat and power

Midterm Green IT Issues for Users to Focus OnDuring the next two to five years, many green technologies will mature and become important to IT groups looking to develop greener IT organizations. However, much of the planning and assessing of the appropriateness and cost of using these new products needs to be examined earlier and in the context of an overall IT strategy. This is especially the case where government legislation (affecting building design, for example) may come into force. Gartner highlights eight areas in this category:

-Green IT procurement
-Green asset life cycle programs
-Environmental labeling of servers and other devices
-Changing people’s behaviors
-Green accounting in IT
-Green legislation in data centers
-Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and IT programs

Long-Term Green IT Issues for Users to Focus OnThere are many green IT technologies, services and projects that will span the next five to 20 years. Much of the industry hype (or “greenwash”) sits in this area and is causing confusion for users. They are unclear about whether carbon-trading programs will become the norm, or whether it will be possible to recycle energy from data centers in a simple and cost-effective way. Gartner has identified the following seven areas to focus on:

-Carbon offsetting and carbon trading
-Data center heat recycling
-Alternative energy sources
-Software efficiency
-Green building design
-Green legislation
-Green chargeback

I am just wondering if the I.T. companies themselves understand what green computing is all about. There are some vendors who would sell products and/or solutions to consumers without knowing what the product is all about and how it would benefit their clients. For the nth time, vendors should realize that the word marketing is not just about selling, its about establishing relationship / partnership with your clients. Earn their trust and be sincere, and you don’t have to do any selling anymore.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
My Plan for Continual Learning about Technologies
Have you tried turning it off, and on again.
Global Green USA

This entry was posted on September 16, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Digital Citizens. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted by Solmn at 10:09 PM View Comments Posted by Solmn at 9:13 PM View Comments 
Cloud Computing Expo - NComputing & its Disruptive $70 PC NComputing claims to be "revolutionizing computing"
By: Maureen O'Gara
Sep. 12, 2008 02:00 PM

IDC doesn't recognize the company that claims to be the leading thin client house on the planet as a through and through thin client company.

Seems two-thirds of it doesn't fit IDC's standard definition of what a thin client should be.

However, that quirky little factoid hasn't stopped NComputing from seeing over a million of its widgets deployed in the 20 months since it came to market and becoming, by all accounts, the fastest-growing desktop virtualization outfit around.

NComputing claims to be "revolutionizing computing."

Okay, all the boys say that but NComputing's appeal, particularly in emerging markets, home to the so-called "next five billion," is its promise of a $70 PC, a price point that has so far eluded such competitors as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC).

For instance, it was NComputing - not OLPC - that captured the first 1:1 country-wide education deployment, which happened to be in Macedonia, whose 180,000 student seats now constitute the largest known thin client deployment ever. It is also the largest known desktop Linux deployment ever even though NComputing's virtualization solution is built on Windows.

NComputing reportedly came in at half the next lowest bid and that includes all the hardware, the transportation, setup, training and maintenance.

What had to have pushed Macedonia over the edge is the fact that NComputing's proposition is sustainable: its users only consume an eco-friendly watt of power and the widgetry will never be obsolete.

NComputing's siren song has attracted commercial accounts like FedEx, CSC, Lear, the World Trade Organization, Carrefour, Cigna, Remax and Flextronics among its user base of 20,000 organizations in 90 countries.

The start-up now boasts an annualized run rate of over a million units. It says it's expecting orders of 10,000 units a clip starting this fall and is expecting to fulfill 7% of all K-12 public school purchases in the US this year, pretty good for a new arrival with only two rounds and a $100 million valuation to its name.

Its siren song also attracted Will Poole, the co-head of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential and former boss of Microsoft's Windows Client Business, whose enviable position gave him the pick of the litter.

Poole, who created Windows Starter - now at seven million sold in emerging markets - and championed détente with OLPC - the Windows version of its XO will be out any minute now - is retiring from Microsoft at the end of the month and says he wants to give something back.

He wants a shot at saving the world by resolving some of the global development issues. And he's going to use NComputing, where he will be non-executive co-chairman and ambassador to developing countries, as a platform while he figures out what he wants to do next.

Poole, by the way, has some money in the company.

What NComputing does is take a bog-standard PC and hang terminals off of it. It figures PCs are so powerful today that most applications only use a fraction of their capacity.

It taps that under-utilized capacity and can put, say, 10 users on a $500 Dell Inspiron reportedly with no discernable latency.

NComputing CEO and co-chair Stephen Dukker, the fast-talking, golden-tongued founder of eMachines, who's been down this disruptive, low-cost road before, says the company's widgetry, stored in a black box that has no CPU, memory or moving parts, doesn't try to eliminate the latency, it compensates for it.

The mojo was developed in Germany by an outlet called HydraPark that was determined to make Citrix eat its dust. NComputing, which got started in 2003, bought the Citrix-killer and from that its vSpace desktop virtualization software and User eXtension Protocol (UXP) were born.

NComputing offers two species of its technology: the X-series and L-series run on Windows Server. (Warning: NComputing won't be as cheap for commercial accounts as for education given Microsoft's licenses.)

The X-series is the cheaper, your basic 70 bucks a head on a one-watt-per-user budget. It uses a direct 10m connection between host and user, which limits it to no more than seven users per PC on X300.

In this case the host - which needs a special card - which is why the X-series doesn't qualify as a thin client as far as IDC is concerned - can be something as simple as a $350 Dell Vostro 200 with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo chip, 1GB of RAM and a 80GB HDD.

It offers Internet access, full multimedia, office productivity and presentations.

The pricier L-series uses an Ethernet connection so it has no distance limitations and can service up to 30 users per desktop PC. It runs $140 per user and demands five watts per seat to run.

Figure a $499 Inspiron 530 with a 2.4GHz quad core, 3GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. Now imagine it simultaneously running four videos off the Media Player, four IE sessions, two IE sessions with streaming video, four Excel sessions, three Word sessions, three Acrobat Reader sessions and nine PowerPoint sessions.

Dukker says two-thirds of his customers are using the X-series, the rest are on the L-series; 60% are running Windows, the rest Linux.

Dukker figures where OLPC made its mistake was in expecting the user to fend for himself once the XO arrived.

NComputing's business model, a job creator at least in the third world, is 100% channel. The reseller gets a 30% margin but is required to deliver the goods, set up the site, support the darn thing and train the users. Dell is part of the channel.

NComputing, which has 150 people worldwide, now has offices in 14 countries including India, Brazil, Korea and Mexico and roughly 50% of its business comes from emerging markets.

NComputing, by the way, calculates that if the 850 million PC worldwide were replaced by its gismo energy use would decline by over 120 billion kilowatt-hours, the equivalent of planting 460 million trees.

Published Sep. 12, 2008— Reads 168
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.
About Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.
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Interview: Wikipedia's founder on Wikia Green Channels: Tech News Tags: internet, community, climate change

Wikipedia's founder has launched a community for all things green. Like Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' new Wikia Green can be edited by anyone, but Wikia's built to attract people passionate about a topic rather than provide general reference. For example, the Wikipedia entry on 'Green Computing' takes a broad overview of carbon emissions from IT, while Wikia Green's entry offers tips for individuals, such as buying laptops instead of desktops. We chatted with Jimmy to get the inside track on Wikia Green.

Why do Wikia Green now? There are so many green blogs and guides all over the internet, and they've had a head start on this project. Aren't people feeling over-saturated with 'green'?
Wales: No, this is a growing area. What we're doing is actually complementary to blogs in the sense that what blogs do is update you on a day-to-day basis. Also, blogs are engaged in political or other types of analysis, whereas a wiki becomes a touchpoint for the community, a place where people meet up and work on whatever the consensus is about a certain topic.

We're hoping that a lot of bloggers will find it useful to send their readers (there) and also to collaboratively work on background information. The blogger doesn't really enjoy explaining something over and over. But if I want to tell you about biodiesel, and if you don't know about biodiesel, I can say, "Read this article first."

Were you seeing maybe an increased interest in green topics on Wikipedia? What sparked your interest in launching this?
Wales: One of the funny things about Wikipedia is I have no idea what the traffic is. We don't even track those kinds of numbers... This was sparked initially by a conversation with Al Gore last year just before he won the Nobel Prize. He said there should be a green wiki...We discussed it some and I decided hey, this is a good idea.

How do you hope to get contributors flowing in? Are you doing any publicity efforts aimed at green blogs, for instance?
Wales: We're doing a lot of outreach. I've been holding a series of green dinners where people educate me...I met Zem Joaquin and we're working with her on (her blog) ecofabulous, and we're gonna be powering their eco lingo column. We're trying to build relationships and to learn from this community: what's missing? What do you need?

Will this integrate Web 2.0-type features, videos, maps, and other tools at some point?
Wales: We have the ability for people to do videos and some mapping stuff. The initial focus is on encyclopaedic content and magazine-style articles...The software is the same platform we use across all the wikis.

How do you prevent companies from stacking the entries with what some environmental activists call greenwashing? How will the community regulate this?
Wales: My view is that's virtually impossible in a wiki context, particularly a green wiki...The community monitors things as they come in. It's not a voting-style system that can be gamed. It's really an open discussion, dialog, and debate system. This is one of the great strengths of a wiki: it's a great counter to astroturfing and other types of campaigns.

What personal interest do you have in green topics and sustainability? Are you measuring your carbon footprint and trying to offset it?
Wales: Yes, I'm doing some things like that...At Wikia we're going through a process of trying to be certified as a green company...I come to this as an outsider. I'm part of that broad general public saying there's something really important and I want to learn more. It's time to wake up and do something. I'm finding it hard to get educated because the information is so disparate. I saw a need where people could come together and really clarifying and documenting all this kind of information.

Do you use any green servers, for instance, on the back-end are there efficiency features in terms of the hardware used to support all this?
Wales: No, we're looking into those kinds of things. On the server side of things the single greatest thing we've done is hire our new CTO, Artur Bergman, because he's an optimisation genius and has doubled the efficiency of our servers.

Where do you see this in 5 to 10 years? What do you hope will develop?
Wales: Obviously we want this to be a large and successful community. I don't have milestones or targets...As long as there's a healthy community and people are having fun and producing something of value, I'm satisfied.

Wikia Green is live now.

Posted: 09 September 2008, 10:48am by Elsa Wenzel
Based on: Wikipedia's Wales launches Wikia Green


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New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes Look of the Paper 

Published: September 7, 2008
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