Citrix's Xen won't cede to VMware or Hyper-V

Citrix's Xen won't cede to VMware or Hyper-V: "Earlier this year, Citrix made a 20% price cut, Citrix's standard edition is $900 per server for up to four sockets, with support charged per incident. Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware charges $3,624 to $3,744 for a standard license, including support for a server with two sockets. In addition, VMware requires a $5,000 VirtualCenter server, which Citrix does not. At the high end, their prices are comparable: $5,750 for VMware compared with $5,000 for Citrix (which both include support). And of course, these figures pale in comparison with Hyper-V's near-free price at $28 per server."

Scouts' Electronicfest - formerly the Computer Swap Meet.

Scouts' Electronicfest - formerly the Computer Swap Meet.: "The Scouts' Computer Swap Meet is changing its name to the Scouts' Electronicfest. This name change will better represent our event, and it's growth from a computer event to that of an all-encompassing electronics event."

Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort

Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort

Since EC2 uses Xen as part of their platform this is interesting too:
Scalr is a recently open-sourced framework for managing the massive serving power of Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. While web services have been using EC2 for increased capacity since Fall 2006, it has never been fully “elastic” (scaling requires adding and configuring more machines when the situation arises). What Scalr promises is compelling: a “redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling” network, or a nearly self-sustainable site that could do normal traffic in the morning, and then get Buzz’d in the afternoon.

The Scalr framework is a series of server images, known dully in Amazon-land as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), for each of the basic website needs: an app server, a load balancer, and a database server. These AMIs come pre-built with a management suite that monitors the load and operating status of the various servers on the cloud. Scalr can increase / decrease capacity as demand fluctuates, as well as detecting and rebuilding improperly functioning instances. Scalr is also smart enough to know what type of scaling is necessary, but how well it will scale is still a fair question.

YouTube - zunePhone ad

YouTube - zunePhone ad

PC World - Pentagon Revs Up Drive For Wearable Power

PC World - Pentagon Revs Up Drive For Wearable Power: "The military needs the power to run electronic gear such as radios, night vision goggles and satellite-navigation tools."

What is interesting about this is how this will change mobile computing in the next few yesrs.