IT Trends :: Thursday, October 5, 2006
New Technology
New Cooling Technologies Tackle Data Center Heat
Heat can be the data center’s worst enemy. The problem is getting worse as tightly packed racks of servers raise temperatures ever higher, sending the industry scrambling to avoid a meltdown. This excellent survey discusses various ways in which technologists are finding practical ways to cope with the intense heat at the core of data centers…
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Give Your Computer’s Idle Time to Charity
If you leave your machine on more than you should, there are a lot more ways now than SETI-at-Home to let that number crunching power do good works on your behalf. Now you can contribute your computer’s idle time to help cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research…
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U.S. Homework Outsourced as 'E-tutoring' Grows
When our kids were little, we often dreamed of having private tutors for them, but it was out of our price range. Now parents are hiring great tutors for $2.50 per hour, virtually, from India. Many of the tutors have master’s degrees in their subjects, and have taught for an average of 10 years. Each underg'es 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang…
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Annoying Spammers
Well, if you have the time and the connection and the computer power, you might want to learn how to create a tarpit and make spamming cost the spammers a little more time and money. Tarpits are fake SMTP servers, which accept connections but don’t deliver mail. Instead, they keep the connections open and reply very slowly. If the sender is badly configured, an uncooperative recipient might actually delay his entire queue handling for several minutes each time he connects to the tarpit…
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