Day: July 7, 2011

My Opinion: We were “The Man” when it came to space exploration. We rocked the house in 1969 when we put men on the moon. But budget cuts at NASA, and general lack of interest in the dream of space exploration by the public has pretty much doomed our space leadership as a nation. It is a shame. President Kennedy gave us a lofty goal to achieve back in the 60s, and we met his timetable of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely before the decade of the sixties was out. I was (and am) a “space geek!” I love the space program. I have been to Cape Kennedy, Houston, and Huntsville, and seen all the achievements in the museums. I have watched shuttles lift off while in Florida, not on TV, but “in the flesh!” I have been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and seen the artifacts of our dream on display there.

But a chapter ends with this last Space Shuttle mission. Yes, the Shuttle is old, dated, and tired. But, it is all we had. Now, even that will be gone. I guess we leave it to other countries to continue the dream. If we had visionary leadership here again… but… sigh. We don’t. Sad.

So, I will be watching tomorrow as the last Shuttle leaves the pad… I wonder who else will even notice?

A pretty good deal!

Amazon Offers Unlimited Cloud Music Storage for $20 per Year

Amazon just upped the ante in the cloud music wars (oh yes, that’s a thing now) by announcing some enticing new offers and features for its Cloud Drive service.

Cloud Drive, you’ll remember, is Amazon’s version of iTunes. You pay your fee and get to keep all your music on Amazon’s servers. Listening to stuff is as easy as clicking a play button in a web browser.

When it first launched, there were grumblings of iDiscontent because the player wasn’t officially supported on Apple’s mobile devices, but that’s one of the things Amazon’s just fixed. From now on, the Cloud Player works just fine on an iPad.

The other slice of new is a time-limited special offer, clearly designed to lure in new customers: free music storage with all paid file storage plans.
That means you can sign up for the basic 20GB storage offer, and you’ll be allowed to upload your entire 200GB music collection without making a dent in your allowance. You’ll still have 20GB free for, you know, all your other stuff. Whatever that is. The entry-level free service, offering 5GB of file storage, is not included in the special offer.

So the deal’s pretty clear: if you want to put your entire music collection the cloud, you can, for a minimum spend of $20 per year. There’s no need to pay out for storage that matches the size of your music library.”

That’s what Microsoft is doing for it’s new Office365 “Cloud Software Service!”

Microsoft pays University of Nebraska $250,000 to use Office 365

“If you really are in need of some high profile clients, you can always pay them. That’s exactly what Microsoft has done with the University of Nebraska. The university will receive $250,000 in incentives from Microsoft to migrate its email and calendaring system to the recently announced Office365 platform.

The school had been using IBM’s Lotus Notes for these services, however that system had begun to age — having been in use since 1997. IBM had pitched its cloud-based version of Notes to the school, but could not come close to Microsoft’s offer. Google was also said to be in the running but probably lost out for much of the same reason.

The funds will be used to subsidize the cost of migration, as well as fund support and the purchase of Microsoft software across the entire university. The switch is expected to save the school about $500,000 a year.”

Wow. When you have pay them to use it… well. Just something to ponder.

Or, you could just use Chrome. Just sayin’!

Is Firefox hogging RAM? Memory Restart can fix that

“When Mozilla released Firefox 4 (and now Firefox 5), it appeared to have finally fixed some of the performance-related gripes of earlier releases. Compared to Firefox 3.6, Firefox 5 is lightning fast, but sadly behind the scenes all is not as it should be. Firefox still suffers from a memory leak that sees its memory demands slowly spiral over an extended period of time, stealing precious system resources and affecting your PC’s performance as a result.

A simple restart fixes the problem, but it’s still annoying. The good news is that Mozilla developers are targeting this memory leak and think they may have found a way to fix it. If we’re lucky, the fix may even make it into Firefox 7, which is due to be released as Firefox Aurora imminently. In the meantime, how you can stop Firefox’s increasing memory demands from spiralling out of control? The answer lies with a tiny add-on appropriately titled Memory Restart.

Memory Restart does two things: first, it displays Firefox’s current memory consumption in the Add-ons Bar. This immediately reveals how Firefox’s memory demands increase over time, regardless of how it’s being used. When Firefox’s memory consumption hits 500MB, the text will change to red to warn you that it’s in danger of overrunning the rest of your system, telling you it’s time to shut down and restart Firefox to free up most of the memory it’s snaffled.
Memory Restart’s other trick is that you can configure it from its Options dialog to automatically restart Firefox when the 500MB threshold is reached, preserving all your open tabs and allowing you to continue browsing without too much hassle. Better still, the arbitrary 500MB figure can be altered to any amount you like, allowing you to tweak Memory Restart according to the amount of installed RAM in your computer.”

Memory Restart for Firefox