Michael Carter

"The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., making it the largest city in the nation to make the move and handing the Web search giant a major victory in its quest to become a software provider to the world's cities and businesses." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Now in beta, RDS makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"As Google and Microsoft battle for dominance in technology, a skirmish in Los Angeles City Hall is offering a rare public glimpse into a rivalry that could help determine the fortunes of both companies -- and, quite possibly, how workers in the future will communicate." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services" - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Most teens don’t use Twitter because it doesn’t enable them to do anything they can’t already do elsewhere, which is the same reason most adults don’t use Twitter." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

It is important for everyone to use WPA2 with AES encryption on all wireless access points. Like WEP, WPA with TKIP should no longer be considered safe. - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

You can now connect to Amazon EC2 instances over a IPsec VPN connection. This allows organizations to create a "virtual private cloud." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Google Maps will now show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads in selected cities." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"SQL Azure Database, a key component of the platform, is a rival to Amazon.com's SimpleDB. Unlike that service, however, it is a relational database." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Earlier this month, Apple rejected an application for the iPhone called Google Voice. The uproar set off a chain of events—Google's CEO Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple's board, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigating wireless open access and handset exclusivity—that may finally end the 135-year-old Alexander Graham Bell era. It's about time." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Google and Microsoft continue to spar over both their data center designs and how much information they reveal about the inner workings of their vast computing centers." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

This is a good article on Windows 7. Go to page 6 for a chart comparing XP, Vista, and Windows 7. - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"As if outsourcing, virtualization, utility computing, automation, hosted applications, and a recession weren't enough to stress out the average IT professional, there's the emerging threat of cloud computing to take away even more IT jobs. As time progresses, analyst firms foresee the cloud becoming more prevalent, absorbing functions traditionally done by IT." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Six in 10 companies in a survey plan to skip the purchase of Microsoft Corp's Windows 7 computer operating system, many of them to pinch pennies and others over concern about compatibility with their existing applications." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

"Google plans to announce in coming weeks that it is turning each of the one million plus Google Apps customer domains into an OpenID provider, enabling millions of people to log in to OpenID-supporting websites with their work, school or organization ID." - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

Interesting article on modern data centers and how companies are dealing with the related space and power issues. - Michael Carter from Bookmarklet

Google announces Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. You will now be able to sync email, contacts, and calendar as well as scheduling meetings with other Google Apps users -- all in Outlook. - Michael Carter

CIOs should be thinking long and hard about purchasing a new Exchange solution or supporting an existing installation. The ROI for Google Apps Premiere or Education will be hard to beat when compared to MSFT Exchange. - Michael Carter