Green Channel: Opinions

Some time ago I had a call with a company that ran data centers they claimed were "green." Their argument for their greenness was they purchased power with green credits, which meant they paid a premium for electricity to fund alternative energy programs. Along with that they had a car park full of solar cells.

As small businesses implement the latest technology to keep up with client demands, next-generation servers come to the forefront of the discussion. But what is a "next-gen" server exactly?

A year ago Gibbs wrote about a cold fusion power system that could change the world ... but so far, we've seen nothing useful ...

Shaw reviews HP's Passport 1912nm Internet Monitor and AOC's Portable USB Monitor.

I've checked out many iPad stands over the last few months and I just found what I think is one of the very best: The Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations. This is a dead simple design which your iPad (version 2 or 3) snaps into and you can rotate it to portrait or landscape as required. It's easy to remove the iPad when you need to and that's it ... as I said, it's dead simple and does the job. For $39.95 the Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations Uprise 360 gets a Gearhead rating of 5 out of 5.

IT professionals implementing energy efficient solutions in the data center are realizing big savings, and many report it has been easier to do than they thought it would be. In its fourth year, the CDW Energy Efficient IT Report found that implementing energy efficient solutions is easier than the typical organization perceives. Even better, "green" initiatives are gaining respect in the IT world, with 43% of survey respondents identifying green initiatives as a top driver for data center consolidation.

Microsoft, Apple and Google have long seen that their future is in the cloud. Now they see their present there as well.

UK citizen Richard O'Dwyer faces the possibility of ten years in the slammer for having a site that linked to pirated content

For anyone bearing the brunt of an Internet hoax that just won't die, there's little more to hope for in terms of potential relief than a story on Snopes.com stating unequivocally that the hoax is indeed a hoax. After all, Snopes is the gold standard when it comes to debunking nonsense.

After all these years DVD ripping is, it seems, still a topic of mystery and experimentation. I've tried ripping DVDs many times with varying degrees of success, and today a friend on my favorite email list just raised the topic again: "What do people on this list use to rip a DVD to their hard drive so they can, for example, watch it on a laptop or a tablet? This was something I'd assumed would come up in a Google search, but I had a surprisingly hard time finding a solution."

Shaw reviews Seagate's Backup Plus external storage drives, Rubbo International's D-Wings.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with a few friends, Monday performed the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. The show must go on, even without Steve Jobs, and it sure did go on -- two well-packed hours of Apple mantra and mania. They did not talk about what I was watching for, but it turned out OK anyway.

A year ago, I wrote that the first Chromebooks felt more like a science project than a strategic product. They were interesting but of little practical value. A lot has changed since then, and while I wouldn't say that Google has developed a truly compelling device, it has shown that the Chromebook and its underlying Chrome OS are evolving.

The world of technology and startups generates some amazingly brilliant ideas. But it also produces some amazingly bad ones. If only they would fail earlier, faster and more often.

A flood of mobile devices into the enterprise is exhausting available licenses for mobile-device security. But there are great options available today that didn't exist two years ago.

Google, as well as car companies and universities are making incredible advances in the technology for self-driving cars, and that technology will enable the robot revolution.

Data center managers and equipment vendors looking for greener alternatives will begin to benefit this year from a major initiative aimed at reducing the power consumed by Ethernet equipment. IEEE 802.3az, or the Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard, will implement low-power idle (LPI) modes for the full range of Ethernet BASE-T transceivers (100Mb, 1GbE and 10GbE) and the backplane physical layer standards (1GbE, 4-lane 1GbE and 10GbE).

These days, with the shock of US$150-per-barrel oil only a year old, consumers in the market for a car will likely pay much more attention to a pair of numbers: The vehicle's two miles-per-gallon ratings.

As the dust settles from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, here are four trends worth looking at based on some products that were announced at the show. On my radar screen for the year:

After months of speculation, the Gershon review into the Federal Government’s ICT procurement strategy hit the streets last week.