Recently we witnessed a website becoming inaccessible for about 10 minutes. It doesn’t sound that bad, if it were a regular site. The problem comes from the fact that this site had only one purpose – to record the votes for a TV contest with a limited voting timeframe of 10 minutes.

This could have been avoided easily with no extra expenses for server hardware or premium hosting service. They only had to use Lighttpd, a lightweight open-source web server. After all, they only had to serve these 2 pages, one holding the voting options and one more to let you know that your vote was submitted.

“We don’t need external service to monitor our sites. We have people on staff to take care of this.”

Many people think like this. Many people, who make important decisions in your company, might think like this. They are both right and wrong. They are right about 99% of the time and we are wrong about 1% of the time. Then again, that 1% percent seems to matter to business owners, as we have come to understand.

Apparently, the problems in Egypt have escalated to the point of online censorship now. Various sources report that Twitter and Facebook have been blocked in order to prevent videos, photos and other information about the protest from becoming public.

Twitter officially confirmed the block yesterday. Today Facebook is also consistently reported to be blocked.

GPU Computing is “the new thing” that is gaining popularity amongst all areas of computing. Graphic cards are now increasing the power of modern data centers, bringing super computer performance to workstations and even aiding tasks on regular desktop computers.

This is important. We fit greater performance in the same physical, while cutting back on utility bills space, thus increasing the efficiency of our hardware. An Australian super computer is now considered the greenest one in the country, only because of its efficiency - 555.5MFlops/Watt. Increasing efficiency in one way to lower the carbon footprint and it looks like it works for them.