Posted 10/27/09 at 02:05:00 AM by Paul Lilly

With no clear winner in the cloud computing sector, some ITs feel it makes more sense to incorporate their own private clouds. Doing so allows businesses to offer its customers a range of customized virtual services, automated tools, and other advanced services at a lower cost than what might otherwise be possible, argues mark Everett Hall of ComputerWorld.

Anything that costs less is sure to be a hit with the bean counters honed in on the bottom line, but the push for private clouds isn't without certain pitfalls. They can be harder to manage and maintain, and then you have to convince end users that being locked into a vendor isn't necessarily a bad thing. And on top of it all, not many people are even aware of what a private cloud is, and that could stymie its adoption. Or could it?

According to Geir Ramleth, CIO at Bechtel Corp., the lack of an exact definition could work to its advantage and prevent some ITs from becoming fixated on too narrow a scope.

Moving forward, that could become a moot point anyway. Earlier this year Thomas Bittman, an analyst with research firm Gartner, predicted that enterprises would spend more money building private cloud computing services over than the next three years than outsourcing to third party providers. And more recently, Gartner said IT shops are likely to spend more than half of their cloud budget on private cloud services by 2012. And when you're talking about a multi-billion industry, those savings start to add up.

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Posted 08/27/09 at 03:11:27 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a recent study by Mozilla, the number one reason for users not upgrading from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 was the new location bar, and the fact that it went deep into people’s bookmarks to suggest sites as they typed. More than 25 percent cited this as their reason for keeping the last generation of Firefox as their browser of choice.

“When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed,” said Firefox’s principal designer, Alex Faaborg. “In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.”

On a related note, Mozilla has introduced a private browsing mode in Firefox 3.5. So, you know, if this is the sort of thing you need to have – it’s safe to upgrade now.

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