Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

While the UK has long been able to depend upon a massive flow of oil and gas from the North Sea, it seems that over the last 20 years we have sold off the ?family silverware?. Slowly but surely the UK utility market has become dominated by overseas companies with the French ruling our water companies and the Germans and Americans our electricity supply ? even many of our oil reserves are now controlled by overseas companies. Is this a big mistake?

When you take a look at the current trend in the energy markets it seems that successive governments may have made mistakes by not protecting our very own utility companies and we are now being made to pay the price. But can we really complain if we boast about the open market policy which has been present in the UK for many years?

While we cannot really complain about the US companies who have ?raided? our markets, as we have done similar to their markets, the German and French situation is very much different. The French and German utility and energy companies are protected by law and overseas ownership is not allowed resulting in what many see as a very unfair situation. Our utility companies are affectively being bought up by state funded companies from markets in which we cannot easily operate.

To make matters worse the current trend of rising energy and utility costs is having a major impact upon the UK economy and while many struggle the foreign owned utility companies seem to be announcing higher and higher profits. But what can be done about the current situation?

The utility sector is supposed to be heavily regulated in order to avoid companies profiting at the expense of their customers (or at least to avoid substantial price increases). Whether this current regulatory regime is working is debatable, but there is no doubting that we never see our charges come down as quickly as they go up!

As the mobile phone industry moves from strength to strength we will soon be arriving at a point where landlines are not really required, but is that really the case? Should we be getting rid of our landlines and using mobiles around the home?

On the face of it there seems to be a very strong argument for ditching the landline and using a mobile phone around the home ? they are generally cheaper, offer you the chance to chat on the move with no restrictions, and can give you access to the worldwide web at the touch of a button. So what is the problem?

One of the main problems is competition and the fact that because the landline companies, such as BT, are still going strong they will always keep the mobile phone companies on their toes. If ever the landline companies were to fail then we would be depending upon the mobile phone industry for all of our future phone calls and internet access. History has shown that were a small number of companies hold control over any particular market, the opportunities for ?price fixing? are at their greatest. The landline network has been around for decades and while there is still much work to be done, the quality of the services they provide has improved of late.

Also, let us not forget about the potential health hazards associated with using your mobile phone for prolonged periods. In line with the great smoking debate which raged on for decades, the majority of us probably recognise that there are health risks associated with extensive mobile phone use, but most of us are prepared to take the risk. So what would happen if a report came out after the death of landlines and it confirmed our worst fears, what would the consumer do then?

Exponential Storage desires to persuade National Security Agency one day and the other bureaus of the government to hire a company for the data storage network. The focus on NSA appears to have a potential: Agency has already established the open source software could be made very secure and use it for several computer functions. The business of data storage is blooming as more and more people use the computers to collect streaming video, photographs and documents. What makes the Exponential unique is the thing that it combines the open source software along with the cluster architecture which uses the network of several servers on Internet to build several pockets of storage space.

The product which the Exponential desires to persuade the customers to assist is the cluster of 5 servers which can each preserve the data worth of 12 terabytes. A terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes. iPod with 160 GB of storage space, for instance, can hold approximately 200 hrs of video or 40,000 songs. With 5 servers, the demo of the product offers a storage space of 60 terabytes, which is equivalent to approximately 80 percent of 50,000 movies of NetFlix’s inventory. The network could even distribute multi-gigabyte video file to several thousands of users simultaneously. Customers may order a number of servers according to their wish depending on the quantity of data they require to store. Data is to be stored on the disk drives of the servers.

Open source imply that the programming code of the software is free and is available for anyone for use and to modify, and it can be often downloaded from Internet. The users customize the programs and encrypt them to make them safe and secure. The Defense department and NSA have embraced the open source software for security to safeguard their networks. Sourcefire, which developed the software for network security from open source community, has a lot of government contracts for protecting sensitive data.

With the redundancy of data-heavy sites such as the Facebook, MySpace and Youtube, the capacity needs of computer storage industry will grow at the rate of 57.4 % per year in the next 5 years. The cost for the storage is getting down simultaneously, at the rate of 33.7 % every year. In the year of 2006, the cost for storing a single gigabyte of storage data was 8 US dollars, while in the year 2011, the cost-per gigabyte shall be less than 1 dollar, according to the IDC’s forecast. The founders of the Exponential pooled the savings to begin a storage company in the year 2005, the year after the AMS, an IT integration and consulting company based in the Fairfax, where 3 of them worked, has been sold.