Hitachi Maxell has announced development of a small 10W class hydrogen fuel cell that runs on a reaction of water and aluminum. They claim to have made improvements in fuel cell technology by developing an aluminum conversion process that requires less aluminum. The company hopes to use reclaimed aluminum in the future to make the technology even more enviro-friendly.

Maxell Announces Fuel Cell :: Street Tech :: hardware beyond the hype

I've been arguing for some time that companies underestimate how they are already de facto media companies and broadcasters, whether in real-world locations or via their websites. Firms just can't get their heads around seeing themselves that way.

Everyone but Wal-Mart, that is

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Wal-mart: We Are the Media

Recently I wrote a series of posts about Microcontent Design, using BBC Backstage as the main case study. As a segue from that theme, one of the product types I've been looking at recently is Microcontent Aggregators. I define a Microcontent Aggregator as a service that aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays it on a new page/site for users to view in aggregate. Usually such services also have external RSS feeds, so that users may subscribe to an aggregate feed for a person.

Read/WriteWeb: Microcontent Aggregators - 43Things

How you place your squigglies won’t affect users in the slightest. But attention to internal code layout details implies that you’re equally attentive to the external details.

Uncommon Sense (for Software)

BLOGGERS READ THIS

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In "The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett and George Soros," its author outlines their 23 "winning" investment habits - tactics and strategies that he believes other investors can learn from. Many of these "habits" seem to fly in the face of conventional Wall Street wisdom

The Big Picture: Soros & Buffett Investment Rules

ImageAuthor.com is an online Java image editor and processor (applet requires Java JVM 1.1 or higher). It can display, edit, process, and save 32-bit color images including BMP, GIF, JPEG, and ICO files. It also supports animated GIF images. ImageAuthor is fully customizable.

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While it's fair to say that we are still working on hardening, Zimbra was designed from the ground up for such scale. The Zimbra architecture inherits from distributed systems expertise that was gleaned building messaging systems that today host many millions of mailboxes world-wide and Java systems that have thousands of production server CPUs within single large Telco deployments.

Of paramount importance to scaling is partitioning. Partitioning leverages "locality of reference" for both processing and data---if certain servers can be specialized to solve some subset of the bigger problem, then the essential code and data are more likely already to be in memory or close at hand on fast disk.

Nice review of the principles of scaling VLIS.

Zimbra - Blog - Scaling up Zimbra

If you did take a look at the drive data, you can see that, for each half year, the drive with the best $ per megabyte figure has been highlighted. This is sometimes called the sweet spot. By calculating the percentage improvement, year on year, using the figure from the first half, I have come up with this graph which charts the history the annual improvement rate of bang per per buck.

Nice trend analysis.

Hard Drive Trends

Backup software is hard and thankless. A sizable minority has bad ideas about how backup does/should work, and what their real needs are.

Backup software is an organization’s software-quality acid test. For Apple’s software spread, I would place it only after the file system and Core Data in the ranking of software that absolutely, positively must-work. It requires an engineering backbone of steel, sometimes even saying “no” to data-compromising requests from users, upper-management and marketing.

rentzsch.com: Hole in the Umbrella: Backup 3