X4150 with 2 x Quad Core E5450 CPU & 4GB RAM/4 x SAS Drives/2 x PSU                          

£1,200.00/€1400                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

X4150 with 2 x Quad Core E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM/4 x HD SAS Drives/2 x PSU                  

£1,050.00/ €1200   

X2200M2: 2x2218 Opteron Dual Core CPUS /8G RAM                        

£380.00/ €440

X2100 M2: 1 x 1218 Opteron Dual Core/ 2GB MEM

£290.00/ €330

X2100 M2: 1 x 1210 Opteron Dual Core/ 2GB MEM

£260.00/ €300

Wish to purchase ? If you aren't a member of Sun Startup Essentials then sign up now

http://sun.com/startups

GO HERE TO EMAIL ME NOW

Digital Mission to SXSWi is back for it's second year after the success of the mission to Austin in March 2009.

The mission to SXSWi is a great opportunity to take advantage of the publicity and profile from a group of British companies attending SXSWi.

The applications for the mission are open until 4th December. The form is pretty painless and shouldn't take more than 20 mins to complete. There's also lots more info about the application criteria on the Digital Mission website.

Plus, there's a melange of features to help develop relationships/partnerships with US companies, look into opening an office stateside and make valuable contacts for the future - not to mention brushing up on your industry knowledge.

Digital Mission provides an opportunity for companies to expand their business or seek investment overseas, organised by Chinwag and the UK Trade & Investment (UKTI). Each Digital Mission has a range of activities planned with UKTI's network of consulates, sector experts and local contacts.

South by South West interactive (SXSWi) takes place in Austin, Texas from 12-16th March 2009 and applications are now open until 4th December. The festival features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

Applications for the mission are open to UK-based, SMEs operating in the digital sector through a competitive selection process. Successful companies are judged by Digital Mission advisory board, comprising experts from across the digital industry and UKTI sector specialists.

Deirdre continues to produce excellent video - the latest being this one, of Bryan Cantrill talking about DTrace Visualisation at LISA '09. I'm only 20 mins in, but from past experience, listening to Bryan is always entertaining and so far so good.

Having easy to access these videos is wonderful. They're not shot in a studio, aren't scripted, aren't professionally lit, don't have flashy effects, but are worth way more than any professionally produced material IMHO, because they're all about content. Keep it up Deirdre!

• Senators press EU to speed its Oracle-Sun probe
  US senators, that is. I'm sure the Commission will completely ignore them.
  (tags: Sun Oracle Merger EU US Politics)
• Graham Allen says it as it is
  "Government is the unelected incubus which needs parliament only in order to cloak itself in its electoral legitimacy."
  (tags: UK Poliitics Reform Corruption Power Government)
• Heart attack risk 'raised by suppressing anger'
  From which we learn that it is in your health interests to engage now to protest about the secrecy behind ACTA and to its terms, and if you are in the UK to the proposed Digital Economy Bill. Just walking away from these outrages puts you at greater risk from a heart attack.
  (tags: Health Anger Heart Cardio BBC Research)

Hi,

We have released Sun VDI 3.1 yesterday. There are already many posts about it, such as this one from Chris about it. The most confusing about this release is the version number, which suggests that Sun VDI 3.1 is just a minor update. Well, it is not.

It has many new things inside that together offer a number of very compelling and unique solution stacks. I've summarized these solution stacks in a presentation that I gave yesterday:

Join the Sun Startup Essentials team us as we host the 5^th Digital Living Room Summit and Venture Forum on Tuesday, December 15 at our Santa Clara auditorium, produced in association with iHollywood Forum. Sun Startup Essentials members: Get 20% off until December 4th. Contact: startupteam@sun.com to get the discount code. 

As we head into 2010, many of the promises of previous years are becoming reality: Internet-enabled television; HD, iTV and soon 3D TV, networked game consoles and subscripion VOD, to name just a few. But many critical questions remain: which technologies will succeed? What will the adoption curve and price points look like?

That's why the fifth annual Digital Living Room, Dec. 15 in Santa Clara, CA, should be on your calendar.  One of the oldest conferences about the future of home entertainment, this year's Digital Living Room focuses on 2010 and the technologies most likely to transform consumer experience next year. Why wait for CES when you can get a jump on networking and intelligence-gathering now?

Here's some of what you'll learn about:

• The arrival of 3D television
• Social TV.
• Networked games
• The connected home
• Cloud computing and the living room
• New paradigms for VOD
• Analyst projections for 2010

Hear from visionaries like Bill Binenstock, Vice President and Manager, CBS.com; Brad McManus, Director of Investments, Panasonic; Tushar Saxena, Director of Home Networking Technologies, Verizon Communications; plus top executives from Playstation, EpixHD, Sun, Intel and many more. Plus, you'll get to network and make deals with these people in an intimate environment you'll never find at CES.

For just 48 hours, take advantage of a special rate available of as low as $150 for a basic ticket. Buy a Deluxe ticket for $195 and get a free ticket to our kickoff party in San Francisco on Dec.14 at Blumberg Capital. Register at www.digitallivingroom.eventbrite.com.

Are you an entrepreneur or venture capitalist? Consider joining us for the DLR Venture Forum, a unique platform to pitch for funds and demo your product. To apply, please send an email to zahava@ihollywoodforum.com.  For information, call 310.736.4133 or email host Michael Stroud at michael@ihollywoodforum.com. 

With many, many new features Sun VDI 3.1 launches today.
Some quick links:

• Announcement
• Product Page
• Documentation
• Download
  

As we say (did I mention this?) – The best VDI ever!

PS_ The hidden major update: Sun VDI 3.1

One of my (many) pet peeves are shell scripts that fail to delete any temporary files they use. Included in this pet peeve are shell scripts that create more temporary files than they absolutely need, in most cases the number is 0 but there are a few cases where you really do need a temporary file but if it is temproary make sure you always delete the file.

The trick here is to use the EXIT trap handler to delete the file. That way if your script is killed (unless it is kill with SIGKILL) it will still clean up. Since you will be using mktemp(1) to create your temporary file and you want to minimize any race condition where the file could be left around you need to do (korn shell):

trap '${TMPFILE:+rm ${TMPFILE}}' EXIT

TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/$0.temp.XXXXXX)

if further down the script you delete or rename the file all you have to do is unset TMPFILE eg:

mv $TMPFILE /etc/foo && unset TMPFILE

I'd just like to make the following clear to customers:

Customers who install packages from one Update release (e.g. S10U6) on a system installed with another release (e.g. S10U3) are running an unsupported configuration.

You cannot install packages from one Update release onto a system installed with any other Update release.

The reason for this is that all available patches are pre-applied into all packages for each Update release.   Patches and packages have a many-to-many relationship.  That is, one patch can patch many packages.   One package can be patched by many patches.

If you install a package from an Update release onto a system installed with a different Update release, you completely compromise patch dependency checking.   This is likely to lead to system corruption as further patches are applied.   Hence, it is unsupported.

'patchadd' checks that dependencies are satisfied when installing a patch.  If 'patchadd' finds ANY installed package patched with a patch which satisfies the dependency, it assumes the patch is applied to all packages.  This is done for performance reasons.  Hence, if a package from a later release is installed on the system, it's pre-applied patches may fool 'patchadd' into thinking that a hard code dependency has been satisfied for all packages on the system when this is not the case.   The patch application will be allowed to continue, potentially corrupting the system.

The converse is also true.   If a package from an earlier Update is applied to a hardened system, the patch delta from that Update to the Update installed on the system plus any additional patches installed on the system would need to be applied to the package to avoid a mismatch in software levels which could lead to incorrect patch dependency resolution and hence to system corruption.  Since this is difficult to get right, adding packages from a different Update release onto an installed system is unsupported.

Please note that if a package from the same Update is applied to a hardened system, then any additional patches installed on the system that apply to the added package must be re-applied to bring that package up to the same software level as the rest of the system.  This is called "incremental patching".   This is supported, but care must be taken.  The easiest way to do this is to reapply all patches installed on the system (as listed by 'patchadd -p').  This will bring the added package(s) up to the same software level as the rest of the system.

Best Wishes,

Gerry Haskins,
Director, Software Patch Services

This is a posting by Hermione way, from Techfluff.TV one of Sun's Startup Essentials Partners

Find Hermione on Twitter at @hermioneway or presenting http://techfluff.tv/

A comprehensive networking list for any startup, that can help determine where to focus your networking time and energy.

Organizations:

Microsoft Bizpark: A program that provides Software, Support and Visibility for Software Startups. In the UK, Bindi Karia is the woman you want to speak to.

Sun Microsystems: Get discounted servers, open source and discounted software free technical expertise and more, free to join and the man you’re after, the man with the most colorful shirts in London is Stewart Townsend.

SeedCamp:  At Seedcamp, they believe Europe has the talent, the role models, and the capital founders needed to succeed.  Reshma Sohoni is  CEO and here is the Seedcamp twitter account.

NACUE: The National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs is a national organization that supports and represents university enterprise societies and student entrepreneurs to drive the growth of entrepreneurship across the UK. They also run a funding process. Victoria Lennox is at the helm. NACUE Twitter account and here is Victoria’s

CmyPitch: cmypitch.com offers free online services for small to mid-sized firms / entrepreneurs. Get supplier quotes, pitch for funding, watch videos. cmypitch Twitter account.

Smarta: Smarta founded by entrepreneur Shaa Wasmund is a new support platform for business owners and entrepreneurs. Our aim is to provide a one-stop-shop where business owners can connect, learn and actually *do* business. Here’s the Smarta Twitter account.

Angel’s Den: Angels Den offers a service for two types of people: those who are trying to obtain business funding and small business finance – and those private investors (the business angels) looking for exciting business ideas to invest in. Startups pay a fee to join. Angel’s Den Twitter and the man behind it all is Bill Morrow

MakeYourMark: The campaign is run by Enterprise Insight, which was founded by the four leading UK business membership organizations – the British Chambers of Commerce, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors. Their Director Generals sit on Enterprise Insight’s board, which is chaired by entrepreneur Peter Jones. Enterprise Insight is supported by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and is endorsed by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.Alongside the Make Your Mark campaign, Enterprise Insight runs:Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Make your mark Twitter

Entrepreneur’s World: is a membership-only organization offering a unique environment where entrepreneurs have stimulating interactions with like-minded business leaders and investors; share experiences; exchange advice; are inspired and collaborate in relaxed, informal environments. with an application criteria of a minimum company annual turnover of £1 million. Ivor Tucker is the founder, I don’t want to give his email so hed to the site to contact him.

School for Startups: The inspiration of serial entrepreneur and angel investor Doug Richard, School for Startups is the UK’s leading provider of business training for entrepreneurs. We provide expert tuition on the critical issues entrepreneurs need to understand, including how to start a business, finance and investment, product management, managing successful teams and entrepreneurial marketing. Schoolforstartups Twitter

Up North

Entrepreneur’s Forum: Encouraging a culture of enterprise and entrepreneurship within the North East. Was established in 2002 by a group of the North East’s leading entrepreneurs.

Growth Investment Network East Midlands: ‘We’ve got the network of East Midlands people you should know if you want to take your business successfully to the next level’. Toby Ried is behind it all, I don’t want to give out his email so i’ll update when I find out his linkedIn.

Startup 2.0: Founded in 2006 with the help of KPMG, Startup 2.0 (NS20) has taken the bold responsibility to build a sustainable ecosystem for early stage tech companies in Britain. At the core of this initiative is a series of premier monthly events focusing on the needs of Tech StartUps.  Manoj Ranaweera is your man.

Girl Geek Dinners Founded and run by Sarah Blow has been providing girls in tech with dinners and events for a number of years.

Events- There are many more Tweetups and events than the ones below, here are some of my favourites:

Drinktank: Started by one of the UK’s most popular startups Huddle, Drink Tank is one of my favourites with a good crowd and free drink, often held at a snazzy bar just off Regent’s street. Huddle’s Suz is behind it all and also organises a girls networking event called Silicon Stilettos

Minibar Started by Christian (weirdly I don’t know his second name) Minibar is free and is held at The Old Truman Brewery in East London. Free bar if you get there early before it runs out. Minibar usually has a theme where startups can pitch to the crowd and get questioned on their business model/pitch etc. Last time the theme was online publishing.

Tuttle Club Started by Lloyd Davis Tuttle is held at the ICA every Friday morning -Tuttle is ‘Co-creating a Social Media Café for London’ and sometimes has free coffee and cake.

OpenSoho Started by Mr know everyone, entrepreneur and investor Paul Walsh Open Soho is usually on a Thursday night in a funky central London venue (usually Floridita or Kettners)- Free drinks until they run out-get there early!

Shoreditch Twit: East London, normally hosted in the Elbow Rooms, started by aptly named Lewis Webb, I’m not sure if they get sponsors for drinks but you can play a game of pool.

Facebook Developers Garage This is for the more techy specific people (coders and developers) held at Sun Microsystems there is without fail free pizza and beer., every time- win! Started by Joshua March they are run monthly and usually have a theme- the last theme was gaming.

BootLaw Started by our favourite technorati lawyers Danvers and Barry, Bootlaw is a free monthly seminar with the next one coming up in September themed on selling shares. If free pizza and beer wasn’t enough they also dish out iPods to people who have listened and learnt the most!

The Glasshouse/Second Chance Tuesday Founded by Judith Clegg The Glasshouse puts on ticketed events monthly. They always have interesting speakers like founder of Bebo Michael Birch, so it’s definitely worth the money. The next event is coming up soon has the Spotify founders up on stage- check the site for more details.

First Tuesday is a professional networking forum for established technology entrepreneurs and companies seeking venture capital, investors and related service provider, They are usually held at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden- no free bar but successful startup founders speak about their journey on stage. email: info@firsttuesday.org.uk

Big Fish You have to apply to become a BigFish member, but it’s free and once accepted you get to hear people like Luke Johnson speak (He is Chaiman of Channel 4 and turned Pizza Express into a huge success story.) Big Fish run monthly events.

Media- Again loads of media but just naming a few blogs/publications that I surround myself with:

TechCrunch: @mikebutcher ’s your man, everyone knows him, everyone loves him and everyone wants to be him! He has a brilliant job running around Europe reviewing startups for the TechCrunch blog. TechCrunch Europe runs a number of events throughout the year where you can pitch your startup.

The Next Woman: Online business magazine for women, showcasing some of the best women in tech Internet/Tech sector. Simone Brummelhuis is your woman.

The Next Web: Founded by serial entrepreneur Boris. Besides the blog, The Next Web runs a few conferences per year, last year co-hosted by your truly!. @Zee is editor for the blog.

Mashable: With a large American following, but set up by Scottish entrepreneur Pete Cashmore (yes the hot one) Mashable is not only a tech blog but holds events in New York and LA.

People- There are loads, I should write another post entirely for people, I will endeavor, but here are a couple of the best:

Oli Barrett Named by WiredUK as one of the most connected men in Britain, Oli has a high calibre network of entrepreneurs, investors and mentors.

Ian Ellis heads up Technology Business at Morgan Stanley, Irish, very intelligent, you can find him on LinkedIn.

Ryan Carson is the founder of Carsonified and also runs the FOWA events all over the world. You should really attend the FOWA FOWD events if your company is in the design/apps sector. In fact, you should really just attend full stop. The events are fantastic.

Other added by you:

mashup*
Established in Feb 2006 by entrepreneur Simon Grice, mashup* is London's foremost digital events team. Running evening networking and debate events, workshops, day conferences incl. Being-Digital, OpenGov, Social Media '09 and - Mixer* a once-a-month networking orientated event. Slots available to demo at every event and lots of great opportunities for Entrepreneurs. Next Event Mixer* 2nd Dec: http://www.mashupevent.com/social-media-mixer 

 Tunbridge Wells Tuttles inspired by the London Tuttle.

twuttle –  A space where business, technical and social issues are discussed. Held at the Trinity Theatre every Wednesday from 10.00am till 12.00am. Come and Go as you please. There is wifi if you want to work. hashtag #twuttle

MAP

twuddle – The evening version of twuttle with beer! Usually on a Tuesday evening but time and place vary so look out for details. £10 in the kitty buys you a place in the group. hashtag #twuddle

http://www.findnetworkingevents.com

OpenCoffee

http://www.bplans.co.uk – a leading Uk resource for entrepreneurs looking to write a business plan. The site includes links free sample business plans as well as articles, calculators and tools.

The Entrepreneurial Exchange which is Scotland’s leading organisation for ambitious growth oriented entrepreneurs. The Exchange helps inform, motivate, educate, inspire and support entrepreneurs to build their businesses bigger, faster.

http://www.BusinessZone.co.uk – part of B2B publisher Sift Media which has been running community websites since 1996, long before it became known as social media!

We also run http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk – the UK’s most active online forums for small business owners which generates 7,000 posts a week from a audience of 50,000 registered members.

Earlier this summer we held five UK regional heats (watch videos at http://www.businesszone.co.uk/pitch-2009), the winners from which will compete in a grand final during November’s Enterprise Week in central London (one for you Hermoine!). Doug Richard and Tim Campbell are on the judging panel.

Tickets to the event are free and it will include a full day conference with some very inspirational speakers. Keep an eye on BusinessZone.co.uk and http://www.thepitch2009.com

Don’t forget Shell LiveWIRE! We have a forum and social network with nearly 100,000 entrepreneurs! We also have the Grand Ideas Awards – up to 5 monthly prizes of £1000 for innovative ideas, and the £10K ‘Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award’- entries for these can be found at our website http://www.shell-livewire.org.

Network King Oli Barrett’s list

Julia Hobsbawm’s Editorial Intelligence (blending politics, business and media)

Anything by Steve Moore (everything from Channel 4 education gatherings to Reboot Britain)

Drink Tank organised by Huddle (Andy, Ali and Suz)

Paul Walsh’s Open Soho

Carole Stone’s Salons and Club events

Andrea Zur Strassen’s The Nomads (for people on the move)

Duncan Cheatle’s Supper Club (for entrepreneurs with 1m+ turnover)

Charlie Hoult’s Castaway (’open office’ event for agency folk, with high proportion of owners)

Anything by Coutts (Andrew Haigh hosts some of the best dinners in London)

The Mandrake Club by Ed Hardy

Anything by EO (the Entrepreneurs Organisation)

Christine Hartland’s Mosaic Networking

TED (hosting events in California, UK, India, and now globally thanks to TEDx)

The Tuttle Club by Lloyd Davis

Growing Business events including Young Guns

Jamie Oliver’s PR masterclass series

Chain Reaction (held in November and inspired by the Council on Social Action)

Tom Ball’s Entretain and Summer/Christmas parties

Techcrunch Europe’s signature events (eg The Europas)

Glasshouse Events by Judith Clegg

• Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
  From Forbes, no less: "In 2009, 30 million people sit unemployed in America. Yet, the speculators have managed to lift the stock market up, and the media pretends that we're having a recovery." -- As I have said in every keynote for many years, when you create a system, you create the game that plays it and if the system remains unchanged it becomes the game.
  (tags: Economy Capitalism AynRand Philosophy Speculation)
• Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse
  "It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry ... as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system. ... What isn't in there? Anything about stimulating the actual digital economy." -- Awful, shameful stuff. And the fact the Tories aren't speaking against it means we can expect no better from them.
  (tags: UK Law Rights Freedom Digital Internet Economy)
• Alcohol 'protects men's hearts'
  As if Europe's men needed more encouragement.
  (tags: Health Heart Alcohol Medicine research BBC)

By Shanti Subramanyam

I attended the Bay Area Startup Weekend in Mountain View this previous week-end. This was the first such event I attended and it was an amazing experience – so I thought I’d share it.

The idea behind the event was that a bunch of folks would show up, some of them would pitch ideas for new startups and the others would join them if they liked the idea and/or had the necessary skills to build it. The goal was to build a working prototype over the course of the week-end. Read more.

When you officially launch your startup and send out a flurry of press releases, the silence can be deafening while you wait for the phone to ring and reporters to call you. Here are some tips to improve your chances of getting noticed by the media.

1) Make sure your press release stands out, but don't overdo it. A clear, concise, and brief press release that gets your message across without a lot of excess verbiage is far more preferable than a long release filled with flowery adjectives and an overabundance of information. It's not necessary to fill a press release with every detail of your company and staff history -- save those for your interview.

2) Make sure your Web site has a press kit and plenty of contact information. Nothing tells a reporter you're serious about media coverage more than giving them easy access to the tools they need to research your company. Here's the place to discuss the history of your company, patents you hold, future goals, and groups you're affiliated with. If you're a technology startup, make sure to include details about about any software licenses you use, especially if you develop software in-house. Feel free to add as much information as you wish, because you never know what information will strike a reporter's fancy.

3) When you land an interview, respect the reporter's time and they'll respect yours. A good journalist won't expect you to drop everything to talk to them, but if you commit to a meeting or conference all, keep the appointment. The reporter is probably working on a deadline and their time is just as valuable as yours. If you're really pressed for time, offer to conduct the interview via email and many reporters will be happy to comply.

4) Offer prep materials ahead of the meeting. Point the journalist to a press kit, create a slide deck to illustrate important points, or offer access to your product so the writer can be as familiar as possible with what your company does. It's fine to offer revocable access to a Web-based service or request a review product be returned -- in fact, an ethical journalist will insist upon it.

5) If you want your PR person to sit in on the meeting or conference call, that's fine -- but don't let them run it. It's only natural for your marketing guru to want to make sure you highlight all the important points of your company, but make sure the reporter has a chance to get the information he needs for his story. Nothing turns a writer off faster than sitting in a rehearsed sales call where there's little chance to glean any unique insight into the company.

6) Relax. It's easy to get nervous when faced with the prospect of seeing every word you say in print for everyone to see. It's also tempting to worry that the journalist will try and dig up dirt or portray your company in an unfavorable light to draw attention to themselves. The reality is, most reporters are very down-to-earth and are typically reporting on industries and niches they find fascinating. A good reporter's job is to educate readers about your company and why they should want to know more about it. That said, don't hesitate to research a reporter ahead of time to get a feel for their tone. If a journalist seems overly negative, or historically paints the companies they cover in a bad light, you may want to consult with your PR person for advice before your interview.

7) If you notice any issues or discrepancies once the story appears, politely contact the writer and point it out. Honest errors can be fixed and, since the reporter's integrity and credibility are also at stake, they will be just as concerned as you are about correcting the situation.

It's not easy to get your startup noticed above the din of all the other companies vying for the media's attention. Handled correctly, though, it's easy to develop an ongoing relationship with the journalists who cover your industry by establishing mutual trust and respect right from the start.

This is a post from Tweetmeme's Blog on Twitter Advertising by Nick Halstead

It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Tweetmeme is a member of Sun's Startup Essentials programme and was one of the first startups in the UK to join

Following on from the Twitter theme of my previous posts, Sheikh Mohammed's feed tells us that he met with Gordon Brown today, as well as the Queen.

I wonder which meeting was more productive and enjoyable?

I can imagine Gordon waffling and fawning inappropriately, whilst the Queen enjoyed meeting an old acquaintance.

Le mercredi 2 décembre à 11h00 - heure de Paris - Sun Starup Essentials vous invite à découvrir l'offre de Planet-Work, notre partenaire hébergement.

Frédéric Vannière, Directeur Technique, vous expliquera comment il a mis en oeuvre les fonctionnalités de virtualisation de Solaris et de ZFS pour proposer des packages d'hébergement souples, évolutifs et économiques. En route pour le Cloud Computing !
Inscrivez-vous !

My last post mentioned that I had just learnt, via Twitter, that Sheikh Mohammed met recently with David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in these kinds of meetings. Britain has a long and close association with the UAE, something that I clearly have a personal interest in. Let's hope Mr Miliband did a good job. British foreign policy clearly needs to have close relations with Gulf states as a high priority. Seeing Sarkozy marching around promising co-operation on nuclear power and muscling in on military relations should be a motivating factor here :)

I would like to see Gulf nationals studying in the UK as a preference over the US, for example. The US seems easier, as well as culturally more attractive a place to go. We need to address that as best we can.

I would love to hear Sheikh Mo's feelings when it comes to the British statesmen he has spoken to over the years. They have come and gone over the years and he will have met many leading figures.

What would he think? Are the current bunch better than previous incumbents of power? Does he see a general decline? Where things better way back when, or better now? Or are things very much the same, with a fair sprinkling of outstanding candidates amongst the general dross?

I don't know if it's because I am simply getting older or because more transparency in government reveals the foibles and farces that used to stay hidden, but the current bunch of British 'leaders' do very little for me.

I would also love to hear Sheikh Mo's feelings on the various Brits he has known who have played a role in the development of the UAE - those who have helped build the armed forces and police, for example. He should be able to provide some fascinating insight on the calibre of individuals who have come to work in the UAE and Dubai in various capacities over the years.

As noted here, I have been reading two books for a couple of months and not made much progress in recent times. My progress through books under consideration tend to be directly proportional to the amount of time spent traveling on trains or plains and I have not been doing that much of either for the last few month, hence the slow progress. A bit more focus and a train trip means I finished one of them last week.

Beautiful Security is a collection of 16 chapters written by 16 different people(s) with 16 different perspectives on 16 different aspects of security. This means there is no common thread other than it is about computer security. In my view this is no bad thing.

I think my favorite chapter was "The evolution of PGP's web of trust" by Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas. The history and insight into the design decisions was really interesting. I also enjoyed the 1st chapter by Peiter Zatko on "Psychological Security Traps".

My interest in Computer Security got triggered about 6 months ago when I got cornered into helping 2 farmers run their PC and laptop. The virus and malware problems were just stunning. Work also had a few triggers (if you work for Sun ask me about the "find" incident) and this book has been very good at giving a informed view on 16 different areas of computer security.

After a couple of months off races, I am really looking forward to the Cardington Cracker in a couple of weeks.

I am late following up on a question we got during the Webinar last Wednesday on High Availability for Web applications. The question was about whether MySQL Cluster is using disks for persistency.

In previous releases of MySQL, the NDB cluster engine (a.k.a. MySQL Cluster) would log on disk but would store all the data in memory. Eventually asynchronous checkpoints would flush data to disks. Reliability was also ensured through intra-cluster replication on different nodes.

Sun Startup Essentials - How can Sun Microsystems help you ? from stewart townsend on Vimeo.

Learn how Sun Startup Essentials can help you if you are a company less than 6 years old, with 150 employees or less.

Following on from my previous job posting here I'm happy to announce some more startup vacancies:

• Worldeka hiring an intern for community development Click
• Huddle hiring an intern for Commercial experience Click 
• Jess Ratcliffe is looking for a web designer/coder to join her startup Click 
• Fabio has a friend looking for a Facebook coder with Flash skills Click
• Fabio is looking for PHP Developer with front end skills Click 

Let me know @scoobeesnac if you have other startup opportunities 

X4150 Server for Startups - Roll up, Roll up now - Clearance Remanufactured stock for you.

If you are a startup, and a member of Sun's Startup Essentials programme you can get this and X2200 now as well, the price list is being sent to you as I write this, if you are not a member then sign up now at http://sun.com/startups and get these servers whilst stock lasts....

X4150 with E5450 CPU & 4GB RAM   £1,200.00/ €1400

2 Quad Core CPUS (8Cores) 4 Gig memory, 4 Hard Discs

 X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM    2xQuad-Core Intel Xeon E5450 CPUs (2x6MB L2, 3.0 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 80W), 4GB memory (2x2GB PC2 5300 FB-DIMM), 4x 146GB 10K RPM 2.5 SAS drives, internal SAS RAID PCI Exp. HBA, DVD+/-RW drive, 2x PSU, embedded LOM, 4x Ethernet ports, 5x USB 2.0 ports, 3x 8-lane PCIslots,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM  £1,050.00/ €1200

2 Quad Core CPUS (8Cores) 4 Gig memory, 4 Hard Discs

X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM    D    2xQuad-Core Intel Xeon E5345 CPUs (2x4MB L2, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 80W), 4GB mem. (2x2GB PC2 5300 FB-DIMM), 4x146GB 10K RPM 2.5 SAS drives, internal SAS RAID PCI Exp. HBA, DVD+/-RW drive, 2x PSU, embedded LOM, 4x Ethernet ports, 5x USB 2.0 ports, 2x 8-lane PCI slots, no power cord, order Geo-specific x-option. RoHS-5.

The best photo I've ever seen of a StorageTek unit:

"An automated magnetic tape vault at CERN computer center, seen on September 15th, 2008. The tapes are used to store the complete LHC data set, from which a fraction of the data is copied to overlying disk caches for fast and widespread access. The handling of the magnetic tape cartridges is now fully automated, as they are racked in vaults where they are moved between the storage shelves and the tape drives by robotic arms. (Claudia Marcelloni, Maximilien Brice, © CERN)" via The Boston Globe

This and other awesome photos have been posted to twitter over the weekend, because the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on – and will produce tons of data about zillions of hardly existing particles. Yet another special form of virtualization!

I'm really starting to enjoy using Twitter. After a year and a half of being 'on it', its appeal and possibilities are starting to shine through.

It's been interesting to see its effect on my blogging. A great deal of the appeal of blogging, for me at least, is getting things off my chest. Expressing things quickly and easily that annoy me, interest me, or that I think might interest others, all written for noone in particular. A vast Letter to the Editor, that always gets printed.

Twitter lets me get things off my chest very efficiently. If I've twittered about the nincompoop crashing headlong into another car after he jumped the light, by the time I get to my laptop the desire to blog at length about the incident has faded. Coupled with less travel, which is when I blog the most, Twittering has definitely affected my blogging mojo. I'm hoping that blogging frequency will improve over the coming weeks - I know I have some regular readers and I know I enjoy a good blog post, so I will be trying to up my game a bit.

The immediacy and intimacy of Twitter is also great fun. I subscribed to Paris Hilton's feed for a while whilst I wrote my article on her visit to the UAE. It was bizarre knowing when Paris was going to bed, whilst not really knowing what lots of my friends back home were up to - something I would be much more interested in.

On the other hand, it's great fun seeing what my twittering friends are up to, both those I know well and those I never met but would like to meet one day. Sometimes it'll be a laugh out loud moment, as someone tweets about a Cairo cab journey, for example. Other times it's just nice to know what people are up to - people I would like to see more of, but simply aren't able to.

I've particularly enjoyed seeing Sheikh Mohammed embrace Twitter. Just now I learnt that he has just been chatting to David Miliband about relations between the UK and the UAE, as well as other weightier matters. I hope Mr Miliband did a good job impressing Sheikh Mo. I also hope Sheikh Mo enjoyed the art exhibition he visited last night.

There's an art to a good tweet, just as there is to writing a good novel, essay, email, blog entry or other written missive. I am not interested in 'I've just eaten a croissant for breakfast', but I can skip past that sort of thing when viewing my 'feed' of people I follow. A good tweet should, in my opinion, contain something mildly interesting or entertaining. Rather than 'I've just eaten a croissant for breakfast', 'Emirates' limp, soggy croissants don't do French cuisine justice' might be more fun. But who cares? I don't have to read what other people write, just as they don't have to read what I write.

The whole thing is fascinating - a brand new way of communicating, with an immense following, but noone can quite put a finger on what its appeal really is. Equally fascinating will be whether anyone can make money out of millions of people burbling their nonsense to all and sundry. I would miss Twitter if it went away, but I wouldn't pay for the service.

If you are interested in following my rantings and burblings in 140 characters or less, you can do so here.

• EU delays Sun/Oracle decision
  Until the end of January instead of the middle. At this point it's all just more blows to a bruised body.
  (tags: Sun Oracle Europe)
• Questions for Lord Mandelson
  These are great questions which deserve (but won't receive) honest answers. By the way, I hate the name of this party and will not join or support it until it chooses a name which does not demean the victims of crimes at sea and give the pro-big-media lobby a perfect talking point with which to discredit these great arguments.
  (tags: UK Politics Media Internet Broadband eGovernment Law)

• Apple's Mistake
  Paul Graham gets it spot on again. Apple's attitude is Google's biggest asset in the battle for the mobile market.
  (tags: Apple Google Zeitgeist iPhone Developer AppStore mobile philosophy future)
• Java Warehouse Developer Center - Supported Locations
  Looks like non-US developers can now submit software for the Java Store, although they can't charge for it. Glacial, but the destination is worth heading for I think.
  (tags: Java Sun JavaStore Developers AppStore)
• Gawd Help Us!
  This fits in with the populism-over-wisdom approach characterise by UK politics at the moment. Sugar is not the worst possible role model for today's connected society, but he has to come close. Another Mandelson decision, I am sure.
  (tags: UK Politics Business)
• Parenting in the age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto
  I agree with (the ever remarkable) Quinn here. My children are now old enough to tell me if I lived up to this ideal, which is a bit scary.
  (tags: Children Parenting Freedom Paranoia Zeitgeist)

Here are the slides and some references for my closing talk at Swiss Intranet Summit in Zürich.

As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)

It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening, those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward, most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".

Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at approximately 5:30 PM.

There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:

thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess (Liz!)"

floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real family."

VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!

Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.

Kind regards,
Liz

• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Goodbye Letter To European Customers
  A bit of apocalyptic sci-fi, but no less plausible than the other scenarios.
  (tags: Sun Oracle Europe)
• Closures after all?
  Closures still causing debate after all these years. As I understand it (and I'm not close to the situation so I may be wrong), work continues on JDK7 in OpenJDK. When the JCP gets unstuck, JSRs will get submitted, and the expert group will then be able to decide what to keep/add. Pragmatism, community, open source.
  (tags: Java JCP JDL Closures JDK7 Standards OpenSource Community)
• The strange death of illegal downloading
  "While the government and the music industry posture about illegal filesharing, smaller, smarter companies are simply out-competing it" -- Copyright abuse of most kinds is just a message to the market saying "business model available". We don't need new laws to protect the incumbents, we need entrepreneurs to outpace them.
  (tags: Music Download P2P RIAA Copyright)

The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

Furthermore there was no comfortable way to download language packs (currently for 96 languages !).

Another reason is that many native language teams have only a small staff or do not have the time to test all available Release Candidate (RC) builds on all platforms for their language. However, these are very close to a final release but have not got the latest tests. But why not offering these to the users with a hint to be carefully when using?

To improve this situation and to deliver more choice we have created a new download website layout.

Main Download Page

http://download.openoffice.org

This website was enhanced to download easily the build you want. Of course the well-known (green) One-Click download remains the same easy way to get your favorite version. The same for the orange button for Developer Snapshots. The new thing is the yellow button that will guide you to the website for Release Candidates.

Full Installations and Language Packs

The improvements were done here to provide all available stable builds:

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The first table provides all full installation sets as stable release of the current OpenOffice.org version. The second table provides all stable language packs.

BTW:
A language pack contains only resource files for a specific language and platform to show, e.g., menus, dialogs and error messages in your language. If translated it may contain also the help content. It's a comfortable way to get several languages without to install the applications double and triple. After installation change the languages via menu "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - User Interface".

Release Candidates

A complete new website was created to offer all Release Candidates. Also here the first table has links to the full installation sets and the second to all language packs:

http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html

Some days ago the 100 millionth download of an OpenOffice.org build was announced. We hope to increase this impressive number with the new download websites.

Happy downloading. :-)