You lookin’ at me? I don’t see any other boxes around here.
A vast collection of Robert De Niro’s film-related materials is now open to researchers and the public at the the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center…. The collection, appraised at roughly $5 million, includes more than 1,300 boxes of papers, film, movie props and costumes. It chronicles the career of the actor, director and producer from the late 1960s through 2005.
Pirates in Parliament
[A] new poll conducted by Swedish newspaper DN.se predicts that the Pirate Party will get 5.1% of all votes in the upcoming EU elections this June – enough to guarantee a seat in the European Parliament. The poll further shows that the party is the second largest party among younger voters in the age group 18-30.
Get Out Your Slide Rule
Furthermore, a planned increase in costs of support for contracts signed between 2010 and 2015 will be capped, [SAP] has said. It promised no contract would go up by more than 3.1 per cent a year. The overall price of a support contact will remain at 22 per cent of the maintenance base, but this 22 per cent figure will also be capped until 2015. Support currently runs at 17 per cent of maintenance base for a “typical” user.
The Longer the Name, The More You Pay
Pricing, per hour, for running IBM software in Amazon EC2, at the entry CPU level (cheapest), in the US:
- $0.38 – IBM DB2 Express Edition
- $1.31 – IBM DB2 Workgroup Edition
- $0.38 – IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express Edition
- $1.31 – IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup Edition
- $0.50 – IBM WebSphere sMash
- $2.48 – IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server Standard Edition
- $6.39 – IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Web Content Management Server Standard Edition
You might also be able to use the above for free for development and QA. In other cloud news, open source cloud arms-dealer Eucalyptus just got $5.5M funding.
Notes from the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit
- 70% of data centers were built before 1985, and will need rebuilding (via @merv).
- Waste makes opportunity: “85% idle compute capacity. $40B of supply chain wasted. 70 cents per dollar just to run the systems. 1.5x data doubles every 18 months. 33% of consumers will terminate their relationship due to security breach.” (Jim Stallings’ slide)
- Of IBM’s 194 datacetners worldwide (just under 6M sq ft), IBM’s own operations are run in just 7 (via @jeunice)
Conversation Rates for Dial-tone 2.0
More than 60 percent of Twitter users have stopped using the micro-blogging service a month after joining, according to Nielsen Online research released on Tuesday…. “Or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.” (via Joshua Baer)
Flash in Your Hand
Meanwhile, Ojanpera said times have never been better for Flash developers. Nokia has more than 300 million Flash enabled devices in the market, he said. And as a distribution channel and Ovi Store will connect Flash developers to millions of Nokia consumers worldwide.
Bluray
Netflix reported fourth quarter earnings. The takeaways? Blu-ray subscribers are up 30%, Netflix Online has grown nicely, and Netflix claims 26% growth year over year.
Flip-chart Transformation
Although industry pundits had derided the PC business as a lost cause, H.P. has expanded its computer division sales by $15.6 billion over the last four years, hitting $42.3 billion in total sales last year. During a similar period, computer sales at Dell rose to $35.8 billion, from $35.2 billion.
WiFi at AT&T
AT&T says users connected to its Wi-Fi hot spots 10.5 million times in the first quarter of 2009, more than triple the number of times its users connected to Wi-Fi hot spots in Q1 2008…. On the device side of things, AT&T has expanded its roster of popular Wi-Fi enabled smartphones, such as the iPhone 3G and the BlackBerry Bold, which accounted for more than 4 million connections to the company’s hot spots.
Meanwhile, in China
China reached more than 1 billion telephone subscribers in Q1 2009, of which *670 million* are mobile.
GeoCities
Yahoo Inc. said Thursday that it would shut down its GeoCities free Web-hosting service after paying about $3 billion for the unit in 1999. U.S. visitors to GeoCities dropped 25% to 12 million in March from the year-ago period, according to research firm ComScore.
I was just wondering that – about relationships versus the length of a name – in a recent tweet: "Experiment: I'd like to see twitter statistics versus @ name length. Am I losing valuable followers because my name is too long?"
So to condense your numbers into a single thought: In the future, we'll be organizing the building of completely new datacenters using secured Flash apps on our mobile phones while streaming Ronin from Netflix – and hopefully, not while on board ships in the North Sea.