 historically, it’s been a reasonably fast follower implementing mainstream technologies in use by its target customers, but people, not engineering, has been its competitive advantage.
And now, Rackspace is going head to head with Amazon on cloud IaaS. It has made a series of acquisitions aimed at acquiring developers and software technology, including Slicehost, JungleDisk, and Webmail.us. (JungleDisk is almost purely a software company, in fact; it makes money by selling software licenses.) Even if they emphasize other competitive differentiation, like customer support, they’re still in direct competition with Amazon on pure functionality. Can Rackspace obtain the competencies it will need to be a software leader?
Posted on March 18, 2010, in Infrastructure and tagged Amazon, cloud, hosting, RAX, VMware. Bookmark the permalink.	2 Comments.
Customer service is essential in any business. And I think it should be one thing that any business need to place some effort. Customer service is one way of retaining your customers and making them satisfied with the services and or products making them to continue their service subscription or product purchase. You can leverage the way you provide customer services by taking into consideration outsourcing your customer service and customer complaint handling needs with an inbound call center that specializes on the said services. Callbox Connect can provide you with all the customer service handling that you need.
Great post. This is exactly the situation hosting companies are in, and only a handful will be able to build an entire IaaS stack from the ground up. The rest will need to rely on software providers that offer turnkey software stacks that plug into their infrastructure and billing systems, and allow for significant feature customization. Sounds like a good fit for open source.For those who have been with me during the misery of the blurbage process, I found this article, “Six Writers Tell All About Covers and Blurbs” to be really comforting. I paricularly like Mark Jude Poirier‘s take on it:.
And with that thought in mind, I am officially going to not mention anything else about my novel until a) my agent sells it or b) my agent tells me it’s not going to sell. She has not yet sent my novel out on submission, but the entire thing is simply too stressful to think about, so I’m pushing it out of my mind and focusing on my next novel.
Which, by the way, is also extremely stressful. I find that once I have a rhythm going, I love to write. But these first steps, when I’m figuring out my character, trying to plot out the action, I’m a bundle of nerves. I read too much, trying to do research, most of which is never used. I obsess too much, toying with the characters in my mind while I’m running in the mornings. I jot too much, and I end up with random pieces of paper with strange lines of dialogue I’ve overheard or an idea I thought of. At some point, it all comes together, but it hasn’t yet for me. I have two main characters in my next novel. One I have a very clear idea of who she is. The other is still a foggy notion for me. I know some basic facts, but I don’t know her, and until I know her, I can’t be sure what she’s going to do. As my agent so wisely told me, the plot doesn’t drive the character; the character must drive the plot. In other words, what your character does must make sense, must move the plot forward. You can’t simply change your character to make sense of a plot.
Now if only my character would come out of hiding. I can just barely glimpse her….Chicago does not have the strictest gun laws in the country. It's time for gun lovers to stop spreading that lie.
The handgun ban made us the primary target of the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation, and in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court forced Chicago to fall into line with the rest of the country.
Since then, the courts have peeled off so many layers of our once stellar gun ordinance that it's barely recognizable. We're still maneuvering to keep gun stores and shooting ranges from opening in the city limits. But the courts have ruled against us on that, too, so we know it's just a matter of time.
Those kinds of details don't fit the conservative, pro-gun narrative, though. To use New York as a talking point, they'd have to admit that strict gun laws might actually have an impact on homicide rates.
We don't make excuses for our ghastly homicide numbers in Chicago. With 762 people killed last year, no one has to remind us that we have a serious gun problem. We own it. And we have to do something about it.
But we are tired of Donald Trump and pro-gun advocates using our city to promote their political agenda.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dragged Chicago into the fray again on Monday when responding to a reporter's question about gun policy in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
"One of the things that we don't want to do is try to create laws that won't stop these types of things from happening," Sanders said at a news conference. "I think if you look to Chicago where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes, they have the strictest gun laws in the country and that certainly hasn't helped there."
Sanders should listen to U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., who argues that the problem is Chicago being surrounded by red states that have completely surrendered to the pro-gun lobby.
U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois to issue with the White House's references to Chicago gun violence in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting.
With no gun stores in Chicago and no background check loopholes for private sales, one thing is clear. The guns being used to kill people on the streets aren't originating in Chicago. They're coming from someplace else.
When politicians and others repeat that ridiculous statement about Chicago's gun laws, it shows how out of touch they are with the problems urban areas face when it comes to gun violence.
When it comes to gun laws, big cities are only as strong as the states that border them. And in Chicago's case, that's Indiana. Thanks to Vice President Mike Pence, the former governor, Indiana has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation.
While Illinois has gone to great lengths to see that background checks are done for all gun purchases, Indiana has done the opposite. To buy a weapon in Illinois, the owner must have a valid firearms owner's identification card, issued by the Illinois State Police.
Those with felony convictions commonly use straw purchases, in which they enlist someone with a clean record to purchase multiple guns and bring them into the city.
Law enforcement officials say 60 percent of the guns confiscated on the streets of Chicago come from Indiana, Wisconsin and Mississippi. The other 40 percent come from suburban Cook County and nearby suburbs.
It's tough, but we can try to sort out the bad apples in our own state and shut them down. But we're helpless when it comes to regulating Indiana, Wisconsin and Mississippi.
Congress could do something, though. Lawmakers could pass legislation requiring universal background checks. That would close federal loopholes on background checks at gun shows and other private sales.
Congress could also limit the number of guns that can be purchased by one person in a period of time. And lawmakers could toughen penalties for straw purchases.
Military-style assault weapons already are banned in the city of Chicago, but in most other places in Illinois and in most other states, they can be purchased as easily as a handgun. If Congress really wanted to stop massacres like the one in Las Vegas from occurring, lawmakers could pass a federal assault weapons ban to replace the one that expired in 2004.
The gun lovers in Washington don't want to talk about these things, though. It's a lot easier to just keep picking on Chicago.#!/bin/bash

today=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
filename=/var/lib/postgresql/pdl_$today.sql

pg_dump -d pdl > $filename && bzip2 $filename
Although many organizations have cyber security mechanisms in-place, apprehension around cyber attacks has reached epidemic proportions. This is due to changes in the computing environment: the increased volume of employees working from home, the corresponding remote access infrastructure, a massively increased dependency on cloud apps, and more sensitive data in-motion than ever before. The balm to this scourge lies in dramatically improving security measures.
In March of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic emerged, hundreds of thousands of offices closed and millions of workers adjusted to the distributed work model. The dangers of the pandemic, combined with delayed government-level responses and other external factors left people frazzled, and fallible. Cyber criminals quickly capitalized on the frenzy. For weeks, uncertainty around the spread of the contagion mounted, and attackers eagerly preyed upon these fears. Amidst voluminous uncertainty, alerts about the coronavirus, personal protective equipment, and virus testing easily proved tempting for the crooks. Phishing websites popped up across the web and 2.2 times more individuals fell for phishing threats than usual. One in four Americans received a phishing-related email….
I live in Texas and I'll tell you what I tell my friends... It's not a matter of if, but when. 

My generation is overwhelmingly for marijuana... However the number of people in my generation that currently hold political seats is zero. The generation that has political seats right