Mashed Articles

One year ago I could not run even 1 km without stopping. Yesterday I ran my first Marathon – the whole 42.195 km!

What an experience! Nothing that words can explain. It was 4+ hours (4:14’30’’) of joy and pain (what a pain) which taught me a few things:
- There are no shortcuts – you must practice, practice and practice to be able a beat the beast
- It’s not your legs that would fail you but your head – a continuous fight between your brain and your body –“Don’t feel my legs. Shall I stop? No! Must go on!”. Or in other words – “If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But never give up!”
- Everyone needs a partner – I had Buddy Runner ‘who’ woke up with me in the early mornings for a run in the last 4 months and kept me motivated all the long way (unfortunately I spilt too much water on myself until my phone died after 3.5 hours).
- I love my family – my wife and kids waited for me in 4 different locations. Gave me isotonic drinks and energy gels (yuck), ran with me a bit but most important – gave me a reason to continue.

The run itself was painful, painful and painful. So why did I do that? I started writing the answer but understood that it is something that could not be explained…

And if you think yesterday was painful, this how I feel today.

Writen by Oliver Turner

Printer users will know how expensive it is to buy new printer cartridges for your ink jet printer. The best way to save money is to buy cheap ink jet cartridges. Finding cheap ink jet cartridges can be easy if you know where to look for. There are mainly two ways of buying printer cartridges – shop online or from the retail store.

The internet is the best place to buy cheap ink jet cartridges. Due to increase in demand for printer cartridges many printer suppliers find it profitable to sell their products online. The online dealers have their websites, which offer information on the various types of ink jet cartridges available for purchase. Most online sellers offer discounts, especially on bulk purchases. These are really useful for office set-ups. Shopping online gives you the option of comparing the prices offered by the different sellers and choose the cheapest discounted price. Visit three to four websites before placing your order.

But care has to be taken when you are buying online. Make sure that you buy from reputed online printer suppliers. Reputed dealers give guarantee on their products and service. Some even have replace faulty cartridges without any extra charge. Buying cheap ink jet cartridges online doesn’t mean that you save only on the product. You can save on shipping and traveling expenses as well. Online dealers may have free shipping facilities, if you spend over a certain amount.

The other option of finding cheap ink jet cartridges may be your local retail computer supplies store. Though prices of ink jet cartridges at retail stores are considerably higher than those offered by the online stores, sometimes the retail stores may also offer discounted prices on their printer supplies. So you have to watch out for such deals and discounts offered by the retail store.

We have tested all printer ink online sources and found the best one. Find the results only on the Cheap ink jet cartridges test. All about printer inks on http://www.leandernet.com

Writen by Vinodh Pushparaj

Data Centers are the core of the Internet. The computer servers that power the Interne,t call Data Centers their home. If you think of how many billions of online transactions that happen every day you will be amazed to know that the final resting place of all these stored transactions is the Data centers. This Amazement quickly turns into Panic when you think about how much private data and vital data is stored there. Over years the Data Center technologies have evolved a lot into much advanced techniques like server virtualization and high speed power houses. There are more than 100 factors one should evaluate a data center against before choosing one to home their servers. In this article we will see the three main that in turn dictate the rest of the factors.

1. Security: We just now saw how much data is stored, processed and served by the data centers. All these are vital data that makes or breaks a global economy. Security includes the data encryption capability of the servers, the security of the uplinks or the backbone networks that are employed. It includes security mechanisms like the Public key dongles and the capability to store the data securely and safely. The less talked aspect is the physical security of the box and the whole data center itself. We are talking about limiting snooping and sniffing the packets, but what happens if one person just walks in carries off a server. How much credit card data, transaction details, bank details and the SSN’s get compromised! You can have a slow box but an insecure one creates a ton of problems in the form of countless lawsuits. Choose the data center that excels in all aspects of security. Ask pointed questions, expect the right answers.

2. Reliability: The next important aspect is the reliability of the systems and the data center infrastructure itself. We are just not talking about backup machines or RAID 5 HDD. We are talking of highly available power systems with sufficient backup time and in house generators for emergencies. The additional aspect to consider is reliability of the company that offers the data center and the persons working for the company. You many want to talk a little bit about their hiring and daily authentication and authorization process if you are even a mid-sized company. Disaster recovery systems are critical for the five 9′s in reliability don’t be stalled because a California power-company had a complete emergency shutdown due to an earthquake or a hurricane in Florida. You should be able to gracefully failover to alternate sites.

3. High Speed: The third aspect is the much needed speed. This is more complex than you think. Adding a word saying that we have the high end servers making a data center a high speed infrastructure is minimum requirement. The network uplinks and the Internet backbone the center are connected to are also very important. You have to ask for custom solutions like caching technologies, load balancing blueprints and high end routers, switches and backplanes.

This article just touches on these major concepts and you have to do sufficient research on the keywords employed in this article. As I said there are 100 factors to consider before choosing the right datacenter. Any good company owning a data center would openly help you evaluate their infrastructure against these factors.

You can find a good Data Center with many of the good capabilities discussed in this article in fastpcnet.net. Ask them about their custom solution and how they measure against the deciding factors and you will be happy at the answers.

Author Holds a Masters in Distributed computing and does freelancing for many great Internet companies through the no fee free freelance website freelancefree.com.