These appliances will allow companies to take advantage of the “private cloud”, with which they run their own applications and storing them in their own data centers. This differs from the “public cloud”, in which the applications are on servers in third-party data centers.

Potential customers are expected to be larger businesses with scalable enterprise server needs. The first in line is the auction super site Ebay.com. The Azure software itself, however, will be more widely available. Microsoft is joining numerous other big IT companies that are now offering cloud services, including IBM, Google, and Amazon.

Source: The China Post
Photo: Flickr

The 25yearsof.com website states:

In the last 25 years, .com has transformed nearly everything in our worlds from the way we shop, connect with our communities, make weekend plans, engage with our government, educate our children and even how we think! So commonplace is .com, that we now take much of these daily life changes and its profound impact for granted. Yet none of this would be possible without the great minds, innovators and risk takers that made .com what it is today.

The 25 years of .com list is as follows:

AOL (Steve Case); Alibaba Group; Amazon (Jeff Bezos); Andy Grove; Apple (Steve Jobs); Baidu; Cisco (John Chambers); Craigslist (Craig Newmark); eBay (Pierre Omidyar); eTrade; Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg); Google (Larry Page & Sergey Brin); Infosys; Jim Clark; Microsoft/MSN/Gates Foundation (Bill Gates); MySpace; Napster (Shawn Fanning); Netscape (Marc Andreessen); Paypal; Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Scott McNealy); Tim Berners-Lee; Twitter; Vint Cerf; Yahoo, (Jerry Yang and David Filo) and YouTube.

After closing its Sacramento data centre back in February, eBay has opened its new facilities in Utah. Data centres are still in high demand in Silicon Valley, and eBay decided to close its eight-year-old centre in favour of opening a newer and more energy efficient facility.

The 250,000-foot new centre has a PUE of 1.4, marking it as an environmental centre. eBay claims it saves up to 50 percent on energy consumption compared to other centres, and 30 percent compared to its most efficient facilities to date. The new structure also hosts PayPal data, and is called the Topaz data centre.

Despite the $287 million investment required to build the centre, eBay predicts it will cash in $2000 every second via its new facilities. It’s also planned as a long-term project that will replace eBay’s leased data holdings across three US states. You can see details and photos at Data Center Pulse.

Source | DataCenterKnowledge

Most of the servers at this 8-year-old data center were sold off, except for one. To officially mark the closing of the facility and to celebrate days of hard work, one lucky data center architect was given the opportunity to slice this last piece of equipment in two.

Picture of the axing and closing can be found here. The Sacramento center is just one of many eBay is closing and replacing with more efficient infrastructure.

Photo | Flickr

In short, yes. As I’ve mentioned before, eBay is not a good place to buy or sell a domain. Names frequently sell for too much, too little, or not at all. I think the name could have possibly reached as much as $100,000 USD– if marketed properly.

The problem is, end-users and domainers interested in a premium name like gangsters.com won’t be looking on eBay, but on domain auction sites. In this instance, the seller failed to reach his target market and the sale price shows this.

Photo | Flickr

As of this post, the auction is at $6,800 USD with 18 bids. The reserve has not been met, and this domain is expected to sell for quite a bit.

It’s a bit surprising to see such a valuable domain sold on eBay. As far as auction sites go, eBay is one of the worst places to buy and sell a name. Buyers are notorious for making outlandish bids and not paying, while sellers are often less than honest. That’s not to say everyone on the site is a con artist, but if I were selling a domain that could hit the six-figure range, I would list it with an auction service with experience in the domain name industry.

Source: Domain Name Wire

Another recent large sale is OnlineEducation.com. It sold on eBay to domainer Alex Alexander for £67,603 ($100,000 USD).

Personally, I think online education is a much more profitable niche than wood pellets and am surprised that OnlineEducation.com didn’t sell for more. With the economy facing tough times, more and more people are going back to school, with many of them doing so online.

Source | DN Journal

Photo | Flickr

The megalopolis will be built in two phases. The first, which is set to begin construction in June of next year, is expected to boast 35 megawatts of power. Another 35 megawatts will be added in 2013 to complete the project.

A government agency responsible for intercepting and analyzing communications both foreign and domestic, the NSA isn’t likely to tell us what their plans for the facility are. The new data center is long overdue, however, as their current setup in Maryland reached its power limit years ago.

The NSA isn’t the only one looking to set up shop in Utah. Last year, Oracle announced intentions to build a £180 million ($334 million USD) data center in Utah, while eBay said it would also invest £204 million ($285 million USD) for a facility in the state.

Source | Data Center Knowledge

Photo | Flickr

In an eBay auction today, InMemoryOfMichaelJackson.com sold for £6,103,329 ($9,999,999 USD) via the site’s Buy it Now feature.

The seller says this in the auction description: “It’s a sad day. Maybe someone can make a good site for people to remember the king by.”

This domain is worth very little and my guess is the sale won’t go through. Despite having been sold already, it is apparently still for sale in a another eBay listing.

A number of other Michael Jackson domains are also for sale on the auction site, all for exorbitant prices. Michael Jackson may be hot news today, but a year from now his domains will be worthless. When investing in domains, it’s important to ignore hype and watch out for scams.

So the next time you see a “Thriller” domain like this, do yourself a favor and “Beat It.”

Photo | Flickr

With this new website, the EFF gives users the ability to see changes in policies via a real-time feed, including side-by-side comparisons of the agreements with the changes highlighted.

‘Terms of Service’ policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information,” the EFF said in a statement. “But most web users don’t read these policies–or understand that the terms are constantly changing.”

Usually, a website will send mass emails to their users whenever a policy change takes effect, but most users do not bother to read the often complicated and lengthy documents. Earlier this year, Facebook made a change to its policy that allowed it to use deleted user content whenever and for as long as it wanted. When users protested, the company backed down from the change. The EFF hopes to put other major Internet services under the same scrutiny to ensure user rights are protected.

Source: CNET
Photo: Flickr