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Lisa Schmeiser this morning filed an InfoWorld story where she writres about the results of her research on recession-proof IT jobs. Three skill sets appear in her story: Virtualization first, then AJAX, and Ruby-on-Rails among Web 2.0 technologies. Virtualization and Cloud Computing are emerging among the top recession-proof technologies globally that will play a huge role during this economic downturn and recovery. 2009 will be the year of Virtualizationa and Cloud Computing, as well as SOA in its reincarnation as Web Oriented Architesture. read more

After I got the WebAssist email I started wondering what people who read this site are using. Personally, I haven't written an ASP or ColdFusion page in several years. I...

Come out from under the bed for a minute. Despite the horror of September, Gartner says worldwide PC shipments hit 80.6 million units in Q3, up 15% year-over-year. The way Gartner counts the number includes desktops, mobiles and x86 servers, but it attributes the turnout to Intel's newfangled netbooks, what Gartner calls "mini-notebooks," which are catching on in the U.S. and EMEA. read more

IBM said Monday that it's going full bore at cloud computing and launching a company-wide initiative to fill the cloud with new software and services. Amazon and Google have something of a first mover advantage with SMBs and ISVs; and IBM's vision is more a mix of tradition data centers and clouds.read more

The layoffs keep rolling in. The latest startup to cut back is, the third largest social network. On Monday, the 110-person company laid off 10 to 15 percent of its employees in what it is calling a "restructuring" move. A tipster told us that the cuts came mostly in Design, HR, and QA. I called to ask for a comment and Hi5's VP of marketing Mike Trigg confirms: We did a restructuring this week. We did let a few people go, but we are also hiring people. The world changed for everybody dramatically last week. We are focused on growing our business. We have great momentum.read more

A happy day! I voted for Obama! Right next to the slightly scary, life-size cardboard cut-out my daughter gave me! Happy, happy day!! Happy, happy day!! PS: I tagged the photos "ivotedforobama" at flickr. [Tags: obama ivotedforobama ]read more

Cloud computing refers to the ability to deploy your application on infrastructure that you do not necessarily own nor manage yourself and that can be easily scaled up to handle demand and provide resiliency to failure. The hardware infrastructure can be composed of clusters of many cheap machines or it may be high-end hardware which is virtualized into many nodes. In either scenario, the cost of ownership is dramatically less than in the traditional model.read more

Intel has bought the assets - the assets, mind you - of NetEffect Inc, née Banderacom, the network connectivity solutions company that specialized in Ethernet products and technologies for server compute clusters. The assets went for $8 million. Tom Swinford, the general manager of Intel's LAN Access Division, said, "The combination of Intel and NetEffect technology will allow Intel to address our customers' most important 10 Gigabit Ethernet needs, including server virtualization, convergence of network and storage traffic, and server compute clusters." read more