Cyclical Evolution, Power Costs

Many things come into and fall out of fashion on a regular basis, some might say that there is a cyclical pattern to these trends. Daisy dukes, tie died, and bell bottoms, have come and gone and come and gone again, but trends in fashion are completely different from trends in technology. Bag Phones, 512k RAM and 800 Mb Hard Drives aren't on the list of things to make a come back.

Centralized computing however, is. In the pioneer days of computing everything was hosted on your organizations main frame. These computing behemoths, with massive processing and storage, were a centralized computer that would rival my 2007 Macbook.   Servers hosted terminals all over the infrastructure, allowing users to slice out parts of the power to do their work. As hardware became cheaper it was proliferated out to users more or less indiscriminately. This shift  can be seen from the movie TRON to the movie Hackers. As such terminal based computing all but vanished (hat tipped to Gates, Woz, Jobs and the like). 

Enter 1998: VM Ware, a virtually (yes, I did) unheard of company selling a great piece of tech. computing with in computing. Virtualizing platforms on anything from workstations to dedicated servers. This paradigm shift is making its way into organizations across the globe. It is becoming common place for organizations to restructure their infrastructure to only hold their computing on server and place Multi Layer Thin Clients (terminals) at each users desk.  

The other advantage to centralizing is power cost reduction, both with regard to servers and workstations. If you are able to reduce the power consumption of you server stack by say 10% you also reduce the load on your HVAC reducing over all power consumption in your facilities. If this is implemented infrastructure wide you can have massive gains both in resource management and utilities cost. In the long run everyone likes to save money.

Facebook ReOrginization

In the ever changing landscape of social media, people now have one more thing to mind. The scrutiny being paid to Facebook (fb) is something that should not be taken lightly. With media, law enforcement, and the corporate world taking a vested interest in the content of fb, users should be careful with whats in their profile.

Denver man fired for complaining about work on Facebook is just the first Google search result that I found when I searched: facebook fired profile. It probably wouldn't take much for me to find various specific examples relating to other corporate issues, crime, or media saturation when it comes to the fb arena.

I know that my fb is different than most because my wife and I share a page. She is the business end of our fb and I occasionally reconnect with old friend or whatnot. A redesign for us would not be required. Most of our content is boring parenting stuff. If I had to do anything it would be to de-friend a few people that are obnoxious, but besides that theres not much on our fb that I'm not proud of.

Photoshop Tool

The channel is probably the best tool in Photoshop, the ability to stack images on top of each other and use them to create your final piece is probably one of the stand out features of Photoshop.

From the Adobe web help portal:
About channels

Channels are grayscale images that store different types of information:

• Color information channels are created automatically when you open a new image. The image’s color mode determines the number of color channels created. For example, an RGB image has a channel for each color (red, green, and blue) plus a composite channel used for editing the image.
• Alpha channels store selections as grayscale images. You can add alpha channels to create and store masks, which let you manipulate or protect parts of an image. (See About masks and alpha channels.)
• Spot color channels specify additional plates for printing with spot color inks. (See About spot colors.)
  An image can have up to 56 channels. All new channels have the same dimensions and number of pixels as the original image.
  The file size required for a channel depends on the pixel information in the channel. Certain file formats, including TIFF and Photoshop formats, compress channel information and can save space. The size of an uncompressed file, including alpha channels and layers, appears as the right-most value in the status bar at the bottom of the window when you choose Document Sizes from the pop‑up menu.
  Note: As long as you save a file in a format supporting the image’s color mode, the color channels are preserved. Alpha channels are preserved only when you save a file in Photoshop, PDF, TIFF, PSB, or raw formats. DCS 2.0 format preserves only spot channels. Saving in other formats may cause channel information to be discarded.

Basically what this tells us is that you can break your image into 56 distinct parts and use them to create different effects with each subtle portion of your design. Which in turn opens a huge level of possible creativity.

Start layering your ideas to create something new.