Brand Designs
Strong brands are necessary for great success, but it's not
as simple as choosing a fancy name, and a clever tagline, even with top-notch
materials. Branding comes with deep
pitfalls for those with their heads in the clouds.
Martin Allen-Smith, Editor, Designer magazine.
Brian McKenna - Former editor, Infosecurity Today
Adrian Read - Editor, Server Management Magazine
Strong brands are necessary for great success, but it's not
as simple as choosing a fancy name, and a clever tagline, even with top-notch
materials. Branding comes with deep
pitfalls for those with their heads in the clouds.
Considering the importance of oil to the global economy, it is surprising how little attention was paid to last week's report by the German Energy Watch Group. The news that world wide oil supply has gone into terminal decline and will soon be outstripped by demand seems to prompt only shrugs and a deft change in topic.
According to the report, oil production probably peaked in 2006. Top international oil companies – the so called oil majors – have collectively been unable to increase production for the last ten years "despite an unprecedented rise in oil prices."
But detailed simulations of how oil reservoirs are drained, run on high-performance computer grids, are helping fight the decline.
What do a Fiat 500, a bubblegum
machine and a Danish rocking chair have in common? The gum is not to fix leaks in a car that sways like a fairground ride, and, despite appearances, they are not toys. No, in fact, they are some of the most treasured objects of the designers featured in this article. Between them they share attributes that inspire love in a way that most objects fail to do. The question is: how?
It looks bad and smells terrible, but animal waste can fuel power stations and can even be used in your car.
Can excrement energy save the world?


There is no shortage of solvable problems that require enormous computer power to find the solution, but has Microsoft's Computer Cluster finally taken high-performance computing (HPC) mainstream.
It’s impossible to predict everything that could go wrong in a business, but asking awkward questions could avert disaster
The Information Security Forum's (ISF) has released version III of its legal repository, bringing together laws relevant to information security and professional legal interpretations.
Information security practitioners need to identify individual laws relevant to the event they are analyzing. The ISF repository is intended to answer such questions as: "Show me all the privacy laws for Canada and Germany", says Andy Jones, senior research consultant, ISF.
Beware! You may never know you are part of a global invasion of the system snatchers.
Grid
computing has successfully crossed from research to business. Yet for
most companies, the grid remains a remote vision hampered by
exaggerated expectation.
For most of the day, a typical
computer processor ticks along at a fraction of its potential. Software
is run sporadically, with the processor only troubled during rare,
intensive tasks. Multiply this by the multitude of computers sitting
under office desks, in server farms and across the world’s millions of
businesses, and the picture of wasted resource is scandalous.
Using grid computing, scientists have developed models of the body's most vital organ to devise better treatment methods.
First published, The Guardian, April 27th 2006 Wear your heart on the screen.