Did you know 73% of Americans use the internet at least occasionally? That is a lot of people! So using texting, email, blogs, social networks, etc. for politics was an obvious and very smart decision. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be up front and clear. This post is an overview of Cloud Computing and why museums should care or at least be aware of it. First though, I find the progression of the server room quite interesting.
In the beginning one would have a singular huge computer that would crave the computational power of your cell phone. Access to these main frames was given to the end users through terminals or consoles. As servers became smaller and relatively cheap (< $10k), we began to fill our server rooms with many racks of computers. Each server typically had a dedicated purpose. Much is wasted with this model, since many of these servers would sit idly by +90% of the time while still consuming an immense amount of power. Not too long ago the Virtual Machine gave us the ability to run many virtual servers on a single machine. This was just a step away from where we are today. Why not run these virtual machines on someone else’s server?
One might say that I’ve been addicted to efficiency for quite a while. Even before learning about the need to conserve fuel and reduce CO2 emissions, I would organize my activities and errands so that I could take care of them in as few excursions as possible. The logistics of ordering these tasks was almost an odd form of entertainment for a mind trained by late nights playing board games in college (computer science and engineering may have had some effect as well). These days, however, my mind has turned to other - perhaps more practical - conservation decisions involving hybrid cars, rain barrels, and energy efficiency.
This device monitors voltage, power, and cost
In today’s post I would like to share some investigations that I have done with a couple of cool energy efficiency tools. Perhaps you’ve heard of vampire energy. I’ve suspected that some of my home appliances are vampires, and a few weeks ago I decided to start doing some investigation of my own by purchasing a consumer-grade energy meter to measure the amount of energy that various electronics around my house consume. I haven’t done much analysis yet, but I have found that during normal use over a month, my entertainment center uses 75.04kWh and costs me $10.20 in electricity. This amounts to $122.40 over the course of a year. When everything is in standby, these undead electronics suck down 36kWh in a month (I need to run this test with the DVR on another outlet). Leaving the system in standby for a year would still cost me about $60.
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A post the other day on Eye Level, rather subtly announced that the Lunder Center is now using Twitter. You probably know that Eye Level is a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and that it focuses a lot on the work that is done at Lunder Center, which as far as I know, is the first and only conservation department that functions as a permanent museum exhibit (instead of being tucked away in the museum, conservators are at work and on view behind floor-to-ceiling glass walls ). But maybe you don’t know about Twitter: it’s a web site to which you send text messages from your cell phone (called “tweets”) that are then displayed for everyone to see. You can “follow” your friend’s tweets (or a museum artifact’s in this case) to know what they are doing and thinking.
I thought I would use my space on the blog this week to give you a sneak peek of the new website we are creating for the upcoming show, Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty.
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