Doesn’t look like much is changing if you are planning on upgrading from Office 2007 to 2010. What do you think?

Kevin Rose: Top 5 Changes The iPhone Needs To Stay Dominant:

1. Create an expedited app review process
2. Allow apps to be hosted, sold, and installed on 3rd party websites
3. Allow the creation of apps to compete with your own native apps
4. Multi-tasking
5. AT&T stinks – move to Verizon

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

I’ve been trying out Google Chrome on Linux and Windows for the past few weeks now that extensions are available.  I like Chrome, it is very snappy and the number of available extensions are growing quickly.  I still plan on sticking with Firefox because it is open source and is something that just feels more familiar to me.  What are you using these days for your primary browser and why?

If you use Gmail to manage your contacts you will likely be happy to hear that they just added a find duplicates button which lets you find and merge your duplicate contacts.  I ran the tool tonight and found out I had 92 duplicates from my 733 contacts.  This was a huge time saver…

I found a great open source password management tool called KeePass which I wanted to share with you.  If you are like me you have tons of different passwords you have to remember.  KeePass organizes your passwords and encrypts them which makes storing your passwords very safe and secure.  The other nice thing is it works with Linux, Windows, and Macs.  The above screenshot is the application freshly installed from my home PC running Ubuntu but at work let me tell you it is a good long list!  It is also highly configurable and even allows for plugins.

Net neutrality is nothing new if you are a geek. We want the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the Internet to be nothing more than a “dumb pipe”. What that means is we don’t want the ISPs to be able to control what we are able to access, how fast we can access what we paid for, and they should offer the service at a reasonable price. John Wilbanks in the above video says that net neutrality means it is our “rights as an Internet user and we should have a right as an Internet user to have access to a neutral architecture that lets us innovate with no more restrictions than fulfilling the technical protocols.”

I am against the Internet Freedom Act and that might surprise you if you are not familiar with what the act actually stands for. I mean I give credit for naming the act something that people would oppose just by the name of it. Who would want to vote against Internet Freedom right? Well John McCain, the  man who almost won the presidency has introduced legislation that would prohibit the FCC from regulating the Internet.  Yes, the man who doesn’t even know how to use the Internet (see the video clip below) has introduced legislation about your Internet experience. Not to mention he has received more campaign dollars than any other politician from telecommunications companies (hmm coincidence he is introducing this legislation to help empower telcos…?)

What he is essentially proposing is broadband providers could limit the traffic to certain sites and protocols if it so desired. For instance many of you probably use Skype to talk to your friends and loved ones online. Well media companies and ISPs don’t like Skype because it allows you to have something for free which they would love to charge you for. What some ISPs have done and are still doing today is throttling your connection and even dropping packets so your Skype call or bittorrent connection is terminated sporadically. See here for more information on how Cox (in Canada) and Comcast in the US have throttled network connections.

Oh and yes Obama is for net neutrality. If you love the Internet and you want innovation of technology, we must stop this legislation.

My favorite video hosting site Vimeo has launched a new desktop uploader which allows you to upload and configure your favorite videos you want to share without having to launch a browser.  The open source community needs to come up with a standard to compete but for now Adobe Air is king which Vimeo has chosen to use as its platform.

Thanks to this new application I can now:

• Upload multiple files
• Batch edit video info and privacy
• Pause & resume upload

A look at the fully-packed racks inside a Facebook data center facility.

The information below is from a fantastic article from DataCenterKnowledge.com:

“How many servers does Facebook have? For some time now, the stock answer has been “more than 10,000 servers,” a number the company began using in April 2008. Facebook has continued to use that number, even as it has soared past 300 million users and dramatically expanded its data center space.

“Today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” Rothschild said during the Q&A session following his talk, adding that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis.

That places Facebook among the largest Internet companies that have publicly discussed their server counts, but still well behind hosting providers Rackspace, 1&1 Internet and OVH, which each house more than 50,000 servers in their data centers. See Who Has The Most Web Servers for more date on the largest infrastructures.

20,000 Servers In 18 Months
It also suggests that Facebook has added about 20,000 servers since early 2008, which explains why it borrowed $100 million in May 2008 to fund server purchases.

Rothschild also shared some huge numbers associated with Facebook’s photo storage operation, which now stores 80 billion images (20 billion images, each in four sizes). Rothschild said the real challenge isn’t storage, but delivery. ”We serve up 600,000 photos a second,” he said.

25 Terabytes of Log Data – Daily
The amount of log data amassed in Facebook’s operations is staggering. Rothschild said Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data, which he said was the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

Rothschild also discussed the effectiveness of the company’s engineering operations. Facebook currently has about 230 engineers on staff, who manage data for more than 300 million users. Rothschild said that ratio of one engineer for more than 1 million active users has been Facebook. ”We believe engineers at Facebook have a dramatic impact.””

Julie emailed me to tell me to watch this interview last night.  Daniel Hesse (Sprint’s CEO) talked with Charlie Rose about the future of wireless technologies and 3G vs. 4G.

I have been getting all of my contacts updated in my Gmail Address Book.  Last week I synced my Facebook contacts with Gmail and this week I learned LinkedIn has an address book exporter.

If you want to imprt your LinkedIn contacts with Gmail, here are the steps:

1. Sign into LinkedIn.com
2. Go to the address book exporter
3. Export all of your contacts to a .csv file
4. Open the CSV file in your favorite spreadsheet editor (Excel, OpenOffice etc)
5. Delete any rows you don’t care about, or data that doesn’t exist in your Gmail address book
6. Put a header row at the top of your spreadsheet to tell Gmail what each column of data represents.  For instance if “John” is in the column name that column “First Name”.



7. Save your spreadsheet somewhere handy like your desktop
8. Open your gmail contacts and click the import link (top right-hand corner of the screen)



9. The rest is pretty intuitive so I’ll leave that up to you.  If you have any problems let me know.