Monthly Archives: March 2010
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Syndication
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March 23, 2010
“The China Job Drain” Launched
By New SignatureNew Signature launched the China Job Drain site today for the Alliance of American Manufacturing (AAM). The site vividly portrays a report commissioned by AAM detailing the number of jobs lost by industry and at the national, state, and regional level since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China Job Drain screen shot
The site features a vast array of interactive charts, graphs, and maps at the national, state, and congressional-district level. All are data-driven, cross-referenced, and hyper-linked to provide visitors with a fluid exploration of job-loss impact across the United States from coast to coast. New Signature employed a variety of technical effects, graphics, and AJAX techniques to present the text of the report and to highlight the regions and industries most greatly affected.
The site is another example of how New Signature helps its clients maximize the value of their academic reports and to bring otherwise static data to life. Locking research up in a static PDF for download does not largely improve upon the research publication methods of decades ago. By applying the full potential of the interactive web, visitors can to take their own paths of discovery through the facts presented. This ultimately creates a more compelling and influential experience.
Contact New Signature as you plan your next report and see what our Creative Technology can do for you.
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Book Review: “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit”
By New Signature
Writing a “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit” book is a tall order. A book of this nature must be written for two distinct audiences: (1) IT professionals with little experience on the Microsoft virtualization stack, and (2) administrators experienced with virtualization who need more knowledge on the new features contained within Hyper-V 2008 R2. The book does an excellent job of providing value to the first audience, but fails to provide as much value to the second audience.Authors Robert Larson and Janique Carbone (with the Windows Virtualization Team) do a solid job at creating a reference book. However, there are several areas where the authors could improve:
- Hyper-V R2 contains a number of features that make it significantly better than the version that shipped with Server 2008 (which wasn’t even an RTM version). These features are mentioned, at best, in passing during the book. With a mere two pages of “background history” on Hyper-V, the book doesn’t clearly convey how much Hyper-V has matured in the past year.
- Virtualization, and the different vendors in the marketplace right now, stir strong passions between IT professionals. The book is written in an abstract tone that doesn’t address many of the charges and counter-charges hurled between the Citrix, VMWare and Microsoft camps.
- Useful tips such as “don’t use snapshots in production” or “differencing disks are bad so beware” tend to get buried or lost in the mix. Tables of specs that are already out of date do nothing to alleviate this confusion, but this is a problem that any technology book faces.
- An entire chapter is dedicated on managing Hyper-V with PowerShell, but it lacks any mention of the fact that native PowerShell commands only come with System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The solution, to download commands from the Microsoft Open Source CodePlex project, is a laudable one, but why not mention SCVMM as well?
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March 19, 2010
Book Review: “Windows Internals, Fifth Edition”
By New Signature
As Microsoft has grown larger the Windows operating system has become much more complex, secure and transparent. One of the principal people behind that increased transparency is Mark Russinovich, who launched a company which would end up exposing many of the key features “under the hood” of Windows. His work didn’t go unnoticed, and Microsoft acquried Mark’s company.Since then, Mark has been the driving force behind the “Windows Internals” book series, which goes into greater depth than any work about how Windows works from an operating system perspective. Last June “Windows Internals, Fifth Edition” was released. This book covers both Vista and Server 2008, was released. Co-authored by David Solomon and with assistance from Alex Ionescu this is the ultimate Windows reference book for both software developers and system architects alike.
At over 1,264 pages, it’s impossible to cover every aspect of the book in a single review. It is certainly easy to state that the book is the definitive tome covering all aspects of the Windows kernel: memory addressing, error mechanisms, object management, security architecture, storage, networking, and I/O problems. (more…)
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March 12, 2010
I Am Not Your ATM
By New Signature
Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, launched the NotYourATM.com launched today. This New Signature designed and produced website is powered by the Drupal publishing platform and the JQuery JavaScript library. This interactive website empowers visitors to send a message to Wall Street by uploading their photos for inclusion on the website.Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, is a powerful force for working people. They combine the strength of 10 million union men and women and millions of workers without the benefit of a workplace union who share common challenges and goals to fight in communities, states and nationally for what really matters–good jobs, affordable health care, world-class education, secure retirements, real homeland security and more.
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March 8, 2010
Infrastructure Optimization
By New SignatureHow advanced is your business when it comes to IT? Is your technology provider lurching from disaster to disaster, fighting fires on an daily if not hourly basis? Or, are they meeting with you on a weekly basis to discuss the progress of ongoing strategic
initiatives and ways to leverage existing technologies to create value?There are four different kinds of organizations New Signature encounters regularly: Basic, Standarized, Rationalized, and Dynamic. Many of our clients begin at the Basic level, so it’s important to understand how we help them progress and mature.
Basic organizations tend to be entirely reactive in nature. They have little to no centralized control systems (for provisioning new users or standards, for instance) and unenforced policies and security standards. As a result, things break quite often and even simple tasks become protracted. (more…)
