Best defeat of a state proposition

California exceptionalism or a rising green tide?
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

Tuesday’s landslide defeat of California Proposition 23 — the ballot measure that would have suspended the state’s landmark global-warming law — marked the emergence of a bipartisan, enviro-business coalition that spanned the demographic divide.

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It appears very likely that California’s energy/global warming legislation will be moving in a different direction than national legislation over the next 2 years. California also passed a proposition allowing a budget to be passed with a simple majority so no longer will the budget be held up purely by a minority of legislators.

It will be interesting if they can build up a larger movement state by state.

Small business and the iPad

by Shermeee

How a small manufacturer turned to the iPad
[Via Macworld]

CIO.com profiles a small manufacturing company that put an iPad into the hands of every one of its 37 employees and finds three tips for a successful iPad rollout.

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Nice little story. Going to put the iPad into the hands of all employees, even ones on the shop floor. They are using a nice social networking tool called Socialtext which provides almost everything a company might want.

So, their delivery guys can now sign the pdfs that are sent to the office when they have made a delivery.

They now view having to fax information around as old technology. The business is completely being changed because of access to iPads.

Less carbon in the cloud

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Another reason to use the cloud: a lower carbon footprint
[Via Ars Technica]

To the standard reasons to move to the cloud—greater scalability, reduced administrative costs, improved availability—Microsoft is hoping to add another reason: a lower carbon footprint. A new, Microsoft-sponsored study suggests that small businesses can reduce their carbon footprint by up to 90 percent by switching from on-premises Exchange, Sharepoint, and Dynamics CRM to cloud-hosted alternatives.

The argument makes sense; small businesses tend to have servers with capacities greatly in excess of their needs, leading to a lot of waste—an idle server may use 50-60 percent of the power of a fully-laden one. Cloud service providers use multi-tenancy to ensure that their servers run with little spare capacity, getting far more useful work out of each ton of carbon dioxide. Their specialization also allows them to build data centers with higher efficiency than conventional standalone servers.

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The thing businesses will need to get over is putting their hard earned data onto someone else’s servers. Trust will have to be earned as well as an excellent uptime record.

All it will take is one massive period of downtime or someone accessing data they should not and all the good from the cloud will be gone.