Month: October 2012

I could tell you a lot about Cloud on System z. When I walk through some IBM presentations, they tell me that a U.S. Bank reduced provisioning time from 45 days to 20 minutes or that there’s 79% less TCA vs. leading public cloud or that IBM System z represents both the lowest TCO coupled with industry leading Qualities of Service for deploying private and/or hybrid clouds. Conclusion : “with solutions from Tivoli to automate provisioning and provide broad spectrum of key cloud capabilities, the time is now to start deploying your cloud on System z”.

Those nice people at Microsoft Press released an update in August to their free ebook ??? it???s a preview version of ???Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript???. And it seems perfect timing to highlight it (being absolutely transparent, I didn’t read it when it came out, but I’ve started to read it this week, as I’m spending more time talking to people about building Windows 8 apps for education)

It???s the perfect guide to Windows 8 applications programming, and gives you the whole story for creating Windows 8 apps. As it???s only a second preview version, the whole thing isn???t yet there ??? so far there’s 12 of a planned 17 chapters, along with a download of companion content (code samples etc)

If you???re interested in getting started, or you???ve got students that you know will want to have a go, then this is a great book to download and to share.

Our new Windows 8 in Education eBook is hot off the press. Written by leading practitioners, the eBook can get you started and inspire you about many of the great features of Windows 8 from an education perspective.

Google Docs is such an incredible tool for college students, offering collaboration, portability, ease of use, and widespread acceptance. But there are so many options, both hidden and obvious, that there???s a good chance you???re not using Google Docs to its fullest capability.

We???ve discovered 50+ great tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a student, with awesome ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing, and staying productive.

Thought I???d pull together a few resources for people interested in gaming???.its not a definitive list but its a great place to start

An experiment which allows readers to pay what they like for a collection of eBooks has unexpectedly reached sales of more than $1.1 million (??700,000) in under two weeks, it was revealed today.

The Humble eBook Bundle went live on 9 October, offering customers a selection of novels and comics by award-winning science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow.

Since then, it has sold more than 80 thousand bundles of eBook receiving an average price of $14 (??9). The promotion is due to close later today and has so far pulled in more than $1.1 million (??700,000) with one user paying a whopping $1,238 (??773) for the 13 books.