Posts Tagged ‘organizations’

Nerval’s Lobster writes “The Green Grid, which helped popularize metrics for minimizing wasted electricity in data centers, has developed a new method for cutting down on wasted electronics as old servers and other equipment reach their inevitable retirement. The Electronics Disposal Efficiency metric is designed to help minimize electronic waste, specifically servers and other enterprise hardware. It will take a cue from other organizations, including the Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) Initiative. The Green Grid is trying to build on established regulations that govern the disposal of consumer electronics such as televisions, including the rules governing Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) within the EU. The metric isn’t concerned with whether equipment has been reused or recycled, or where it’s broken down into component parts

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The Green Grid Publishes New Data Center Recycling Metric

The New York Times has published a short feature profiling Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division — it’s worth a read, if only as a reminder of how popular the service has become. Launched almost exactly ten years ago, AWS now comprises seven major data center complexes across three contents, serving billions of pageviews per day (the sort of scale that, unfortunately, becomes most obvious when one of these “Availability Zones” goes down ). But what’s most interesting is the company’s continued ambitions. AWS is estimated to bring in $1 billion every year, and the division’s head, Andrew Jassy, says he expects it to grow by a factor of ten

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Why Amazon’s worldwide cloud computing service is just the start

[Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. The box was full of paper, and printed on the

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Liberating America’s secret, for-pay laws

Apple will allow independent environmental audits of at least two of its suppliers’ manufacturing plants , and they could begin as early as March, reports activist Ma Jun to USA Today . Ma is the founder of the Chinese Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), one of several environmental organizations that has been critical of the companies’ environmental practices. While Apple has performed its own audits of its production facilities since 2007, the new inspections by the Fair Labor Association and now the IPE mark a big change in how the company deals with labor and environmental complaints. So far the plans only include two as yet unnamed suppliers, but this could be expanded to include more in the future. The decision to..

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Apple to allow third-party environmental inspections, could begin as early as March

Harry McCracken’s been one of our favorite technology journalists for many years — besides having a positively photographic memory, he has a capacity for putting a personal touch on his work that pulls us in with virtually everything he writes. Last week he relayed the story of being pitched a $500 gift card from one of the industry’s giant PR firms in exchange for “starting a conversation” with his readers around an upcoming home theater campaign from LG . As McCracken says, “a big PR firm offering what amounted to cash payments for coverage on behalf of a major tech company” isn’t something you hear every day. Opinions are one thing (we’re never afraid to show those), but for journalists like McCracken and us, impartiality is an..

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Harry McCracken takes PR firm to task over pay-for-play blogging

Back in 2008, it looked like the Google Books legal saga might finally be over. After filing suit against Google for copyright infringement, a coalition represented by the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers had reached an agreement with the company, which would have given legal sanction to Google Books’ scanning practices while compensating authors and publishers. Since a judge rejected the settlement earlier this year, however, there’s been little movement in the case — until last week, when Google started trying get the plaintiffs kicked out altogether. The company is arguing that only individual copyright holders, not collective organizations like the Authors Guild and the American Society of Media Photographers,… Continue reading…

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Google moves to strike Authors Guild and other organizations from Books suit