Have you ever had a computer for a long time and then wanted or needed to move all your data to a new one? Or, have you ever had to reinstall Windows just because you’ve loaded so many programs that it’s caused your computer to crash so often that you’re willing to start over? Well, what would you say if I told you it is possible to take a “snapshot” of your entire computer and move or copy the data to another machine in minutes so you can continue right where you left off.

Well you can, and it’s not something that is “coming soon”, it’s here today and has been here for at least a couple of years. The technology is called Virtualization, and there are several software vendors who provide the capability to allow you to do this on any operating system – Mac, Linux, or PC.

Before you ask me “why would I want to virtualize my computer”, let me share a few reasons:

• Portable workspaces – virtualization allows you to move your entire digital workspace from one physical machine to another. You can even use an iPod or USB memory sticks to host a virtual machine!
• Testing and training – rather than loading all kinds of unknown software into your normal computing environment, you can have a virtual machine just for testing. Heck, you could have one for games, one for personal computing, and one for work!
• Disaster recovery – if you always keep a recent backup of your virtual machine, say… on a portable USB hard drive, even if your computer dies you’ll be able to pick back up exactly where you left off without having to reinstall everything.
• Consolidation – Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.

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I’ve been holding off on sharing this information, which is really mostly rumor and speculation, up to this point – but Google is supposedly readying the launch of a new cellular phone which will come GPS and have built in access to Google Maps, Gmail, Calendar and Docs.

Google previously bid for the FCC’s 700MHz wireless spectrum, one which could be used to operate a new Google cellular phone service, and as I previously reported they acquired GrandCentral (I handed out around 75 invites to the beta service), a unified messaging platform which provides “find-me, follow-me” service, voice mail, and other goodies.
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On Thursday February 8 one of my recently posted articles was Dugg and then proceeded to almost immediately go viral.

The rush to my site was so overwhelming that it completely disabled the server for the first 3 hours. Here is what I did to bring it back online, and how I shored things up for the future.
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Basically everyone has heard of Linux, but a lot of folks are uncertain exactly how to pronounce it. Is that “lie-nux”, or “lin-ux”? Well, Linus Torvalds, the guy who invented it, is here to tell you.
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