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Dell: Enterprise desktops aren’t dead, but are getting smaller

Dell on Thursday launched what it claims is the “world’s smallest fully functional commercial desktop” with an integrated power supply and Intel vPro technology.

Even though desktop sales have been in decline for years, there’s a big race to smaller form factors underway. Dell’s OptiPlex 780 USFF (ultra small form factor), which starts at $629, is designed to take on similar offerings from HP and Lenovo. Dell also unveiled the OptiPlex 380. The big pitch: Desktops aren’t glamorous but they take up less space these days and still matter to select verticals.

In a statement, Mike Basore, senior product marketing manager at Dell’s client group, said:

“The death of the commercial desktop has been greatly overstated. We are seeing customers look to deploy small form factor systems in ways never before imagined.”

If you say so.

So how small is small? The OptiPlex 780 USFF weighs in at 7 pounds is 9.4 inches high, 2.6 inches wide with a 9.3 inch diameter.

In other words, you can toss it in your backpack. Not that you would of course because you probably have a laptop.

Server market shows signs of stabilising, says Gartner

Despite shipments falling 17 per cent and revenues dropping 15 per cent, the global server market seems to be stabilising, said IT research and analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said that despite the yearly declines, the third-quarter results were more promising.

Hewitt said: “There was a 13.8 per cent increase in shipments and 10.2 per cent in revenues compared with the second quarter. This suggests that the market is showing signs of stabilisation as we move towards the end of 2009.”

Similarly with the global market, Gartner senior research analyst Errol Rasit said that the EMEA server sector grew sequentially by seven per cent compared with the last quarter, Rasit said this was the largest second-to-third-quarter growth since 1998.

However, the market was still constrained this year as virtualisation remained key to increasing efficiency and reducing server spend. The server market showed a double-digit year-on-year decline in the third quarter of 2009,” added Rasit.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), server shipments totalled over 526,000 units in the third quarter of 2009, dropping 22.9 per cent year on year, while revenue totalled $3bn (£1.8bn) in the same quarter, declining 22.8 per cent on third-quarter 2008.

Hewlett Packard led the EMEA market, in terms of both revenue and shipments, according to the Gartner figures. Globally, IBM led in revenues while HP led in shipments.

Rasit said: “As 2009 draws to a close, the outlook for the fourth-quarter EMEA server market is for slightly improved results sequentially, increasing the likelihood of a return to growth in 2010.”

The SEO Benefits of a Dedicated Server

As a webmaster, there are a lot of choices which need to be made, choices which ultimately affect the long-term success of your project. Hosting definitely has its role in the equation and if you’re serious about making an informed decision, you need to analyze all of the benefits as well as drawbacks associated with going dedicated.

When it comes to drawbacks, the fact that dedicated servers tend to be more expensive is by far the most important one. After all, nobody wants to spend hundreds of dollars monthly on hosting unless it’s either a necessity (maybe the site has outgrown its current setup) or the pros clearly outweigh the cons.

Do the Pros outweigh the Cons?
No two projects are alike, so it all depends on the specifics of yours. If you have a huge budget at your disposal, it makes sense to go dedicated right from the beginning because that way, you won’t have to go through the hassle of migrating from one hosting plan to another once your site starts receiving some serious traffic.

If that is not the case though and if you’re on a tight budget, calculations are in order. Leaving other benefits aside (the fact that you have a lot of resources at your disposal, the fact that you don’t have to worry about other websites crashing the server due to a sudden spike of traffic and the list could go on and on), let’s focus on the SEO aspect of things.

Solution4Hosting Dedicated servers

What Are the SEO Benefits of Dedicated Servers?
First of all, it’s important to understand that there are no “direct” SEO benefits to hosting on a dedicated server. In other words, search engine spiders don’t check if your website is hosted on a dedicated server in order to give boosts or penalties based on what they find out.

On the other hand, there are quite a few indirect SEO benefits associated with dedicated servers. First of all, you don’t have to worry about your website being in a “bad neighborhood”. The main problem with shared hosting is that a lot of websites, sometimes even thousands, end up being hosted on the same server/IP.

Unfortunately for the people who only employ legitimate approaches to search engine optimization, not everyone is willing to play fair. There are webmasters who are always on the lookout for the fast way to success and it’s safe to assume that out of hundreds or thousands of websites hosted on a certain server, at least a handful will be “problematic” from that perspective. In other words, even if you do everything right, there’s a chance that you’ll have to pay for other people’s mistakes.

Aside from that, there’s also the issue of page loading / page refresh speed which needs to be taken into consideration. Algorithms are constantly changing, but at least some search engines take page load times into consideration at least to a certain degree. It makes perfect sense if you stop for a moment and think about what search engines are meant to do. Search engines all want to display the best possible websites when someone searches for a certain term and fast page load times are important when it comes to the experience of your visitors. Of course, there are other factors which also are taken into consideration and most of them have more weight than page load times. But still, having an edge, however insignificant it may seem, is always a good thing, especially if you’re targeting terms which are extremely competitive.

The most important thing that dedicated servers put on the table is complete control. It’s your server and you can use it as you please. This means that you have more control over the software that you’re using and that you can tweak absolutely everything. Now that we’ve analyzed some of the most important SEO benefits associated with dedicated server, it all boils down to one question:

Do These Benefits Outweigh the Extra Costs?
There’s unfortunately no universally valid answer to this question, it all depends on how much money you have at your disposal and how competitive the term you’re targeting is. If your budget is not exactly impressive then the answer is probable that no, the SEO benefits alone do not make going dedicated worth it. There are a lot of more useful things that you could do with the money you’d have to spend on a dedicated server. You can always upgrade at a later point but until then, there are more important things which deserve your financial attention.

On the other hand, if your budget is decent at the very least then yes, going dedicated makes sense, especially if you’re targeting extremely competitive terms. Having another edge definitely can’t hurt and all things considered, paying extra for a dedicated server will prove to be worth it in the long run.

Web hosting users learn of Google and Admob deal

Those web hosting users looking to the mobile market for additional business will be interested to hear that Google has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AdMob.

The internet giant has agreed to acquire the mobile display ad technology provider for $750 million (£447.5 million) in stock.

According to Google, the deal will help improve its expertise and technology in mobile advertising.

“Attracting the world’s top engineering talent and people with entrepreneurial vision to Google has always been crucial to our success. AdMob’s proven track record in innovating at speed will help maintain that culture,” commented Vic Gundotra, vice-president of engineering at Google.

Omar Hamoui, founder and chief executive officer of AdMob, said he thinks people underestimate how important advertisements have been in the creation of “innovative content” on the web.

Google recently announced that it is working with a number of airports in the US and Boingo Wireless to provide free Wi-Fi as a holiday gift from now through to January 15th 2010.

Currently involved in the deal are Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston and Baltimore, among other airports. Burbank and Seattle airports will offer airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

How the Web Spoofing Attack Works

URL Rewriting

STEP I
# A Phisher could insert a malicious script inside a product review to attack the user.

# The Script would modify the host site so that the user believes he/she is interacting with secure site. this technique is also called as “Cross-Scripting.”
URL-redirecting

STEP II
# This done by using encoded characters to hide the destination address of a link.
Ex-“abc” = “abc”

# Assuming the attacker’s server is on the machine www.attacker.org, the attacker rewrites a URL by adding http://www.attacker.org to the front of the URL by use of
JAVA Script.
For example,
http://home.YourDomainName.com becomes http://www.attacker.org/http://home.YourDomainName.com.

STEP III
# Once the attacker’s server has fetched the real document needed to satisfy the request, the attacker rewrites all of the URLs in the document. Then the attacker’s server provides the rewritten page to the victim’s browser.

# If the victim follows a link on the new page, the victim remains trapped in the attacker’s false web.

Forms
When the victim submits a form, the submitted data goes to the attacker’s server. The attacker’s server can observe and even modify the submitted data, doing whatever malicious editing desired, before passing it on to the real server.
Form-attacker
1. A deceptive message is sent from the phisher to the user.
2. A user provides confidential information to a phishing server (normally after some interaction with the server).
3. The phisher obtains the confidential information from the server.
4. The confidential information is used to impersonate the user.
5. The phisher obtains illicit monetary gain.

Web Spoofing Attack

Web Spoofing is Tricking Someone into visiting a Website other than one they intend to visit , by creating a similar website. Web Spoofing is a Phishing Scheme.

The attacker must somehow lure the victim into the attacker’s false web. there are several ways to do this.

# An attacker could put a link to false Web onto popular Web page.
# If the victim is using email, the attacker could email the victim a pointer to false Web.
# Finally, the attacker could trick a web search engine into indexing part of a false Web.

Have you ever received an e-mail that looked like this?

———————————————————
From: Bank of America
To: John D
Subject: Your Online Banking Account is Inactive

Your Online Banking Account is Innactive

We closed your online access for security reasons.

Click here to access your account
We must verify your account information.

Spoofing attacks in the physical world as well as the electronic world.

People using computer system often makes security relevant decisions based on Social
engineering they see.

you might decide to type in you account number because you believe you are visiting your bank’s web page. This belief might arise because the page has a familiar look.

Ways of Trapping Victim

1. A browser presents many types of context that users might rely on to make decisions.

2. Appearance – the appearance of an object might convey a certain impressions.

3. Name of Objects – people often deduce what is in a file by its name.

4. Timing of Events – if 2 things happen at the same time, the user might think they
are related.

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