community

Optiwind is one the few companies searching for the middle ground in wind power--somewhere between the gigantic three-blade wind mills and the small turbines for individual homes.

The company has erected its first midsize, production-scale wind turbine on a family farm in its home state of Connecticut to test performance, the company said late last week. It received a $1 million loan from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund for the project.

Optiwind is targeting organizations that have electricity bills around $100,000 per year and are looking for on-site power generation to offset those expenses. Alternatives approaches have included … Read more

IBM is tapping into its own network of PC owners to help figure out how to clean up drinking water.

Big Blue announced Monday a series of high-tech projects related to creating safer drinking water, which IBM notes is a rare resource for at least 1.2 billion people worldwide.

To drive the initiatives, the company is calling on its World Community Grid, a network of PC owners who pitch in computing time to help scientists tackle global problems. People who volunteer for the Grid allow their idle computers to be used by IBM to collectively run simulations and other … Read more

For those of us who went to high school before the Internet had made its way into most households, back when evenings were more likely to be spent twisting telephone wire around our fingers than typing messages to our friends, having online relationships that are equally important to those that happen in person may sound implausible.

But for teens today, online communities--be they through games, social-networking sites, or other virtual groups--offer "crucial socialization and identification experiences," according to researchers who studied 4,299 people from Spain, Japan, and the U.K. who use the social-networking site Habbo.

Moreover, … Read more

As a long-time Mac troubleshooting researcher and consultant, one of my favorite and perhaps the most valuable Mac knowledge sites online is Apple's own Support Discussions forums. According to an official post on the site, the forums will be receiving a makeover, becoming more socially inclined by adding feature sets like avatars, homepages, and widgets. … Read more

According to a study conducted by Slacker in 2007, about 70 percent of music enthusiasts don't want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists, meaning that unless you're a DJ--or just really hard-core about music arrangement--you'd probably prefer to just listen to your library on shuffle or have someone else do the mixing for you. Internet radio stations such as Pandora and Slacker, and social recommendation sites such as iLike and Last.fm already do a good job providing the latter.

However, if you're craving a mix for a specific mood or activity--or if you want to limit the DJ powers to a specific set of personal acquaintances--Songvote is the service for you. This extremely nifty (and completely free) Web-based app lets users create collaborative playlists based on a simple time-restrained voting system. Using it is ridiculously straightforward: visit the site; create a theme-, event-, or activity-based contest; and then sit back and wait for the votes to roll in. Once the time is up (based on an end date you specify), Songvote provides a final playlist based upon the results of the voting. Each mix also includes direct links to AmazonMP3 and iTunes to spur song purchasing.

… Read more

Puppet Labs announced on Thursday that Adobe Systems is publishing code for managing Hadoop on the Puppet Forge community development site. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

Puppet is an open-source data center automation and configuration management framework aiming to provide system administrators a platform for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management.

The necessity of data center automation and management tools (often grouped into the DevOps category) is becoming ever more apparent, as cloud principles and large-scale systems that process data in a parallel manner continue to emerge.

Case in point: Hadoop is an open-source platform powering hugely … Read more

Common Windows security wisdom says it's a bad idea to run multiple antivirus apps simultaneously. Generally that's true, but Immunet 2.0 intends to play nice with your existing protection and bolster it with help from the cloud and the crowd. Immunet's latest update introduces new scanning tools, detection engines, and support in a bid to persuade users that the program is the spackle they need to plug the holes in their security wall.

Installation and setup The installation of Immunet 2.0 asks for registration, which you can skip to avoid sending your data up to … Read more

Common Windows security wisdom says it's a bad idea to run multiple antivirus apps simultaneously. However, that's not always the case, and Immunet's latest update intends to bolster your existing protection with help from the cloud and the crowd. Available exclusively Thursday on CNET Download.com, Immunet 2.0 introduces new scanning tools, detection engines, and support in a bid to convince users that the program is the spackle they need to plug the holes in their security wall.

Similar to PC Tools' ThreatFire, which didn't originally address virus-related threats but does now, Immunet seeks to … Read more

It might not seem like much, but a Monday announcement from Facebook to unveil its new "Community Pages" feature is one of the boldest steps that the social-networking site has taken toward, well, consuming your life.

"Community Pages" take the concept of a Facebook "fan page" and apply them to concepts, places, and ideas, rather than brands. An announcement at the top of Facebook's prototype community page for "cooking" explains that it aims to be "the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic," and sources quite a bit … Read more