Leateds.com

Bebo, will it shut down?

April 07, 2010

AOL are now beginning to see that the investment they made into the social network, Bebo, was a big mistake. So much now that they are either going to shut the site down or look for a new buyer, but it will be unlikely that they will make a profit if they sell it.

Two years ago AOL bought Bebo for 850 million dollars! A lot of money, but back then Bebo was the number one social network in Ireland and the UK. Since then though it seems like Bebo remained pretty static, not a lot changed and it soon became more of a social network for young teens. Having such a younger audience does not always appeal to advertisers because they are less likely to make money from their advertisements.

Other social networks such as Facebook suddenly took over in the past year and with a lot of people signing up to use Facebook they just lost interest in Bebo.

I don’t use Bebo anymore, I might log in once every so often but I do not actually use it for talking to friends. Here is a little graph of recent stats for various social networking sites, you can see the decline in Bebo over the past year, almost a 50% drop in unique visits!

I do think that it would be unfortunate to see bebo close, i think that with the right owner it could be turned around but it would require a lot of work. It should be more slimmed down, the content is just too bulky on the site, all other sites seem to be going with the trend of slimming down there sites. Facebook has a nice plain and simple look to it and so too does YouTube, with it’s recent upgrade of it’s video page it is even more simplistic!

There is however always new and better services coming out and if the current sites do not keep with the times then they are bound to fizzle out like Bebo, when Twitter was launched, Facebook brought out a new, what’s on your mind feature, which is the same as what twitter has, by adding this feature Facebook managed to keep their members. Bebo did bring out a new feature like this but it was too late and also it didnt incorporate into the site as well as it did with Facebook.

For Bebo to add that feature they had to make a new “Home” section to their site where you could see recent changes and the new status changes of users (the twitter-like feature).

For now Bebo is still here, by the end of next month (May 2010) we will see if it will close down or be sold as that is when the company’s strategic evaluation will end.

New Multi-Million Euro IT Department

March 23, 2010

Today I got my first look at the new multi-million Euro department that has been built on the DKIT campus. My first impressions of the building is that it is massive, the map you can get when you first go in will definitely be needed to find your classes!

Here are a few pics of what the place looks like at the moment.

As you can see it is looking well, there is no hardware as of yet, but that will all be getting installed during the coming summer and will be ready for the start of the next academic year, September 2010.

This is an amazing transformation for this building, it used to be an old cigarette factory (Carrolls), but DKIT bought it a few years ago.

This new department definitely puts our current IT department to shame! This building will not only be home for the computing department, but also the multimedia and music departments will also be in this building too!

I am definitely looking forward to seeing this place come September when I return for my final year!

You can see more pictures of Carrolls in my photo album.

Dual monitors flash hack

March 11, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

A problem with having dual monitors is when you try to watch a flash video in full screen on one monitor and then try to work away on the other monitor. As soon as you click on the second monitor the full screen video will close!

I was looking around the lifehacker website the other day and came across this article, there is a small program that you run that will make your flash video’s stay in full screen when you are working away on another monitor.

If you want to download this flash hack then go here and follow the download instructions.

System Administration – Server Exam

March 09, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

Today I had an exam in System Administration, and I definitely done really well in it 😀 . I am not usually this confident on my result but I just feel that it was fairly straight forward.

System Administration is basically setting up and configuring a server that will allow client computers to connect to it, also we learn how to set up print servers and dns servers. The exam was broken down into two parts. The first part was to create 20 users and set up user folders and create a login script so that once the user logs in they will be mapped to their own home folder, a group shared folder and be able to print from the client pc through the server.

For the second part of the exam, we were given a page of script and an excel spreadsheet and had to find out why the code was not working, once we found all the mistakes it was just a matter of fixing them, describe what was happening in the code and then executing the code. The end result would be more users created on the server.

I think System Administration is one of the more interesting subjects that I do. Last semester we done the first section of this Module and it was more GUI based, we went through all the menus to create groups, members etc. However this semester (second semester) we are doing scripting, since we have done .vb code before in previous years in college, the scripting was welcome as we were used to writing it.

So much more can be done with scripting such as creating logon scripts and setting what programs open as soon a user logs on.

Hard drive failure

February 12, 2010

Seagate Barracuda ST15150WD 4.26GB 7200RPM SCS...

Image by purpaboo via Flickr

This week I have been asked to fix a computer by someone that I know, he has the computer a little over a year now and it has suddenly stopped working for him. Once the computer starts up you see the manufacturers splash screen, then nothing! It just stays there.

I thought it was a bit strange after a while of looking about I saw that the computer was not recognising the hard drive that was in the computer! Next I popped open the computer and with great difficulty I managed to get out the enclosure that holds the hard drive in place.

This was now the perfect time to use my external hard drive cables that I bought a while back, I connected the cables up and into my computer and turned the power on and the drive begun to spin, but no usb drive was detected. I thought that was a bit strange because every drive I connected before always got picked up by the computer.

So my last test was to power down my pc, disconnect my hard drive and plug in his hard drive, when I did this I got the same problem as his computer, it would boot to the manufacturers splash screen and go no further, this is when I knew the hard drive had failed. So I reconnected my hard drive and after a bit of online searching I found that the make of this hard drive had actually being given an unbelievable amount of problems, everyone had the same problem as the hard drive I have.

It turn out this hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) would work perfectly one day and you would shut the pc down normally and the next day it would just not work. So basically the hard drive is bricked. The problem apparently was to do with the firmware on the hard drive itself, there is now a fix released for the hard drive which will prevent this from happening, however if your hard drive has already been bricked then there is no way to flash the new firmware onto it.

There is a way to fix these hard drives, someone found this hack that would work involving getting a Nokia Mobile cable and connecting it to the hard drives pins and using HyperTerminal or putty to send commands to it, I think it looks a bit complex so decided not to give it a go.

After a while of looking for a new hard drive online I quickly realised how expensive some people are selling them for. I decided I would go for a Western Digital hard drive as they are the most reliable.

Most hard drives I looked up cost around €70.00 , The current hard drive in the computer had a capacity of 500gb so I asked him if he wanted more space, and since he does a lot of multimedia work he said he could do with a bit more, so we went to the next available size which was 640gb.

The cheapest place I found this hard drive was on Komplett where it was just €54.78, not bad so before I ordered it I said I will have a look in Pc world here in town and the price was just mental, they were selling a 500gb hard drive for around €140.00! Not a chance I was going to buy it from them, so I ordered it from komplett.

The funny thing is that the UK PC world are selling the same hard drive as the Irish PC world for only €70.00! It is ridiculas the way they can have such a huge difference in their prices, so much for a chain store, I thought they all kept their prices the same!