Women In Technology International – Professional Women just completed their Annual Women Powering Technology Summit, where director of Facebook engineering Jocelyn Goldfein spoke about the importance of getting more women into STEM, what the key obstacles are and some changes that would make a difference in growing the number of women in tech.

By Zachary M. Seward and Albert Sun

Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: “123456.” So is the runner-up: “password.”

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Since its founding, SoftLayer has revolutionized hosting through its unswerving commitment to innovation and automation. At a pivotal time in the industry, as increased connectivity, virtualization advances, and cloud service innovations dramatically reshape the landscape, SoftLayer is poised to continue playing a significant role in the industry’s transformation.

“I’m extremely proud of how much SoftLayer has grown and accomplished in its history. GI Partners’ investment and partnership enables us to take our unparalleled approach to the next stage,” said Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer of SoftLayer. “It’s gratifying that a firm with GI Partners’ insight and success sees such value in SoftLayer’s past growth and future opportunities.”

“SoftLayer has taken a visionary model and created a company for the future of hosting,” said Rick Magnuson, Executive Managing Director of GI Partners. “We are excited to bring additional resources and experience to help SoftLayer leverage its strategic position in the expanding global data center services market.”

DH Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to SoftLayer in connection with the transaction.

About GI Partners
GI Partners, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, is a private equity firm established in 2001, managing approximately $4 billion of capital. The firm focuses on investments in asset-intensive businesses or portfolios of assets in a number of key sectors, including specialty healthcare, leisure, real estate, financial services, and technology. The firm has made several investments in the data center industry, most notably Digital Realty Trust in 2002, The Planet in 2006, The Telx Group in 2006, and ViaWest in 2010. For more information about GI Partners, please visit http://www.gipartners.com. Reach GI Partners in Menlo Park, California at +1 650-233-3600 and London, U.K. at +44 20 7034 1120.

About SoftLayer Technologies
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, SoftLayer is a best-in-class, infrastructure-as-a-service provider with data centers in Dallas, Seattle, and Washington, DC, and network Points of Presence across the US. SoftLayer integrates and automates all IT elements, allowing customers to create cloud, dedicated, or seamless hybrid computing environments managed through a single interface. Enterprises of any size can have complete control, security, scalability, and ease-of-management in an on-demand IT solution. For more information, please visit http://www.softlayer.com or call 866.398.7638.

As for Philly, This agreement was signed back in 2009 with a rollout in Chestnut Hill, followed by Brewerytown, East and West Mount Airy, South Philadelphia and Kensington.
(side note)
It seems to be that Verizon is skipping over the minority sections of Philadelphia. After searching online I found this post in a forum
“I have had conversations with several Verizon construction crews going around South and West Philly and they tell me they are having problems with laying fiber in those West Philadelphia alleyways with all that trash and trees and obstructions. They told me 3-5 years minimum. I work for Comcast. I am not a fan, I just work for them.”

This is very disturbing news if this is true.

At the time of this writing they have removed Pennsylvania from their community section on http://www22.verizon.com/about/community/ . The link is still there but seems to be broken now. We managed to file the pdf which shows the Pa locations to received Fios.

Alternate link just in case VZ removes the pdf

The pdf gives a general area and does not going into much details. But lets takes E Woodland ave since this is in the pdf file. Verizon completely skips southwest philly on the south side of Baltimore Ave. E Woodland is Sharon Hill. This does not include 65th and Woodland at all. This areas will continue to have DSL instead.

Verizon has also ended its Wholesale fiber to the home in which Powserve.com was effected by this. Powserve was working on a deal with a vendor to roll this out to their customers in early 2011. Powserve currently offers DSL services using the Verizon network to customers in the tri-state area.

Other references

Baltimore was completely skipped over. Rumors has it that Baltimore was skipped due to their low incoming communities and they did not see a profit in the entire city. But Verizon has denied this rumors and says they the city could not agree on a Franchise Agreement.

The Baltimore sun reports on this

Reported by Mas for Openkb

Researchers say that the end of the keyboard and mouse may be near. I don’t believe this is a good idea and hope this is just a rumor. I cant see me using a touchscreen to code up a program or troubleshoot a network issue.

Another thing i am seeing is a increase in laptop sells. With the reduce cost on laptops these days more people are dumping desktops for a laptop in the home. While laptops can provide a convenience during American Idol or Big Brother. Nothing beats a desktop with a movable mouse and larger keyboard. How can you be productive if you always have to touch the screen to type up your resume or contract. The consumers need to stop buying these units so we can keep the production of keyboards and mouse up.

Mas

To try it out:

* Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers

Google FAQ on the new service

Fedora 12 have been renamed to Constantine and set to be released on November 3rd.

The alpha release is set for August.