Squid Box

Sell/rent/lease a managed squid box to consumer and small businesses. The bandwidth shaping could be valuable for a small business.

 http://www.squid-cache.org

Oracle Downgrade

Look for cost saving opportunities by monitoring which Oracle features are in use and recommending if a license/feature downgrade is possible.

While every Oracle shop has a different licensing agreement, there are substantial savings to be had from downgrading from Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) to the lesser Standard Edition and Express Edition (XE). In some shops, consolidating instances onto single servers is the answer. I've worked in shops that chose to abandon certain EE features so that they could run their applications on the cheaper Oracle SE.



Oracle's Multi-Core Factor in Licensing multi core licensing

It is conventional knowledge that in the world of Oracle licensing, one license is needed per processor, but multi-core processors are a different animal. Multi-core processor licensing costs have to do with the number of cores multiplied by Oracle's defined multi-core factor. For example, the IBM AIX (a.k.a. RISC) system has 4-eight core processors, which means that it requires 24 Oracle licenses based on Oracle's "multi-core factor", which is 0.75 for the IBM AIX system.

In this case the formula for determining that 24 Oracle licenses are needed is 4*8*0.75 = 24

The multi-core factor is as follows:

* 0.25 for SUN's UltraSparc T1 processors
* 0.50 for Intel and AMD processors
* 0.75 for SUN's UltraSparc T2 processors
* 0.75 for all other multi-core processors
* 1.00 for single-core processors

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Hosting Open Source as SaaS

I would be surprised if serving ads would pay for the hosting/bandwidth/tech support required to host some of the open source SaaS applications. This would provide huge experience at low risk, and absorb significant hours.

MantisBT is a free popular web-based bugtracking system that might fit the model.

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20081117
Teamwork is a Web-based groupware for project management. It supplies groupware, issue tracking, cost control, and document and project management features with fine-grained security in a friendly interface.

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200812
Team tasks does project management. There are others.

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20090331
Request Tracker is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

RT Hosting Plans
Gossamer offers four different hosting plans for RT. If you are unsure of what would be the best fit for you, please contact them with the details on how you plan to use RT.

Bronze - $125 a month
For companies processing up to 500 tickets per month
Shared Server - Dual AMD Opteron Server, 4 GB of RAM, 73 GB RAID 1 Drives, 64 bit Linux

Silver - $350 a month
For companies processing up to 1000 tickets per month
Dedicated Server - Single AMD Opteron Server, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB Drives

Gold - $800 a month
For companies processing up to 5000 tickets per month
Dedicated Server - Dual AMD Opteron Server, 4 GB of RAM, 73 GB RAID 1 Drives, 64 bit Linux

Platinum - $3250 a month
Unlimited tickets per month
Custom Cluster - please contact Gossamer for more information

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201101
Heroku. Ruby cloud platform as a service.

Water - Fluoride Removal

Many municipal water systems add fluoride to water for the stated purpose of enhancing teeth development. There is increasing attention to the downsides of fluoride such as brittle teeth, reduced IQ/motivation, and the ineffectiveness to reduce teeth cavities.

Fluoride can be removed by:
distillation,
reverse osmosis filter,
activated alumina defluoridation filter.

Distillation technology is well-known.
Reverse osmosis technology is also well-known.

Would it be possible to radically reduce the high price ($30) of activated filters?
Would it be possible to find some other filter agent that could attach to or precipitate out the fluoride?

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2008.12
1. At this time activated filters are an old technology used by many across the globe to trap all sorts of things. Because it has been practiced so long by so many people and supplied by so many companies across the world, I'd expect it to be about bottom price for the technology. Don't know if anything better will be invented some day. Flourine /flouride technology is very specialized technology due to the element itself and where it sits on the periodic table. It will react with just about everything and anything, so once it is in the water at such a low concentration it becomes an engineering challenge to remove it making the cost a challenge.
2. For the best possible future break through technology, I expect it will be "membrane" technology which is the basis for reverse osmosis. Research in this technology because it is the basis for new sources for fresh water from salt water and space flight development so astronauts will be able to recycle their urine into drinking water, etc.