A Grim Fairy Tale

STRAWBERRY QUICK !!!

This is a new drug known as 'strawberry quick '. 
There is a very scary thing going on in the schools right now that we all need to be aware of. 

There is a type of crystal meth going around that looks like strawberry pop rocks (the candy that sizzles and 'pops' in your mouth). It also smells like strawberry and it is being handed out to kids in school yards. They are calling it strawberry meth or strawberry quick. 

Kids are ingesting this thinking that it is candy and being rushed off to the hospital in dire condition. It also comes in chocolate, peanut butter, cola, cherry, grape and orange. 

Please instruct your children not to accept candy from strangers and even not to accept candy that looks like this from a friend (who may have been given it and believed it is candy) and to take any that they may have to a teacher, principal, etc. immediately. 

Info from Wikipedia -
Strawberry quick meth is a drug scare from 2007. Drug dealers were allegedly using coloring and flavoring to disguise methamphetaminesas Strawberry Quik, thus making them more appealing to children. The story was widely reported in the media, but no cases of children using flavored meth have been verified.

Drug scare

Fox News reported that drug dealers were using pop rocks to disguise the taste of meth and market it to children.

Emails began to circulate, claiming that meth was being disguised as candy and given to unsuspecting children. Snopes has reported that while colored crystal meth exists, and flavored meth may exist, there is no evidence of it being given to children. It is notable to point out that drug dealers seek out clients with a regular source of income, which precludes many children.

In 2008, the BBC reported that police in Oxfordshire, England, had warned over 80 schools of the risk of Strawberry meth, before considering it a hoax.

Existence of colored or flavored meth

Sometimes meth labs will try to brand their crystal meth product by coloring it in order to make it seem unique and to give it more market appeal.^[4] Police and drug enforcement officials have conjectured that the idea for "strawberry meth" may have come from such a process.

Law enforcement and treatment providers in Nevada and California have reported the distribution and/or use of flavored methamphetamine.^[5][6]

Strawberry flavored meth was seized in an apartment in Carson City, Nevada in January 2007.

A brief on Cloud Hosting

"Cloud Hosting" has been creating quite a buzz around these days. You might be hearing the phrase for the first time but the technology is not something new at this time of writing.

In fact, you’re already part of the cloud hosting/computing users (without being noticed) as Google naturally is a big promoter of this idea.

Google searches (as well as other Google operations) are operating under a massive computer infrastructure (cloud!) that people tap into from their local computers.

What is cloud hosting?

Generally, a cloud-hosted website is opearting on multiple connected servers. Instead of limited to a single server like what we have in traditional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to multiple servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.

Cloud Hosting in plain English

Here’s a video released to help people fully understand what Cloud Computing is all about and I think it’s a good piece of learning material.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Cloud hosting benefits the users from various angles. It’s scalability and cost efficient is the commonly known advantages.

As the technology is highly scalable (load balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Think about the hassle of migrating your website from a shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website experienced a sudden surge – all these problem can be avoided easily by switching to cloud hosting.

Cost is another huge plus if you need a lot of processing power. Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It’s like your electricity and water supply bills – it’s pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.

Major disadvantage with cloud hosting: Security

Questions like these arise when it comes to cloud hosting:

• I am sharing the same physical hardware with other users, is my data safe?
• Where is my data located at? (You no longer control the physical location of your data in cloud hosting)

The security issue is always one of the major questions and arguments raised when it comes to cloud hosting.  

Cloud Hosting: New Players and Pricing Examples

Updated on April 2010
This post has been published for some times and the topic (cloud computing and hosting) was widely covered in main stream media for the past one year. It’s no surprise to see that the industry is crowded with more competitors these days. Beside the common big names like RakeSpace, Amazon, and GoGrid, we are now seeing FlexiScale, GridLayer, Cloud.bg, and NetDepot… and so on.
In fact cloud computing/hosting has grown from being a business concept to one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry. From what I learned, many startup tech companies nowadays do not build their datacenters anymore, they simply go ‘cloud’.
In case you are unsure about how cloud hosting users are charged, here’s a quick example. Listed table below is the pricing data of NetDepot (in three different packages).

Cloud Servers	Cloud Storage	Virtual Private Data Center
Server grade hardware using Intel Nehalem chipset	Cloud-based solution for data storing, sharing, and management	Two or more cloud servers put together in a resource pool within vCenter
500 GB Cloud Storage/1Virtual Machine	Instantly scalable and reliable file-level backup service	100% Uptime Guarantee
VMware vSphere Platform	HP StorageWorks	-
$200/mo	$0.50 per GB/mo	$400/mo up

Src: http://www.NetDepot.com/cloud-hosting