The Artist Formerly Known As Network Appliance
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 10. Mar, 2008 | View Comments
Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp.
This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, [...]
ZFS: Super File System!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 27. Feb, 2008 | View Comments
ZFS really piques my interest, so I just had to include it in my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar series.
Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem!
ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the essential technolgy [...]
Apple Customers Vent Over Ex-Xserve RAID
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 20. Feb, 2008 | View Comments
Apple’s business customers do not appear amused at the company’s exit from the enterprise storage space, but it was the quiet way that the company dumped the Xserve RAID product from their lineup that really irked. “XRAID” customers were left wondering whether they made the right choice, and if the company’s support for the [...]
Apple Revs Xsan and Kills Xserve RAID?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage on 19. Feb, 2008 | View Comments
Apple has an odd relationship with enterprise computing. Their Xserve server products are strong, as is Leopard Server, and they have an excellent SAN file system, Xsan, that they just updated. Yet, Mac OS X is the last major operating system with no volume manager (thanks to the antiquated HFS+), and it looks [...]
Is Apple Fibbing With Their MacBook Air Renderings?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 16. Jan, 2008 | View Comments
Yesterday evening, I began composing an article comparing my experiences a few years back with my sole computer being an ultra-thin notebook quite like the MacBook Air, but ended up at rather a different place. In compositing an image comparing my old Toshiba Portégé 3010CT with the super-thin Apple, I noticed that Apple’s illustrations [...]
No More CDs
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 17. Dec, 2007 | View Comments
So yesterday we finished ripping our entire CD collection – we’ve now completed our switch to digital music at home. It’s done.
It amuses me to think of the statistics:
We have 11,284 tracks stored, including 279 Christmas songs and 549 kids songs!
Most songs were ripped using LAME at the VBR3 setting in joint stereo
This music library [...]
iTunes Redefines the Holiday…
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 07. Dec, 2007 | View Comments
So my family is going to see the Nutcracker ballet this weekend – a beautiful holiday tradition, I think. We wanted to rent a copy on video so the kids could get ready to see what it’s all about, but no dice. We can get Barbie, Tom & Jerry, and even Robot Chicken, [...]
Music in the Wild World
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 03. Oct, 2007 | View Comments
OK, so let’s get this whole new world of music straight…
Apple now allows iPhone and iTouch users to buy iTunes songs without a computer and they’ve teamed up with Starbucks to offer in-store song shopping, but not yet…
Amazon.com now sells real mp3s with no DRM or watermarking for less than iTunes, making Apple look like [...]
Google Revs Apps
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 18. Sep, 2007 | View Comments
If you’re a Google user like I am (in my off-time), you’ll be happy to learn that Google finally made two long-awaited changes today. First up is the addition of presentations to the Google Docs suite. Although Docs still lags well behind the full-featured office suites (especially Microsoft’s unexpectedly great PowerPoint 2007), this [...]
DRM Lock-In Becomes Lock-Out
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 13. Aug, 2007 | View Comments
Next time someone trots out the old argument that “only pirates hate digital rights management (DRM),” just point out what just happened at the old Googleplex. They just canceled their pay-per-download Google Video site and locked everyone out of the content that they legally paid for. We all knew this could happen with [...]
