I recently bought a used car through Internet dealer Vroom and thought I would document my experience. This is not the first time I’ve bought a used car, not my first Internet auto transaction, and not the first BMW i3 I’ve bought, so perhaps this gives me a little perspective.
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Featured Posts
GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)
This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!
Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.
My Videos
PathSolutions TotalView Demo with Tim Titus
PathSolutions Solution Overview with Tim Titus
Riverbed Troubleshooting Post-Mortem and Conclusion
Diving Deep into Application Performance with Riverbed AppResponse
More Featured Posts
Thinking About Storage In a New Way, From Cloud to Flash, with Dropbox and Fusion-io
I’ve been a storage revolutionary for quite a while, looking for new ways of data storage rather than technologies that perpetuate the same old approaches. That’s why I’m excited about the implications of two very different API access methods announced by Dropbox at DBX and by Fusion-io today at OSCON.
Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?
Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.
ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)
ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it’s inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it’s not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small office/home office (SOHO) environment. Here’s why.
Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again
I remain a huge fan of drobo generally, and the third-generation drobo remains the best choice for home storage. It’s the perfect storage device for the long haul, and the performance improvements make it a no-brainer. Get one.
Ten Terrible Apple Products
I’m often accused of being an Apple fanboy. While it’s true that I love my vast selection of fruity products from Cupertino, I’m not blind when the company makes mistakes. In fact, I think Apple’s mistakes are as enlightening as their successes: They reveal a company that is fallible, sometimes learning but often allowing the junk to rot far longer than other companies would.
A Complete List of VMware VAAI Primitives
VMware’s introduced the “vStorage APIs for Array Integration†(VAAI) in vSphere 4.1, and block-heads like me went nuts. We’ve been trying to integrate storage and servers for decades, and VMware’s APIs finally allowed this to work in truly seamless fashion. But the world of VAAI is a thicket of bizarre naming and puzzling functionality. Some VAAI primitives are ignored or even hidden! Let’s take a look at the complete list.
It’s Time To Move Beyond Passwords (Especially On Web Sites)
Sure, single sign-on puts all your eggs in one basket. But this is vastly preferable to trusting that hundreds of third-party baskets are secure, especially when they prove on a weekly basis that they aren’t! It’s time to put distributed passwords behind us and switch to systems like SAML, both for businesses and consumers.
Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack
Last week I headed to Austin, Texas to attend the semi-annual OpenStack Summit there. Along with the usual socializing, I was looking to understand the current state of the technology: What does OpenStack really mean these days, and where is it going? Let’s start with “free”. As “the Internet” is quick to point out, this critical word has multiple […]