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.
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Featured Posts
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.
Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about microprocessors, from the many-core CPUs that AMD and Intel introduced recently to the massively scalable GPGPU processing that’s taking machine learning by storm. After years of consolidation on commodity x86 CPUs, it seems that the computing paradigm is turning again to specialized offload processors. This trend towards heterogeneous computing will change the face of hardware, from mobile devices to the datacenter.
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More Featured Posts
The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!
The Terrifying True Story Of Virtual Machine Mobility
Virtualization of server, network, and storage services illuminates the link between physical resources and functional applications. A running virtual machine can instantly move from one server, network adapter, HBA, or LUN to another. And when it happens, traditional components have no idea how to react.
Scaling Storage At The Client
Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!
Not All 802.11n Networks Are Alike
Buyers of 802.11n wireless network equipment should not assume they will see a great benefit right out of the box. Most will have to enable by hand a high-performance configuration including wide channels and 5 GHz operation. And some client devices may never reach the levels of performance expected by consumers due to hardware limitations.
A High-Tech Water Heater? Yep! Introducing the A. O. Smith Vertex
I justify spending six times more on the Vertex 100 for a simple reason: It’ll keep up with the heavy water use in my house. I’m hoping I’ll never have to worry about hot water as long as I live here. The fact that it saves over $100 per year due to energy-efficient design is just icing on the cake.
Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1
As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Unlike version 5, which included many new technical storage features, 5.1 mainly tweaks existing features and adds these new elements to the mix.
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.
Sony NEX-5 Camera Review
The world of photography is like so many others: A vast gulf separates the amateurs and enthusiasts, from equipment to nomenclature to skills. I am decidedly in the amateur camp when it comes to photography, but I recently upgraded to a new compact interchangeable-lense camera, the Sony alpha NEX-5. It is an excellent match for my needs, allowing me to expand my skills and explore more advanced photographic techniques without sacrificing portability and ease of use.