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October 18, 2020 By Stephen Leave a Comment

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.

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

July 19, 2017

It’s an easy decision: Get a free ProtonMail account and use that as your verification address for important financial and social media accounts. Keep using whatever email account you like for regular communication, but don’t mix security and communication!

Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)

August 4, 2011

Mac OS X was majorly deficient in that it lacked a volume manager. This wouldn’t seem like a big deal to the average user, but held back the operating system in so many ways. A volume manager brings storage virtualization to an operating system, allowing storage capacity efficiently to be managed and manipulated. But all this has changed in Mac OS X 10.7 â€œLionâ€ with CoreStorage.

Debit or Credit? Always Choose Credit!

December 19, 2013

“Credit of debit?”ï»¿ It’s all very confusing for American shoppers. But the news about a massive point-of-sale data theft at Target makes one thing very, very clear: Always choose “credit” when the cashier asks!

Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1

September 4, 2012

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.

Begun, the Patent Wars Have

July 9, 2012

Every day, it seems there is a new lawsuit in the mobile phone industry. HTC, Motorola, Google, Microsoft, and especially Apple and Samsung are actively litigating their way through a thicket of patents. The same is increasingly happening in the rest of the IT industry. But is all this bloodshed really about innovation? Or is it, as one federal judge noted, simply a new form of intense business competition?

Microsoft’s Big Chance to Change

August 23, 2013

It takes a truly-remarkable leader to be willing to kill his old golden geese to make room for a new one; so far, only Apple and Amazon seem willing to forgo continuity in the name of profitable destruction. But new corporate leadership at Microsoft might un-stick the company and awaken the once-innovative Redmond powerhouse. The retirement of Steve Ballmer is welcome news.

The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

September 19, 2014

As Iâ€™ve written about what Iâ€™m calling the â€œRack Endgameâ€, the specter of converged infrastructure hasnâ€™t been far from my thoughts. As others have pointed out, disaggregation of servers, networks, and storage doesnâ€™t require a rack-sized stack; it can exist in a rack-mountable chassis and is already on sale!

vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

February 3, 2015

Way back in the 1990’s, UNIX admins delighted in upgrading from NFSv2 to NFSv3. Then NFSv4 came around and … crickets. Now VMware has become the first major/useful/mainstream application for NFSv4.1, so the floodgates are open! But are they?

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