This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content. I have long felt that voicemail was archaic. Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has […]
Everything
Microsoft Working to Improve Windows 7 Boot Times
Confirming my observation of longish Windows boot times, Microsoft engineer Michael Fortin today blogged about the booting improvements scheduled for Windows 7. He rightly points out that there are really three different “boot times” to consider: Boot Resume from sleep Resume from hibernate Note that the Microsoft definition of “boot (1)” only gets us through […]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…” Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck […]
Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI
One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of […]
Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
Custom drive icons can help you to keep your removable and internal drives straight. It’s simple to do in Mac OS X, but illustrates an odd way in which Apple implemented their split resource/data fork filesystem idea in a GUI.
