BD Event

Will You Be At The ExecEvent?

January 11, 2011 By Stephen 1 Comment

The ExecEvent (formerly known as The BD Event) is coming up in two weeks, and I wanted to introduce it to my readers.

Join Me At CloudCamp Columbus, June 30, 2009!

June 18, 2009 By Stephen Leave a Comment

I’m really looking forward to joining the CloudCamp “unconference” movement, and will be heading to Columbus, Ohio, at the end of this month for my first Camp!

All Business Development All The Time!

May 4, 2009 By Stephen Leave a Comment

If you work in the enterprise storage, storage networking, virtualization, or security industry, listen up! Otherwise, this post is not for you! I hope you, or a representative from your company, will join me and the folks from Nirvanix and my friends like W. Curtis Preston and Marc Staimer, Charles Curran and Dan Gordon from Valhalla, and just about […]

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.

Hands-On Review: Unicomp Spacesaver M Keyboard for Mac

July 3, 2012

I would not hesitate to recommend the Unicomp Spacesaver M to Macintosh users used to an original IBM Model M, and I am admittedly a tough customer. I wish that Unicomp would update their website, packaging, logo, and keyboard graphics, but none of this really matters as your fingers press the keys. If any keyboard is worth $100, it is the Unicomp Spacesaver M!

The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles

August 25, 2010

Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? Mechanical performance, RAM caching, I/O capacity, and the intelligence of the system all have a part to play. Today we examine the rule of spindles: Adding more disk spindles is generally more effective than using faster spindles.

Microsoft: Kill the Craptops Before They Destroy Windows!

January 7, 2013

Release after release, Microsoft pushes Windows forward. Yet the operating system is continually undermined by the “value-focused” low-end machines pushed by the majority of OEMs. This race to the bottom has tarnished Windows for a decade and now threatens to derail Windows 8. Microsoft must do something to stop the crap before it’s too late!

The Best Mac OS X Terminal Font: Glass TTY VT220

October 6, 2015

More than five years ago, I blogged about a “stupidly cool” terminal font. Now that Mac OS X isn’t a big cat anymore, I figured it was time to repeat that: If you’re an old-school computer nerd like me, Glass TTY VT220 is the coolest terminal font for Mac OS X!

Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

September 2, 2014

We were never able to achieve storage virtualization in mainstream enterprise IT because we lacked the ability to identify and move data non-disruptively. This has been solved by caching and distributed storage solutions, and it’s only a matter of time before the legacy need for centralized storage falls away.

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?

From LAN Manager and SMB to CIFS: The Evolution of Prehistoric PC Network Protocols

March 22, 2012

Computers aren’t much good on their own. This simple fact was evident even at the dawn of the microcomputing age, and has never been more true today in the “post-PC” world. If the standard microcomputer is the “Wintel” box (Microsoft’s Windows, Intel’s CPUs, and all that implies) then the standard network services protocol is SMB. So let’s take a nice deep dive into SMB, past, present, and future!

Thinking About Storage In a New Way, From Cloud to Flash, with Dropbox and Fusion-io

July 23, 2013

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.