Bluetooth

Switch Day 58: Ten Pros and Cons of the MacBook Pro

August 11, 2008 by Stephen 4 Comments

I’ve now been a Mac user for two months. Since I switched primarily to get access to Apple’s excellent hardware, I thought I would issue an update on my observations about it at this point. I should note that I’m limiting this post to the hardware (maybe I’ll cover OS X some other time), and […]

Quick and Easy Bluetooth Sharing Between PC and Mac

July 25, 2008 by Stephen 8 Comments

As I transition to the Mac, I often find myself needing to transfer a file back and forth quickly. I could create SMB shares on both systems, but this requires both to be connected to a wired or wireless Ethernet LAN. Luckily, both Vista and OS X offer functional Bluetooth sharing technology for quick, easy […]

Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro

July 4, 2008 by Stephen 9 Comments

It turns out that Apple made at least a few errors in designing the hardware of the MacBook Pro. After living with it for a solid week, I can report that, along with the useless ambient light sensor and wimpy power cord, both of the ‘Pro’s USB ports are compromised! The left side doesn’t have the power […]

Just Picked Up a Cheap Bluetooth Headset

October 8, 2007 by Stephen Leave a Comment

So I was disappointed by the range and sound quality for my Cardo Scala 500 when used with the iPhone. It was good with the BlackBerry but so bad with the Apple that I ended up using the wired headphones most of the time. Today I stopped by the local Best Buy and discovered the […]

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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.

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!

Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking

December 19, 2014

Hard disk drives keep getting bigger, meaning capacity just keeps getting cheaper. But storage capacity is like money: The more you have, the more you use. And this growth in capacity means that data is at risk from a very old nemesis: Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE).

Why I Am Biased Against FCoE

October 21, 2011

I am biased against FCoE because it’s too new to be blithely and broadly recommended for production enterprise use. That’s all. Yes, the standards are standardized and there are products extant. But that’s not enough for me.

Why Are PCIe SSDs So Fast?

June 12, 2013

The world of storage can be confusing, with obscure terms hiding massive differences in technology and performance. Such is the case for the latest PCI express SSDs: They are much faster than traditional SAS or SATA SSDs, but many aren’t sure exactly why. In this article, I will try to explain the real difference.

Donate Your Swag to School Kids In Need

July 28, 2010

Trade shows are a veritable swag-fest, some with great loot and some with junk. I’ve been critical of the booth babe and chotchkie phenomenon, but my friend Kevin Houston has a better suggestion: Donate your (useful) swag like backpacks and pens to school kids in need.

Cisco’s Trojan Horse

September 15, 2014

Industry watchers like me have long wondered when Cisco will transform itself into a full-line IT infrastructure vendor. This strategy was tipped in 2009 as Cisco barged into the server market with UCS. But one leg of the stool is still missing: Storage remains the province of Cisco partners like EMC and NetApp.

Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

June 26, 2017

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.

10 Mysteries The Lost Finale Definitively Settled

May 25, 2010

The series finale of Lost didn’t settle every question, but it did settle many of the long-running questions raised by fans. Although my live viewing was frustratingly complicated by failed transmission equipment at ABC affiliate, WEWS, I was able to watch the entire episode thanks to iTunes. So let’s settle the things that can be settled regarding Lost.

Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5

July 16, 2011

Once again, VMware added a ton of new storage enhancements to vSphere. With storage rapidly becoming the limiting factor in scalability and performance of virtual machine environments, this is no surprise. Also not surprising is the fact that major features like Policy-Driven Storage and Storage DRS (along with SIOC) are exclusive to “Enterprise Plus” licenses.