This regular series features highlights from the week. The big news for me was Wednesday’s announcement of Tech Field Day 5 in February, though others might have been paying attention to Dell’s acquisition of Compellent. I also continued my series on Light Peak by musing about combining Light Peak and USB 3.0 and pondering, what if Light Peak was electrical rather than optical?
Tech Field Day
Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, December 10, 2010
This week I started getting to know a whole bunch of wireless geeks in preparation for Wireless Field Day in March. I also wrote about Light Peak, my search for an AirPrint-compatible printer, and some more on the iPad. On the enterprise IT side, I covered Application Performance Monitoring (with a special offer from SolarWinds) and Dell’s potential acquisition of Compellent.
What is Application Performance Monitoring?
Remember what it was like to drive without a GPS? Sure, it’s possible, but a good GPS takes it to a whole new level. Need gas? A Denny’s Grand Slam? A detour around traffic? You’ve got it! And when the kids start asking “how much longer” you have a precise answer! Old-school server metrics are like the gauges in your car: They show what’s happening now and can be useful to the driver, but a lot of questions are left un-answered. This is where application performance monitoring comes in: Rather than just checking server stats, APM gives credible, actionable, and user-focused answers about the state of your systems.
Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, November 19, 2010
This regular series features highlights from the week. Last week focused on Tech Field Day output, with lots of great writeups resulting from our November event. But there’re a few other interesting items included, too!
The Tablet Wasteland and the iPad Oasis
Last year, as the pre-release hype around the iPad was reaching its peak, dozens of companies announced their own tablet computers or “pads”. Some predicted doom for Apple’s device even before it was released. After all, how could premium-priced Apple compete with the volume PC makers and all the factories in China? Pretty well, it turns out. Almost a year later, no tablet has even come close to Apple’s mighty iPad, and it currently boasts 95% market share. Where are the iPad killers?
