The Virtualization of Stuff: The Post-Stuff World

From the Wall Street Journal comes this comment about the impact of cheap digital storage on the physical world. The Post-Stuff World: We invented records, books, newspapers and cash to hold those "idea" nouns -- music, writing, news and value -- and we larded up our...

When CIOs Speak, Listen Behind The Words

Over at HDS, the always thoughtful Hu Yoshida, discusses a recent CIO roundtable he attended. I've spent years of close listening to customers to understand the nature of their communication. Despite the "high-tech" aura of their work, I've found that IT people are...

RFPs For The Rest Of Us

Especially for small business, where it is hard to even know what to ask, generating Requests For Proposals is usually too much work. Yet it is important to get potential vendors on the record, especially for infrequently purchased technology. And that is where...

Credit Where Credit is Due

As much as I hope Sun's Project Honeycomb will be a success, there doesn't appear to be a single element of it that is a first. Like most high-tech products it picks from threads of innovation that have sometimes been hanging around for decades. So when Sun claims:...

25x Backup Data Compression Further Explained

And I'm not going to do it. Instead, take a look at Data Domain's nifty pdf whitepaper starting on page 12 (or Sec1:11). The first 11 pages are why it is wonderful. On page 12 they start getting into the how. I have a few quibbles but overall it is well done. Also,...

Maxtor in the Home? How about the Business?

The folks at Silicon Valley Wag have a post about Maxtor, the disk drive company being bought by Seagate, teaming up with a software startup named Fabrik that is apparently creating web-based applications for managing one's home digital content on the web. Details are...

Quantum & ADIC: Together At Last

The tape business is normally about as exciting as watching paint dry. But with Sun's misguided acquisition of StorageTek and now Quantum's acquisition of ADIC, the pace of change is picking up. Quantum has been in a long going-out-of-business spiral for the last six...