EMC’s costly battle against upstarts
A few weeks ago Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan flagged EMC's aggressive sales tactics as a key problem for Nimble's enterprise penetration. We can now put a number on how much this is costing EMC. For the full year, EMC's Information Storage group product...
Snow on the rocks
Dial-a-climate People are often surprised to learn that it snows in Arizona. While much of state is low Sonoran desert - it rarely gets below freezing in Phoenix - altitude is the primary determinant of climate in Arizona. That's why it can be freezing on the edge of...
Paul Graham’s naiveté – MLK day, 2016
In Economic Inequality, Paul Graham - of Ycombinator fame - posted an astonishingly naive essay on income inequality. While many others have written take-downs (see here and here, of Mr. Graham's factual and logical flaws, there's another that deserves attention. The...
Gödel Machines, deep learning and the limits of AI
If, like me, you're interested in AI and deep learning, you'll like this. Neural networks are all the rage in AI, but there is a newer technology - Gödel machines - that is now a standard part of the AI toolset. What is a Gödel machine? From the abstract of the...
Market share: HP & Others up – everyone else down
IDC's Worldwide Total Disk Storage Systems Market for Q3 2015 had some interesting results. The thumbnail is the title of this post. But there are a couple more details. ODM vendors - who sell direct to the hyperscale data center customers - had the fastest revenue...
New year’s eve & new year’s day hikes
I was under the weather for much of November and taking it slow in December. But for the new year I took a couple of short hikes of 2-3 miles. On the 31st I parked on Chapel Road and walked the Chapel Trail. The spires in this picture are the Two Nuns. The Chapel in...
When will SSDs kill the 2.5″ disk drive?
Probably never. Here's why. DRAMeXchange is predicting that in 2017 some 41% of laptops will sport SSDs. As the per gigabyte price difference between disk and flash shrinks, the price differential becomes irrelevant at ever-higher capacity points. Most people have...
How storage is changing the world
Cheap storage is changing the world. Whether it is in the cloud, on a dash cam, or embedded in an app, cheap - as in inexpensive - storage is enabling new relationships between individuals, and with culture, power, and groups. Facebook is the most prominent example of...
Mr. Dell’s eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror
Zigging when others are zagging can be smart. Dell buying EMC to create a large computer company could be genius - or the last hurrah of a failing business model. Dell's perspective is simple: ≈50% of Dell's revenue comes from PCs, a rapidly shrinking market. Dell...
Is AWS trying to throttle back its growth?
I was hoping to go to this year's Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, as I did last year, but no joy. Not enough press passes to go around, I was told. But then I learned that AWS limited press and analyst passes to fewer than 30, much to the disappointment of...
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