Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 16, 2015
by sjvn01
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Chromebooks spank Windows

Last summer Microsoft talked its partners into trying to stop the growing popularity of Chromebooks in its tracks by making a big push during the holiday season. While full retail results won’t be in for a while, we do know the laptop sales results from the most important retailer of them all, Amazon. Guess what. With that retailer at least, Microsoft and its buddies failed. Miserably.

Amazon reports that its top three computers sold over the holidays were — drum-roll, please — Chromebooks. It was that way last year too. Oh, wait, I’m wrong; Microsoft did worse this year. In 2013, one of Amazon’s top three sellers was a Windows machine, The Asus’ Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 “2-in-1” device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.

Chromebooks spank Windows. More>

January 15, 2015
by sjvn01
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The private cloud is not the same thing as a data center

Yes, there is such a thing as a private cloud. No, it’s not the same thing as having lots of virtual machines on your data center’s servers.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and I’ve already had someone ask me why they should bother with a private cloud when they already had lots and lots of virtual machines (VM)s in their data center.

Excuse me as I bang my head against the wall.

Guys, guys, if a cloud was just a bunch of servers, virtual or otherwise, we’d still be stuck in the ’90s. Oh, that’s right. Some of you still are.

OK, I’ll make it simple. Flip open your copy of the National Institute and Technology’s (NIST), The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing and read aloud with me from page 2:

The private cloud is not the same thing as a data center. More>

January 8, 2015
by sjvn01
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2015: The year the Internet crashes. Hard.

An Internet joke that goes back at least to the early 1980s consists entirely of the phrase: “Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!” Every year, even more often than you’d hear “This will be the year of the Linux desktop!” someone would predict that the Internet was going to go to hell in a handbasket — and nothing happened. This year it’s my turn, but I fear I’m going to be proved right.

2015: The year the Internet crashes. Hard. More>

January 1, 2015
by sjvn01
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5 things to expect from the cloud in 2015

2014 saw big changes in the cloud. In 2015, we’ll see more cloud growth – and challenges – than ever.

In 2014, we saw a lot of things happen with the cloud. OpenStack became the dominant open-source cloud, and Ubuntu became the top operating system on clouds.

Some cloud news was amazing. Microsoft, of all companies, proclaimed its love for Linux. Why? Because 20% of the operating systems on Azure are Linux. If you can’t fight them, join them!

And then there was the news no one saw coming. I mean, in 2014, how many people really knew anything about containers? Then along came Docker and everyone from the usual open-source suspects to Microsoft to VMware was on board.

So, what will 2015 bring us? Well let me dust off my crystal ball and here’s what I see.

5 things to expect from the cloud in 2015. More>