The Large Hadron Collider created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, officially became the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator on Monday. The enormous facility has sent two beams of protons shooting through its ring at 1.18 teraelectronvolts. It happened 10 days after scientists started up the collider again following a one-year hiatus due to technical problems. The previous record of 0.98 TeV was set by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2001.

Ask any IT organization to identify the No. 1 cause of network performance problems, and they’ll probably point to high-profile events: denial-of-service attacks, computer viruses, fiber cuts, power outages or hardware failures. However, studies show that more than two-thirds of network issues are actually tied to a simple everyday activity: The ungoverned process of IT staff making network configuration changes. Change is an opportunity for mistake. Internal errors — often inadvertent — can take a heavy toll on overall network performance.

Ask any IT organization to identify the No. 1 cause of network performance problems, and they’ll probably point to high-profile events: denial-of-service attacks, computer viruses, fiber cuts, power outages or hardware failures. However, studies show that more than two-thirds of network issues are actually tied to a simple everyday activity: The ungoverned process of IT staff making network configuration changes. Change is an opportunity for mistake. Internal errors — often inadvertent — can take a heavy toll on overall network performance.

The Linux Blog Safari “Tech Turkeys” column may have come and gone, but there’s one more story to share that could almost have been included. What else can you call it, after all, when a Linux professional is apparently fired for using Linux? Sound too strange to be true? Better read on. The story involves an American principal, an Indian contracting company, a “large computer/server company with three letters in their name” and a “large credit card company with four letters in their name,” as HeliOS’s Ken Starks discreetly put it.

The Linux Blog Safari “Tech Turkeys” column may have come and gone, but there’s one more story to share that could almost have been included. What else can you call it, after all, when a Linux professional is apparently fired for using Linux? Sound too strange to be true? Better read on. The story involves an American principal, an Indian contracting company, a “large computer/server company with three letters in their name” and a “large credit card company with four letters in their name,” as HeliOS’s Ken Starks discreetly put it.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson once wrote, “The street finds its own use for things.” That’s been the case for the Mac mini since its introduction in 2005. Originally marketed as a personal computer, it quickly gained street cred as a media server for the blossoming digital living room. Now Apple has given its mighty mite a proper server configuration in the hopes of moving the white box from the home to the office. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server was introduced last month. Save for the absence of a SuperDrive slot, the unit looks much the same as any other mini.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson once wrote, “The street finds its own use for things.” That’s been the case for the Mac mini since its introduction in 2005. Originally marketed as a personal computer, it quickly gained street cred as a media server for the blossoming digital living room. Now Apple has given its mighty mite a proper server configuration in the hopes of moving the white box from the home to the office. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server was introduced last month. Save for the absence of a SuperDrive slot, the unit looks much the same as any other mini.

Google’s Chrome OS is really a copy of several products already on the market and an interesting recreation of the thin client concept that Sun and Oracle came up with over a decade ago. You could argue, however, that most successful products, like the iPod and iPhone, are simply better copies of what came before. Really, nobody cares that much — consumers only care about whether a new offering will make their lives better. The Google Chrome OS goes directly to a primary need that mainstream PC users have had unmet since the beginning: an appliance experience.

When younger folks today ask me what it felt like to experience a Macintosh for the first time, expecting a moment of revelation as though I’d set foot on Mars, it’s hard for them to understand this embryo of the Mac in the context of the world we early developers lived in. While we appreciated the Apple II for having accelerated the pace of evolution in computing, most of us in the business had the sincere impression that Apple least of all understood what our work was about.

It ended up being a somewhat different PDC than we had anticipated, and even, to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles last week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It’s tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

The reason there’s a Macintosh today is not because of some brilliant flash of engineering genius, as many revisionists like to believe. It’s because Apple had the audacity to make a few big mistakes first, and learn from them. The main reason I wasn’t escorted out of those first computer conferences, even though they typically displayed signs that expressly forbade anyone under 18 from entering, was because I looked the part of someone older who knew what he was doing.

Laura Fitton’s ascent has been staggering: In less than a year, she’s become mayor of nine different places in several different states, all without giving any speeches or kissing any babies. Instead, Fitton has gone out. A lot. And that’s allowed her to build an empire in the world of a rapidly growing Internet startup called “Foursquare,” which rewards users with points and virtual “mayorships” for checking in on their cellphones when they’re out and about. Foursquare is the brainchild of Dennis Crowley, 33, and Naveen Selvadurai, 27.

Newer Posts »