Today’s data-storage customer has lost his voice in a sea of vendor jockeying and positioning. This glut of vendors creates a noisy industry and a crowded marketplace, where all vendors sound the same and marketing materials are nearly indistinguishable from vendor to vendor. Directly because of this confusion, many data storage customers have chosen to stick with practices that they are familiar with, regardless of whether those behaviors prove detrimental to their storage environment.

Anyone whose home has been under attack from zombies knows all too well how incredibly annoying the problem can get — way worse than termites or even a wasp nest. Luckily, strategic landscaping in the front yard can be an effective defense, at least in the cartoony world “Plants vs. Zombies” inhabits. PopCap’s game for PCs and Macs has been scaled down into an iPhone/iPod touch version, which loosely follows the tower defense game genre while adding in some new features to keep things interesting.

Security may be the hottest topic in IT, but it’s also one of the least understood. So BriefingDirect assembled a panel to examine the need for IT security to run more like a data-driven science, rather than a mysterious art form. Rigorously applying data and metrics to security can dramatically improve IT results and reduce overall risk to the business. By employing and applying more metrics and standards to security, the protection of IT becomes better, and the known threats can become evaluated uniformly.

A Pennsylvania couple has filed a lawsuit against their local school district for allegedly using the webcam in a school-issued laptop to spy on their son at home. The suit — which was filed last week in U.S. District Court by Michael Robbins and Holly Robbins on behalf of their son, Blake Robbins — alleges that the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa., invaded students’ privacy and stole private information, violating numerous laws. The family seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages as well as class action status for the suit.

Toyota’s well-publicized problems with sudden, unintended acceleration have led Consumer Reports to issue a list of suggested fixes automakers can implement to prevent such problems. These include designing cars so that sustained pressure on the brakes can stop them even if the gas pedal is fully depressed, making it easier to turn off the engine in an emergency, and making it easier to shift into neutral when the car accelerates out of control. Toyota has recalled over 8 million cars and trucks worldwide because of the acceleration problem.

Well the Day of Love is safely behind us again for another year, and not a moment too soon! For some it may be a joyous occasion — a time of bubbles, flowers and pink puffy pillows — but let’s just say that sentiment is by no means unanimous. No, at the other end of the introversion scale, Valentine’s Day is fraught with anxiety, doubt and *way* too much time in the card aisle. It’s not often that geeks wax philosophical about the World of Amour, but HeliOS’s Ken Starks was recently brave enough to venture into those treacherous waters.

Following a day’s delay due to cloudy weather, space shuttle Endeavour launched successfully early Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle, which launched at 4:14 a.m. EST, is carrying a new module and an attached cupola for the International Space Station. “What a beautiful launch we had this morning… the orbiter performed extremely well,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for space operations, during the postlaunch news conference. “This is a great start to a very complicated mission.”

For some types of personalities, a simple to-do list is all that’s needed to keep things on track. They don’t need reminders; they check their notes on their own accord. They don’t like being bugged about stuff, so please get off their case already; they know what they’re doing. Others need a little more prodding, goading and hammering. Maybe they’re absent minded, incredibly busy, or just the type of worrier who sleeps with three alarm clocks set at five-minute increments.

System administrators are well aware of the pain associated with maintenance windows. This effort is usually taking place off-hours and requires challenging coordination between different activities and often different departmental personnel. Although almost every system administrator will agree to pass on the project, maintenance windows are very important to obtain an updated infrastructure and to mitigate risks of an unplanned outage.

In case you missed it, seven long years of wrangling have come to an end: 802.11n has now been officially ratified by the IEEE. Super-fast WiFi is here. The 802.11n standard ushers in increased network throughput and range that will change wireless access, services and applications. With this final blessing, any hesitancy that existed within many organizations around 802.11n deployment has been removed. One application of note enabled by 802.11n is Voice over Wireless, also known as “VoFi.”

Screenlets bring a collection of fun things and useful apps to add functional eye candy to the Linux desktop with little or no resource drain on the computer. Windows and Mac machines have their widgets. Linux has its Screenlets. So you can scratch one more reason from the list of why you shouldn’t migrate to an open source operating system. When I held newbie status as a newcomer to the Linux OS, I had little interest in or use for Screenlets. However, back then I was struggling to master the basics of the open source world of computing.

It could be the next service announced by your car’s GPS feature when you drive from state to state: letting you know what highway exit to take — and warning you about whether texting/phoning while driving in that state is legal. Tuesday’s move by the Department of Transportation to outlaw texting while driving for interstate commercial traffic makes it clear that the federal government is making distracted driving a priority in 2010. However, it also adds to the tangle of separate state and, in some cases, civic regulations.

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