Paul Rubens

Mechanical hard drives with spinning disks are doomed to extinction, thanks to solid state flash drives that are becoming cheaper and offering greater capacity by the month. At least that’s how some in the data storage industry see it. Outwardly, there’s a convincing logic to this argument, especially when you consider what’s happened in other […]

Imagine a monstrous, seven-foot reanimated Tux-the-penguin with bolts though its neck, pursued through the countryside by angry pitchfork-wielding villagers. It’s not an image you’re likely to forget in a hurry. And that, one suspects, was the intention of Dan Pacek, Red Hat’s strategic marketing guy, when he described the predicament you’ll find yourself in, should […]

Both Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Windows Azure, though wildly different in scope and intent, are in essence a a heaping helping of a previously successful offering. Will they succeed? Supersizing may have gone out of style in the restaurant world, but it sure is alive and kicking in the tech industry, as recent news proved. […]

“Private cloud” is a term heard a lot these days, but what does it actually mean? Before trying to pin down this elusive beast, it’s useful first to think about what’s meant by cloud computing. Defining “cloud” is not easy, but a cloud computing solution will almost certainly offer: Elasticity and scalability. This encompasses the […]

Against traditional logic, a software solution may gain more sales by having a higher price. Open source software may suffer from what is usually seen as one of its advantages — its famously low price. Talk to any art dealer and you’ll hear the same thing: Sometimes the only way to shift a work that’s […]

The SANS Institute recommends passwords should be at least 15 characters long, which effectively means that these password can’t be carried around in end users’ heads. Let’s take a look at how secure a password this long would be. If we take a scenario in which user passwords are made up of upper and lower […]

Hard drive failures are a fact of life: That’s why there are RAID arrays, backup systems and an entire infrastructure designed to prevent data loss and minimize the impact to an organization when drives stop working. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to minimize hard drive failure. Google’s landmark research document, “Failure Trends […]

You’ve probably read one of the many articles going around recently about how you should be preparing to incorporate Macs into your network environment. Save yourself the bother: Google’s announcement of its Chrome OS last month sounded the death knell for the prospects of Macs in the enterprise. Apple has never really made much of […]

Apple’s App Store has more than 50,000 mobile apps. Blackberry’s App World and Nokia’s Ovi store are ramping up the number they offer as quickly as possible. In the near future, Microsoft will open its Marketplace for Mobile store as well. As a result, there has never been such a wide choice of mobile apps […]

Microsoft continues to humiliate Apple in both the desktop and server markets, with Apple’s market share stuck stubbornly below 5 percent in the former, and hovering a fraction above 0 percent in the latter. But when it comes to the mobile operating system market, it’s Microsoft that’s eating humble pie — of a brand with […]