A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
I have been a computer journalist for most of my working life although I did start in the wonderful world of accountancy. I have been editor of Compting magazine in London and prior to that held a number of editing jobs, including time spend at the late, lamented DEC Computing and was at one time London editor for Byte magazine. Outside of work, my main interests are travelling, football and baseball. I lived for some years in Boston, Mass, and became an incurable Boston Red Sox fan as a result. I have no particular qualifications for being a journalist other than a university degree and a lifelong curiosity about people.
Microsoft is having a re-think about its SQL Server strategy and in particular about what it wants to do with SQL Data Services.Part of the company’s Azure services platform, SQL Data Services, it appeared was going to produce a fairly straightforward, if not even perhaps cut-down databases services platform.
Power and energy savings and green IT in its own right are all by products of saving money, according to those running the biggest energy users in IT, data centre managers.At least that was a key message to take away from the Data Centre World conference held in London on Monday and Tuesday.
On Monday the leader in the data storage market, EMC launched four new arrays that will include de-duplication features and flash storage.Three of the Celerra arrays are straightforward storage devices and the fourth is a network gateway for clustering storage systems, All are blade arrays offering support for from one to eight blades on he high-end models.
The Brazilian Government has ordered 350,000 low-cost PCs that should, if deployment proceeds as planned, be one of the largest thin-client roll-outs of Linux systems ever carried out.Two companies, Canada-based Useful and the Brazilian company, ThinNetworks announced on Wednesday that they planned to deploy the systems to Brazilian schoolchildren using shared hardware.
Intel’s upcoming new chip architecture, code-named Nehalem had a design based on a straightforward principle of modern system design. To run a computer you need a microprocessor and to run a very powerful computer, you need a lot of microprocessors stuck together.
Intel is going to cut its workforce in Ireland by between 200 and 300 jobs despite assuring workers there that their jobs were safe.The company confirmed to the Press Association on Wednesday that it was intending to make the cuts despite the fact that it had earlier said that no more redundancies were planned.
On Wednesday it appeared that Citrix was about to declare that it was offering its flagship virtualisation software, XenServer, for free, a move that might immediately revitalise the company’s presence in the virtualisation market.Citrix said on Thursday that they would be making an announcement about XensServer but would not give any details.
ZManda on Monday launched cloud computing-based backup and recovery software for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).ZMands Cloud Backup (ZCB) is designed to be easy to configure and use, the company said, and will provide backup and recovery for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Servers, based applications.
Oh dear, I have to report a bit of a goof here. Not by me, I hasten to add, but by those awfully nice Panasonic people.
From Monday to Wednesday this week, the British Library in St Pancras is host to a conference on the Digital Lives Research Project.The project has been, and continues, under the auspices of some mainstream cultural and educational institutions and is intended as a major piece of research about our own history and the way in which we record it and store it, digitally.