The random nature of life events can be summarized by the phrases "right place at the right time" or "wrong place at the wrong time."  There is a scene in the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."  that portrays the randomness of an accident.  How appropriate given the events last month for my household.  The good news is that nobody was injured and that is the most important outcome.  It doesn't stop one from wondering that if one... Read Full Story

Have you made contributions toward a more ECO friendly environment?  Any and all efforts do make a difference when all added together.  While we have made progress in some areas, it is evident that we need to go faster and stronger.  Stop and think of your own personal carbon footprint.  In other words what are you doing that is causing the emission of greenhouse gasses.  When I look at the picture above it resonates 'clean' (it also indirectly infers Lord of ... Read Full Story

Have you made contributions toward a more ECO friendly environment?  Any and all efforts do make a difference when all added together.  While we have made progress in some areas, it is evident that we need to go faster and stronger.  Stop and think of your own personal carbon footprint.  In other words what are you doing that is causing the emission of greenhouse gasses.  When I look at the picture above it resonates 'clean' (it also indirectly infers Lord of ... Read Full Story

The transistor counts of both the CPU and GPU are escalating almost as fast as toxic assets from the sub prime mortgage meltdown.  As in every good debate there are usually 2 opposed sides to a given topic.  Political parties such as Democrats and Republicans thrive on the point versus counterpoint arguments.  This analogy certainly is applicable to the technology of semiconductors.  Gone are the days of the CPU as the center of the computer.  With the advancement of ... Read Full Story

I recently started using a new gadget that has made mobile information access much easier.  However it took some tinkering to get it all working seamlessly. MP3 and iPod music players are almost as common as wrist watches today.  My kids and I have acquired a collection of them over the years.  The latest edition for me is the iTouch which is the newest iPod that enables you to not only listen to music, but watch movies, photos, connect to the internet via w-ifi and install app... Read Full Story

A picture is worth a 1000 words and it certainly resonates with the economic global meltdown this past year.  A red flag indicator on the economy is the TED spread.  This metric is an indicator of perrceived credit risk in the economy.  The TED spread tracks the difference between interest rates of interbank loans and short term T-Bills (government debt).  The difference is measured in basis points (bps). Unlike the economic recessions of the past, this spread skyrocketed ... Read Full Story

Last week I was with community friends in the largest country in the world.  It has the largest forest reserve and its lakes contain 25% of the worlds unfrozen fresh water.  Thinking China... well I was in the Russian Federation. I visited 2 prestegious universities:  Moscow State University, Russia's largest and St. Petersburg State University, Russia's oldest and founded by Peter the Great.  It is very rewarding to see adoption of ones technology being put to goo... Read Full Story

I get asked quite frequently about open source software and how can you make any money, especially if you give software away.  My two word response is quite simple: "business model."  Open Source software does have licensing terms & conditions and revenue is part of the business model.  Having personally spent approximately 3 years front and center in the open source software world-- I've explained it many different ways in an attempt to get others to grasp th... Read Full Story

It took approximately 15 months for the event to occur, but as it has happened to so many others the RROD was not unexpected.  My son creates lots of computations on his 1 teraflop Xbox 360. Needless to say the gaming community is not very amused with Xbox 360 technical problems.  More about community in a future post. The console in our house suffered from the lower right quadrant ring of red light, otherwise known as the "E74 System Error."  Microsoft has extended t... Read Full Story

Almost everyone in the IT infrastructure business is feverishly working on cloud solutions today.   This includes the incumbent providers as well as the infrastructure providers to the incumbents.  An excellent blog can be found here which outlines the trends that have accelerated over the past 5 years with respect to what has morphed into the cloud. One tool that is platform agnostic across Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris, etc. is Sun's open sourced Grid Engine.  There is... Read Full Story