Independent Experts United
Our favorite material from around the web
Ars Technica published a look back at the rise and fall of Firewire.
Some highlights that jumped out to me: the connector was based on the original Game Boy connector, down to the pins. The original working name of the standard was ChefCat. Sony didn’t use the name “Firewire” in Japan because they thought it made Sony sound boring.
I’ve made no bones about my skepticism about Windows 10 S. It seems to fall into the uncanny valley between a locked down mobile OS versus the full power and vulnerability of regular old Windows. But Microsoft thinks the benefits to performance and security outweigh the loss of its enormous legacy software ecosystem.
AMD finally released it’s initial batch of server CPU’s, under the regretful name EPYC. As promised in their announcement, the chips truly offer some interesting capabilities. No matter which EPYC 7000-series chip you buy, you get some impressive features standard: 8-channel DDR4 memory support (up to 2TB supported), 64MB of L3 cache, and 128 lanes of sweet PCIe 3.0.
In response to a reader question on his look at Liqid’s composable infrastructure, Russ White frames an interesting question: is it easier to extend PCIe to support switching, and longer runs, or is it easier to design an entire protocol to (effectively) run PCIe over Ethernet? Liqid developed their solution based on former, but other composable infrastructure projects prefer an Ethernet based approach. It’s an interesting look into the benefits and drawbacks of both.
Las Vegas can be daunting for the uninitiated, especially if they’re more intent on attending the event than hitting the Strip. So we loved seeing Jim Jones recent “Vegas for Newbies” article. Although we’ve got our own secrets (we go there at least half a dozen times a year for tech shows), Jim’s suggestions are dead on.
For those that want a lean Linux subsystem to provide container functionality to be part of a greater container platform, LinuxKit is for you. If you’re not sure where to get started with it, check out this piece by Docker Captain Ajeet Singh Raina.
If I had to guess what the next buzzword was going to be in enterprise IT, “intent driven” seems to be the new hotness. For one, it sounds a lot more humanistic than saying automation. But it also represents a larger shift of companies moving away from the idea of how something has to be done, and toward looking for ways to implement how they want a given IT goal to proceed.
But as much as “intent driven” products seems to be catching on, we often see companies struggling to identify what is the actual intent behind their solutions.
An old dog is learning some new tricks. QNX has been around since the 80s, and the OS is getting a big update from BlackBerry. The venerable OS now supports containers.
Backblaze just released their 10th annual survey results on backup frequency. As a personal and business backup provider, they have a clear interest in the responses. But, like their disk drive reliability numbers, it’s nice that they share the results publicly.
Once a term gets pegged as trendy in enterprise IT, its actual meaning quickly goes out the window. It becomes less about what that word represents, and more about how you can skew your existing products to somehow claim to be part of this rising trend. This quickly leads to a morass of marketing bluster, and genuine confusion about how solutions and products fit into categories.
Keith Townsend tries to rescue two of the trendiest buzzwords in use today: hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud.
