I’ve written recently about how the data protection industry has become one of the hot parts of the tech market, with a mix of innovation from established providers like Veeam, Commvault and Veritas, as well as exciting new players like Rubrik and Cohesity. Many of these companies are bringing interesting innovation and an overdue change […]
Qualcomm’s Terrible No Good Very Bad Acquisition | Gestalt IT Rundown: April 18, 2018
Rich Stroffolino is riding solo on this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown. He runs down the IT news of the week, including a Qualcomm – NXP acquisition reset, another good quarter for IBM, Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0, and Azure Sphere.
The Year of AR, Cloud Networking Dreams, and Nick Bowie in Gestalt News 18.9
In this edition of Gestalt News:
– John Herbert talks about the networking trials of moving to the cloud
– Rich Stroffolino examines if 2018 is the year of the cloud
– Nick Bowie sits down for the IT Origins interview
The Gen-Z Consortium: A Blade By Any Other Name?
Can the Gen-Z Consortium makes blade servers the future of the data center?
Changes in AI: Solving Checkers
Checkers is the game I played to kill time waiting for tables at restaurants. But solving checkers turns out to be a fascinating exercise. Recently, Alphabet’s AlphaGo team has made a lot of headlines with their neural network-based ability to beat human Go masters. But Ray Lucchesi looks back at earlier days trying to solve checkers with much more limited hardware and fundamentally different approaches.
Remembrances of Interfaces Past: Firewire
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.
Quantum Benchmarks
Quantum computing has advanced outside of being purely theoretical or the purview of science fiction. Several companies have specialized computes as their research projects or proof of concepts. IBM put up a publicly available quantum computer for testing with their IBM Q initiative. They’ve now expanded that from an available 5-qubit processor to 16-qubit. But it’s still the Wild West for the field.
For example, simply measuring performance gets surprisingly difficult. It’s easy to forget in classical computing with the bevy of benchmarks available, but even the language for performance on the quantum side isn’t agreed upon. Chris Lee at Ars Technica gives an in-depth look at what IBM is introducing as a measure of quantum computing performance: quantum volume.
Gestalt Server News 17.6
In this iteration of Gestalt Server News:
– We launch the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast!
– X-IO pivots toward the edge
– A History of Virtualization and Containers
Plus a look at the rise of RDMA and more!
IPv6 Hits the Weekend, Network Engineers are Programmers, and Epoch Rollover Considerations in Gestalt Networking News 17.5
In this edition of Gestalt Networking News:
– IPv6 has a case of the Mondays
– Do network engineers need to be programmers now?
– Plus, the epoch rollover struggle is real
Remembering the IBM 1403: Hammer Time
The IBM 1403 leaned heavily on IBM’s history with typewriters. Except it used an elaborate series of hammers to hit behind the paper into an ink ribbon and the alphanumeric character. Some models used up to 132 hammers in a single printer.