New Article on Computer Data Cleanup

It's Spring, and to many of us that means "Spring Cleaning". Computer data is one of those areas that needs constant grooming, and the payoff is big! But to some just thinking of it feels like a chore. In this article I'll help you organize your data and delete unnecessary files easily.

Cloud Computing Reflections

In November I posted an entry about an article I wrote about Cloud Computing; that it proves Solomon was right that there's nothing new under the sun.  As I've been thinking about Cloud Computing and what it's evolving to mean (server-based computing to minimize traffic and hardware requirements), the following struck me as... interesting!

• When engineering Novell Netware networks in the mid-1980s using programs like WordPerfect, we engineered them so all software ran from the server where the data also resided.  Microsoft decided to enter the word processing game and did so in a big way, eclipsing Word Perfect.  But their solution, Word, was so inefficient they recommended running it from the local hard drive.
• Microsoft decided to enter the network game and did so in a big way too, eclipsing Novell.  They did their best to achieve Netware's reliability, even adopting Novell's strategy of using a database called a directory to manage the network.  But things were often unstable and services conflicted with each other, so they developed the strategy of running many servers to minimize service conflicts and to further distribute the network, pushing as much data and programs as possible to the workstation.  With today's hypervisor technology we're finally able to engineer Microsoft networks with very few server 'hosts'-- part of Cloud Computing architecture.

So, more than a dozen years later we're finally able to do with Microsoft Windows networks most of what we were able to do with Novell Networks.  Congrats to Microsoft!