So, what if you came into the office one morning and heard some clicking sound coming from your server? That clicking sound could be a near heart-stopper for some or another minor irritation to others depending on how well they have planned for such a situation. It is the tell-tale sign that a hard drive … Read more
It finally happened to me! I accidentally dropped my phone in water the other day and completely freaked out because as soon as the phone hit the water, it turned off and would not power back on – kudos to the manufacturer for that. It may have been what saved the phone. This is a very expensive phone and I was already bemoaning how I would have to shell out the money to replace it.
The internet, however, came to the rescue and I got a few pointers that I added to what I did to revive my phone.
The general saying these days is that the economy is in a bad shape, things are tight and it is becoming increasingly difficult to make payroll. For small business owners, this is evident in the rate at which employees are being laid off, or having their hours reduced. The danger in all this is that cost cutting may be taken to such an extreme level that it is bound to affect productivity in the long run. I remember working very hard to convince a friend of mine to be careful about laying off too many good employees. “Why?” he asked, and my response was, what are you going to do if the work starts coming in and you do not have experienced people to get it out the door efficiently and profitably?
I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:
I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.
First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.
You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.
The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.
The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.
For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.
With the announcement today of the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, the database market has suddenly been thrown into a state of flux. The earlier rumor was that IBM was interested in buying Sun.
This is especially significant because of the myriad of products owned by the merged company.
Sun has over the years positioned itself as a systems company and has expanded its sphere of influence in that arena. So what is the driving force behind this purchase? Some have argued that is is driven by the new move toward integration. According to CNet, this idea dates back to a concept called Raw Iron. In other words, it is an attempt to move Oracle from the horizontal market space it has been stuck in into a vertical market where Sun has made its mark, kind of.
