Ben Thompson put together a great piece looking at the transition of Microsoft over the last five years. While the company’s embrace of services is no secret, what Ben shows is that this wasn’t a 360-degree shift. Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had many of the same assets, but applied them as a way to promote Windows. It shows that their shift is as much a cultural one if anything else.
With the release of Ubuntu 18.04, Canonical included some compelling new features, like support for updates without rebooting and Snap software installs. But in some ways it’s a return to form for the distribution. The most notable blast from the past is returning to GNOME after a long dalliance with Unity.
This week, our IT Origins series interviewed Dan Frith. We discussed how he moved from the helpdesk through his IT career, enumerated the worst trends in IT, and gave some love to data protection. Be sure to check out the full interview!
This week on the Rundown, Rich Stroffolino takes a look at some of the overarching trends from RSA Conference, examines why the Flickr acquisition is a sign of potential SaaS problems, and asks if Windows 10 Lean is interesting.
Troy Hunt is done with IRL analogies being forced onto digital concepts. But maybe the problem isn’t the analogies, but the expectations we put on them. Analogies can be useful, but only if we acknowledge their limits while using them.
On this episode, we’re discussing Network Functions Virtualization, aka NFV. The roundtable discusses what exactly NFV is, how it differs from SDN, and if it’s going to eat all specialized networking hardware. The discussion then turns into how changes in network design principles make NFV even more viable in the enterprise.
Hass.io, the Python-based open-source platform to run Home Assistant recently announced major updates are coming to in 2018. Luckily it looks like changes to their core Linux distribution should be minimally disruptive to existing users.
SmugMug recently announced the acquisition of Flickr. The acquisition brings with it new ToS, calls into question the future of its free tier, and illustrates why building a workflow or organization on something you don’t own can be problematic.
E8 Storage announced support for InfiniBand, expanding the company’s storage solution from Ethernet interconnect.
Cisco’s new 4800-series access points have a feature list to make you drool. 4×4 802.11ac Wave 2 radios, a built-in hyperlocation antenna array, and BLE beacon support. But on top of this, Lee Badman looked at the documentation for the device, and got a history lesson of how fast the wireless market has changed.
