Ahead of the Curve | Tom YagerForward-looking insight informing today's technology choicesOne switcher's tale: Once you go iMac, you never go back- May 28, 2008 I've been relating the story of a professional colleague who, some months ago and under semi-voluntary circumstances, made the switch from Windows to the Mac. Her twisted arm now nicely healed, she has not only switched, she has an unshakable conviction that even the fastest, newest PC would be an embarrassing hand-me-down next to a mature Mac. If I were to swap her early model MacBook for a quad-core PC desktop, she'd accept it with the graciousness one brings to the gift of a fruitcake (or...http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/05/ahead_of_the_cu_5.html?source=rss AMD's server roadmap burns through Intel's fog- May 21, 2008 Intel CEO Paul Otellini's memorable "shame on us... mea culpa, we screwed up" March 2007 speech to Morgan Stanley investors came after his company's marketing fog machine could no longer conceal the truth that, depending on your point of view, Intel was peddling technology that it knew to be somewhere between four and eight years behind AMD's. AMD told you so, and so did I, but Intel's marketing is capable of overpowering reason. Intel manages to thrive by setting expectations that match its...http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/05/ahead_of_the_cu_4.html?source=rss It's quiet, it's green, it's the rack o' my dreams- May 14, 2008 When I refer to my lab, I use the term loosely. It's a 10-by-10-foot working space whose smooth walls channel the sound from every device with a fan straight into my ears. I share that room with every server I use and test. Of these, an 8-core Xserve is the only box that stays on 247, and I wish I could say I've gotten used to the noise. I haven't. While the Xserve idles at a pleasant noise level, as soon as any computing load kicks in, the fans spin up. When they do, they find a frequency...http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/05/ahead_of_the_cu_3.html?source=rss The Green Delay: A timely proposal for IT energy conservation- May 7, 2008 "I hope I'm dead before I'm 50." This was said in an entirely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion by someone who had gotten a poorly timed, age-appropriate, red state public school treatment of both sides of the global warming debate. Is it, as was presented, more likely that natural cycles and the law of averages are to blame for melting glaciers and freakish weather Either way, his lesson came one day before the horror in Myanmar. It awakened memories of Thailand and New Orleans. It put a...http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/05/ahead_of_the_cu_2.html?source=rss |