Real Time View

  Creator: Simon Alvinge  |  Credit: Getty Images / iStockphoto After moving into our newly built home in northern Colorado, we cycled through many Kuerig coffee makers. It took a couple of years and a lot of trials and errors with more than one Kuerig coffee maker finding its way down into storage. Were we insane not to realize it wasn’t the coffee machines as we tried one after the other with no resultant changes in results? Eventually, having called in the electrician, it proved to be a faulty circuit breaker. “When these breakers were first installed there were a number of them that were problematic,” was the only response we were given. For Margo and me, take away our morning coffee and expect unpredictable behavior to follow. In fact, on any given day, it takes us three coffees before we can rationally face the work day. However, as much as we made adjustments to our schedules – a quick trip to Starbucks became the norm – there was always that fear lurking...

This past weekend I seated myself close to the television through much of The Rolex24 at Daytona. Much like other races that span 24 hours, for as long as I can recall it was considered an endurance race, much the same as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and yet with the improved reliability of the participating vehicles, Daytona is now very much a 24 hour sprint race. Mixing prototypes with vehicles you could drive off the showroom floor sort of, these long races make for entertaining viewing. While we have a connection with one of the racers involved, the Indy Car phenom Colton Herta, the grandson of our good friends, the Kennys, who just happened to add yet another Rolex to his collection of Rolex Daytona watches after winning the Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) class and placed fifth overall (car pictured above), all the same I was surprised at how quickly those 24 hours passed. I remember conversations with my father after listening to Le Mans the time disk brakes first appeared (on a Jaguar...

For those who have hit the high seas with the intension of sailing to a faraway land, there are many elements that can contribute to missing arriving at your harbor. Sail one degree off course then for every 60 miles you sail you will miss your target by one mile. Not much, or so it seems and yet, sail around the world following the equator and you will be off course by 500 miles. While flying between Sydney and San Francisco during the year I commuted between the Tandem office in North Sydney and the Cupertino campus, there was a time when I received an invite to enter the flight deck. Those were different times when security wasn’t an issue and on the Queen of the Sky, that venerable Boeing 747. Imagine my surprise to see the first officer pulling out his sextant, sighting a planet as it rose from the horizon and then checking with the aircraft’s inertial navigation system remarking as he did so that he was right on course. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then to know that the NonSto...

                 “I’ve got a feeling and I just can’t let it go!” This is a line from a haunting song by Los Angeles indie electro-soul band, Caught a Ghost. Not to be confused with the song from Frozen, it became the theme song of Amazon Prime series “Bosch” that was based on numerous novels by Michael Connelly. For those familiar with the novels or those who have viewed the Prime series, you will know that the main character Bosch enjoys jazz and the choice of this song for the series title may have been a surprise and yet, it absolutely captures the indomitable spirit of Detective Bosch. This is the same feeling I get whenever I hear news about the latest cloud offering or about the enterprise that has elected to migrate everything to the cloud. And this feeling is amplified whenever I read of news about yet another outage affecting millions of users. It is almost as if IT professionals have forgotten the first law of IT: Change. Call it...

As I look back at the past year perhaps the best way to describe it was how there were many times where things were broken. I am not talking about the occasional drinking glass or dinner plate but objects that mattered to us. When things are broken their performance is hindered to where in some cases they no longer serve any useful purpose. Replacement appears to be the order of the day. Mind you, I am not talking about the weather here in Colorado as I have lost track of how many days have passed without a meaningful snow fall. This morning may have been the exception as a little rain together with what might pass as a little sleet did fall but not for long enough to stick to anything. Enjoying December days that have climbed into the 70sF (20sC) would surely pass as unusual even if we didn’t talk about weather patterns that look to be broken. However, before developing this story line further, please be happy for us as remedies for almost everything have been found. But what was brok...

We are witnessing major cloud service providers flexing their muscles giving us all cause for concern; NonStop in the data center becoming a viable alternative for many enterprises. We have just come through our twelfth snowstorm here in Northern Colorado. It is pretty normal to see that many snowfalls by the time spring arrives. However, this particular snowstorm broke a number of records and it has taken me many days to clear a path to our front door, but as the weekend approached the skies have cleared and there is very few clouds to be seen. What occurs in nature however is no indication of what happens in the world of business where there are many more clouds to be seen than what was present overhead that day.    There is no escaping how many references to cloud computing you will come across of late. The mega-vendors who are the big purveyors of cloud computing are battling it out over market share and all the time, the questions keep coming up. Can I afford not to mov...

  Let’s talk about virtual machines, containers and what’s the attraction for NonStop customers. But first, the big question; with mission critical applications, are they relevant? When it comes to myths and fables there is perhaps none more the subject of speculation than the existence of King Arthur and his fabled magician, Merlin. Modern speculation goes so far as to suggest Merlin was an original “Time Lord” of Dr. Who’s fame. Others suggest he was the model for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf. As for Harry Potter, well it is not so much a case of speculation so much as it’s a case of dropping into a pure fantasy. Merlin even made an appearance in the movies; Transformers: Last Knight. Myths carry with them the expectation that wondrous things occurred and that without their featured characters, societies would have been lost. When it comes to technology there has always been a sense of fantasy and of the unbelievable and yet, here we are entering the seventh decade of commercial IT...