Storage

Let's face it, most backup administrators are typically under paid, under appreciated, and only become important in the eyes of upper management when things go wrong.

It seems the only way to learn the number of platters inside a hard drive is to ask the company.

The City of Los Angeles has had it with GroupWise, and will replace it with Google Apps. It's a big win for la GOOG, especially as it beat Microsoft to the deal. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers count how many angels can dance on a cloud.
(GOOG) (MSFT) Not to mention iPhone costumes...

Defensively buying a hard drive means taking into consideration the number of platters -- the fewer the better. But, you have to sleuth around in the specs to find the drives with the fewest platters.

Yahoo's GeoCities, a free web-hosting service and once the Internet's third most visited domain, will be shutting down on Monday, Oct. 26, taking with it thousands of user homepages and decades of data. Fortunately, some historians are making sure GeoCities' content is not lost to the annals of time.

In today's podcast: MySQL co-founder wants Oracle to sell database; IBM puts executive on leave over securities-fraud charge; and Apple posts big jump in profits.

Network admin sends an e-mail to his group's applications admin, database admin, developer and interim IT manager -- and he has a serious security concern.

It's a few years ago, and this mainframe programmer gets a job at a big company where he reports to a project manager who's, well, pretty set in his ways.

Is this what Apple (AAPL) meant by Snow Leopard freeing up disk space? It's confirmed that Mac OS X users are losing all their data, even in 10.6.1. It seems that after a guest login, the user home can get wiped. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers taunt smug fanbois, saying OS X has got buggier and buggier. Not to mention Probably Bad News...

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It can be difficult to quickly highlight the key benefits of virtualzation to a management team if you don't fully understand them yourself. Outlined below are a few key benefits of virtualization that every tech savvy individual should know.

IBM/Lotus wants you to reconsider "Going Google". It's now offering a SaaS/cloud hosted email service, with similar functionality to Google Apps' Gmail -- but undercutting Google's price. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it'll be more reliable than Gmail. Not to mention Tetris as you've never seen it before...
(IBM) (GOOG) (MSFT)

Steve Ballmer hasn't exactly shined as Microsoft CEO, but he's confident enough in his business acumen to offer this stunningly bad piece of advice to IBM: It's time to get back into the hardware business. This, despite the fact that focusing on high-profit businesses like services and consulting has turned IBM back into a money-making powerhouse.

Every once in awhile a great technology idea comes along that makes me think: "Why didn't I think of that? " Last year's Pogoplug was certainly such an idea. It basically is small adapter that turns USB storage into not only a NAS, but it also turns it into a web file server share.

Well, this product just got better with their drive manufacturing partner Seagate.

The last time I checked, Seagate built and sold hard drives. So why would they market a backup solution that requires an exact duplicate drive instead of an upgrade when disaster strikes?

A Web developer needs to upgrade Web code for this company's largest client -- which shouldn't be a problem. All he has to do is pay a little attention.