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When you buy a MP3 from iTunes, do you own it? What if you could resell some of the ton of digital music you don't listen to, but that is taking up hard drive space? You can buy and legally resell "used" MP3s on eMarketplace ReDigi, the brainchild of former MIT programmers. Like the RIAA which refuses to change a broken business model, Capitol Records had a copyright infringement cow and objected in court. However a judge handed the first round victory to ReDigi, not Capitol. It's looking good for music lovers.

In a previous post, I invoked Thomas Jefferson in predicting the future of storage.

As I prepare to conclude and summarize this series of Computerworld posts, I'd like to invoke another, eminently-quotable American statesman, Dan Quayle. Our 44^th vice president famously described the future by stating:

"The future will be better tomorrow."

This company is upgrading production equipment at several sites spread all over the state -- and when this pilot fish gets a call from another site about a PC that won't power up, he knows what to do.

In a classic Saturday Night Live parody commercial Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd play a couple having an argument over whether New Shimmer is a floor wax or a dessert topping.

One of this sysadmin pilot fish's regular tasks is recovering space on Windows servers, and his usual procedure is to spot the users with the biggest files and then call or email them, asking them to delete a few. Then he gets a bright idea.

Pilot fish gets a call from a site manager who wants to restore the data that was deleted the night before. Exactly what will that require?

The Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) critical patch update (CPU) for January 2012 includes just two fixes for the eponymous database. But at least one is a real doozy, it seems. IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder where the patches are for all the other critical bugs. Not to mention: a heartwarming tale of brotherly support...

Anyone who has seen the 1976 film Marathon Man, will no doubt recall the cringe-inducing scene where a sadistic Nazi dentist (played by Laurence Olivier) tortures the protagonist (Dustin Hoffman) by drilling into his teeth without anesthetic. Throughout the ordeal, Olivier constantly asks, "Is it safe?"  Not knowing what "it" refers to, Hoffman can't come up with an answer to avert the torture.

It's that time of year again. So, let's breakout the old crystal ball and look into the future to find out what data storage and intelligent storage networking developments will be most prevalent in the year to come.

There's an old saying that the difference between neurosis and psychosis is that neurotics build castles in the clouds and psychotics move in. What then does that say about those of us who try to build storage farms in the cloud? Are we afflicted with some special form of insanity?

In a down market, many organizations look to reduce costs. One tried and true method in cost reduction is to review existing IT operational procedures in order to determine where adding efficiencies may reduce operational budget requirements.

The last place you would expect to hear anything negative about backing up files, is a blog on Defensive Computing. Yet here we are.

By 2015, the drop in price for digital storage will allow the government to store all the phone calls you made in a year for only two cents per person. Improvements to electronic spying tech will make retroactive surveillance possible and other eavesdropping easy and cheap. Yes, Virginia, even the LED lights might be "listening."

This IT shop has an ongoing problem with low server disk space, thanks to some poor design decisions -- and a log file that just won't stop getting bigger.

As a kid, when I was being carpooled to soccer practice, I got into a heated discussion with my friends regarding the kind of car we would be driving as adults when we took our kids to soccer practice.  Impassioned arguments were made on behalf of flying cars, car-boat hybrids, and personal jetpacks; I suspect we would have been disappointed to learn  that the vast majority of us would be driving our kids to soccer in plain old SUVs -- not too far a cry from the woody station wagon we were riding in at the time of the discussion.