A month ago I began hearing about impending layoffs at IBM, but what could I say beyond “layoffs are coming?” This time my first clues came not from American IBMers but from those working for Big Blue abroad. Big layoffs were coming, they feared, following an earnings shortfall that caused panic in Armonk with the prospect that IBM might after all miss its long-stated earnings target for 2015. Well the layoffs began hitting a couple weeks ago just before I went into an involuntary technical shutdown trying to move this rag from one host to another. So I, who like to be the first to break these stories, have to in this case write the […]
IBM to customers: Your hand is staining my window
Snowden and the NSA reflect a millennial climate change
Snowdon (not Snowden) is the name of the tallest mountain in Wales and while by Swiss or Colorado standards it may not seem like much the weather on Snowdon is unpredictable and has taken many lives. I climbed Snowdon as a schoolboy with my class and that day on the mountain another school group was lost in a blizzard and some boys died. This is what first came to mind when I heard about National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking documents and fleeing to Hong Kong. Like his namesake mountain, this Snowden is trouble for those who are overconfident or unwary.
I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a […]
If it’s Ethernet versus Godzilla, then Godzilla is DOCSIS
Two weeks ago I was at the Computer History Museum to help observe the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. It was literally 40 years to the day since Bob Metcalfe drew his first sketches of what became the world’s dominant OSI Level 2 network technology. It was a fun and festive day that ended, believe it or not, with dancing. But some of the celebration didn’t make sense to me. Or, rather, it seemed to me that important parts of the discussion were missing.
When, for example, did 802.11 WiFi become a part of 802.3 Ethernet? That claim was made over and over during the day and helped power the argument that Ethernet is today a $100 billion business. Yeah, right.
Parts of that argument are true. […]
Father’s Day
Today was Father’s Day in the USA and that white-haired guy in the picture was my father. It’s the last picture I have of him, taken a few months before he died, ironically on my birthday. I was expecting a call, just not that call. That was in 1991. I had an InfoWorld column due that day and I wrote it, as I recall, about him. They indulged me.
We men spend our lives alternately emulating our fathers and rebelling against them, a process I was surprised to see lasts long after death. They give us their faces: certainly you can see a lot of him in me, though his face is mooshed a bit from landing a […]
Better late than never
I’m back!
The process of switching I, Cringely from Media Temple to WP Engine, which was supposed to take a few hours, ended up taking more than a week!
Poor Jennie had to do the hard work, schlepping over thousands of files from a server that continually crashed. There may be an easier way to do it but we don’t know that way. Then WP Engine ran a security upgrade in the middle of our transition, freezing us out of the system because we were neither here nor there. My nemesis CloudFlare didn’t want to give up the DNS and when we finally got it switched it for some reason took two days to propagate.
But enough of […]
