Small Business In-House IT - A Classic Sucker's Bet

If You Are Not Using SaaS Yet, You're Falling Behind, Fast.... Software as a Service and the Social Web Two of the most important trends in Information Technology are the burgeoning ranks of mature web based hosted software applications and the Social Web or Web 2.0. Truthfully, and while a whole host of consultants would maintain otherwise, there is really nothing truly *New* about either of these things (this is true for most things in Information Technology BTW). Today's Web 2.0 is yesterday's Usenet, Chat or BBS. Yesterday's Mainframe, ASP and AOL is today's SaaS. Facebook, LinkedIn and My Space are merely more mature than earlier social collaboration and communications tools. As a small business owner, you are probably fixated on trying to figure out what you SHOULD be doing in the Social Web, and that's a good thing. Information wants to be free and tools want to be used. But don't loose sight of the forest for the trees More...In the rush to join the ranks of the twitterati and partake of the blogophoria, you're missing what I consider the most critical lesson and aspect of the whole Web 2.0 thing, and that is that these social web apps represent the first real consumerization of modern SaaS (putting aside search and e-mail). Facebook is a huge, complex and rich SaaS offering and you use it everyday without a second thought ! What happened to the traditional excuses given by IT Depts and Business Owners for not moving to hosted or open source software? Sensitive Data? Facebook knows all about you, your family and friends. Security ? Do you honestly think you or your IT Dept can do security better than Google? But I need technical support ! No you don't, you only think you do - after all how helpful and responsive was the last call center you called, chances are you'll get better help from the web anyway. Dump MS Office, Sharepoint, IIS and above all Access and then put the servers on E-bay next to Sarah Palin's plane. Loose the distraction, cost and limits of all your office productivity suites and small business software, it's holding you back. Photo by Alecani on Flickr

OCZ Vertex SSD - This Makes it Official, HDD are SOO Over for Notebooks

The writing has been on the wall for some time now, but I think this is shark jumping time for the traditional hard disk drive, at least in Notebooks and Netbooks. Finally here is an affordable (~$300), reasonably sized (120GB) solid state disk with a dramatic performance improvement over HDD's. More...Given the cost per MB advantage that HDD's still enjoy, I am sure they will still be around in desktops, though I would not be surprised if we see more hybrid solutions where the O.S, swap space and other I/O bottleneck prone data are stored on the Solid State Disk, and less frequently used files are sent out to pasture on the HDD. It would also make sense to have an algorithm to intelligently manage moving files between the two as needs arise (Hello EMC). In a RAID configuration, these things would kill ! Laptop Mag has all the test data, and a before and after performance comparison on an SSD retrofit into a two year old laptop, it's eye opening. Check it out here : Laptop Mag OCZ SSD

Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo RAID NAS Review

After years of trying to get a cheap workable storage and backup solution for our importanthome files I finally broke down and bought one of these last week. Some years back I had abad experience with an early Netgear NAS so I was a little leery of home NAS solutions, buta disk failure and continued frustrations with XP network sharing had left me despondantand desperate for a solution. I had heard nothing but good things about Buffalo, and MicroCenter had these on sale, so I gave it a whirl. Oddly enough Mr. Grey Ponytail the MicroCenter worker almost talked me out of it by giving me incorrect info about the product. Ponytail insisted that this device needed client software installed on every PC that wouldaccess it and that it wouldn't just show up as a windows workgroup member. Turns outhe was only impersonating a geek and had no idea what he was talking about, it doesn't needclient SW and it does show up as any other network device would in windows. Anyway, the setup went relatively smoothly with only a minor glitch and a stupid one at that. More...Buffalo's utility installer software needs to "find" the machine on the network, if it can't, the installer doesn't finish - better design would be to finish installing the utility SW and then run a config program. Buffalo's documentation is pretty much crap as well and doesn't even include instructions on how to swap a drive in the even of a RAID drive failure. The product itself isas advertised and exceeded my expectations for performance even on RAID 1. I also found theconfiguration using the web control panel comprehensive and well done. Considering thatthe LinkStation is only a bit more expensive than a 2 Tb USB external drive, it kindof a bargain.I'll update this post if anything untoward occurs with the box in the future, but so far so good.

Sarah Haskins

Sarah does some clever bits poking fun at advertising targeted at women that I think you

may enjoy, there is more here if you are so inclined: Sarah Haskins on Current. Some of

the ads really are cringe worthy.

Realistic Mach One Loudspeaker

Man did I want a pair of these in the 80's

Shake Rattle and Roll - 3 Ways

The versions of the iconic R&R song, Big Joe was first, but I like
Bill Haley's version the best. Written in 1954 by Jesse Stone for
Big Joe Turner.

BallDroppings

This is a fun and oddly riveting little physics time waster. Click on the image to check it out.