Eric Lundquist

Acer acquiring Gateway means that Dell has to look over both shoulders at the same time. On one hand, Dell’s past mistakes have allowed a focused Hewlett-Packard to regain market share, become the best friend a channel vendor can have and provide a very competitive set of business computers from laptops (running whichever OS you’d […]

The New York Times (and eWeek) had a story on Saturday about a Chinese technology company interested in buying Seagate Technology. The unidentified company set off a round of fears that Chinese purchasing a hard drive company might endanger U.S. security interests by giving it undue access to both encryption technologies and manufacturing technologies. I […]

Forget about the frictionless high-tech economy—how about a little more friction instead? In between flights recently, I caught tidbits from CNN at the airport on the continuing subprime-mortgage meltdown. In the stories about hapless homeowners facing ever-rising mortgages, there was an undercurrent of the unknown. The biggest unknown: Exactly how serious is the mortgage crisis […]

When all else fails, blame it on the algorithm. Skype had a major service outage recently. But aren’t systems that run on peer to peer architectures supposed to be able to avoid a big crash as networks of peers provide many alternative avenues for data to travel and many individual peers to take up the […]

Cynthia Rettig has an article worth reading this month in the MIT Sloan Management Review. The article entiitled, “The Trouble with enterprise software,” doesn’t break a lot of new ground but does provide some research justification to the naysayers. The use of multiple databases, lots of legacy applications and the complexity of making it all […]

The yin and yang of chip design this week. At the hot chips conference in Stanford, Tilera talked about their 64 processor architecture. The company which has about $40 million in funding behind it is talking about hitting 1,000 processors by 2014. Of course it is not the number of processors on the chip as […]

So, going green in the server room and in the rest of your company is a good idea, right? I dont think there would be too many “nay” votes on that topic. But, too often, initiatives like going green become a big, bureaucratic tangle. The great corporate alternative to actually making decisions and doing something […]

The fake Steve Jobs got his fake training from a fake cat (er, Katt) Yes, I chuckled along with the rest of the East Coasters when it was revealed that the fake Steve Jobs was NOT a West Coaster, not a young hip blogger (sorry, Dan) and not uncovered by the blogging crowd that will […]

Bridges, Tunnels and Steampipes Without Control Following the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, state and federal officials have been busy sending out inspectors to take another look at the bridges spanning the roads and rivers in their territories. Despite a century or so of advances in strain gauges, portable metal fatigue detection […]