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David Strom

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Top Stories by David Strom

At its annual user and partner Impact conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM announced a slew of new products, including new additions to its WebSphere applications family. There are also promises of better integration with software products from its recent acquisitions and a new piece of integrated hardware to its Pure line of expert hardware systems.  Today’s IBM mainframe comes inside a 19-inch rack and runs on Intel CPUs. You can read more about my coverage of IBM’s Impact 2012 conference this week in Las Vegas in Tom’s ITPro here. ... (more)

Hanging out with the First Kids

If it is April in St. Louis, it is time for our downtown to be swarming with thousands of the smartest kids on the planet. They are here to participate in another First Robotics Global Competition, one of my favorite events to cover. For those of you that haven’t yet heard about this, the kids take part in this very fun and challenging event. They have to build and operate robots of varying shapes and sizes, depending on their age group. The event is held in our indoor football stadium-cum-conference center, and it is big: both buildings are filled with so much positive energy and... (more)

What Kind of Software Company Should You Work For?

I met Peter Griess last night and heard him talk about his career. Even though he still has plenty of years ahead of him, he has already worked for NetApp, Yahoo, and now Facebook. He was part of a nine-person startup that worked on some interesting social email apps that eventually got acquired by Yahoo. Along his career he has seen very different kinds of cultures in these various software engineering departments, and as I was listening to his talk, I thought about the many software companies that I have covered over the years. I would break them down into three different kinds ... (more)

Learning From Failure

About a month ago, on ReadWriteWeb ran a link to a TED video about learning from failure. It spoke to me and I started thinking about some of my failures in my professional life over the past years. I have had more of them that I initially thought of, and while that was a little depressing, it was instructive to collect all of them in one place. So why not share them with you, dear reader? After all, I usually tell you about my insights. Here goes. I have written three books, with two of them actually published. While you may think of that as a success, in reality neither of them ... (more)

Don’t Mess With Your DNS

Despite threats by Anonymous, the Internet’s numerous root Domain Name Servers (DNS) were still functional over the weekend. There were reported claims to bring down this collection of important servers in the hopes of more cyberterrorism. However, while there are only 13 root servers, they are replicated into hundreds of machines around the globe using a variety of protocol tricks, and recently efforts were accelerated to further protect the roots too. But I learned a valuable DNS lesson of my own last week, unrelated to the supposed plans of this hacker group. And that is: tre... (more)