David Strom

This is my review of QuorumLabs’ onQ recovery appliance that accompanied my video screencast. I go into a bit more depth here about its various features. ... (more)

What We’ve Got Here Is a Failure to Communicate

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character’s famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a “friend” of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let’s call this friend Bob for simplicity. My go-to communication method is email, so I first tried to send Bob a quick email to answer a question. Sadly... (more)

Do We Need a Desktop OS Anymore?

In a word, no. We may be reaching the point where the desktop OS is no longer important, eclipsed by the developments of the browser and ironically a victim of better integration by Microsoft and others. Yet we are all huddling around the news feeds coming out of Build 2011 as we try to figure out what Microsoft is attempting with Windows 8 and Metro. My prediction is that this will become the OS/2 of the modern era: an OS that is so elegant but instantly obsolete by events, designed for the wrong chip (the mobile ARM CPUs) and based on a cellphone design ethos that no one could c... (more)

How Banks Can Text You Fraud Alerts in Real Time

Like some of you, I was in the market to buy a new phone late last year, and went online to the AT&T store to make my purchase the day or so after the new iPhone 4S was available. Smart, I thought to myself: avoid the lines (not that there are many lines here in St. Louis, but still). Took about five minutes to enter all my information and then I was done. I got a confirmation email that my order had been placed, and an estimated ship date a few weeks away. That was fine: I wasn’t in a hurry. But then there were a bizarre series of circumstances. My order was summarily cancelled... (more)

Blogging is far from dead

I took a look around for an article that I wrote today for ReadWriteWeb on new models in Web publishing and was glad to see that blogging is far from dead. Indeed, it is evolving rapidly into some interesting new forms and I wanted to take this opportunity to review some of them with you. If you want to read more or share your thoughts, click on the link above. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the “golden age of blogging” into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era. Jeremiah Owyang wrote o... (more)