This seems to be the age of “Big Data”. Every sector seems to have a need for it -- from biotechs doing genome sequencing, to financial providers mining market data. For many, the ability to store massive amounts of structured or unstructured data is the key to...
For the everyday user with a laptop or desktop, this article may not apply. And for those of you who have no need to have more than one PC on your desk -- kudos! But from time to time, its necessary to have several PC's on your desk at the same time -- especially...
Have you ever sent out an email with a bunch of important questions and received a reply that began with "my answers are in blue". Have you then found yourself combing through your large email searching for those answers only to discover that your email provider...
With websites, it's important to have a consistent method to gate keep incoming connections. This is primarily to maintain security and ensure a common access point for all traffic. Web proxy servers allow channeling of traffic and proxy content from internal servers...
One of the most critical aspects of your network infrastructure is how well it's performing. The question that I often get asked as a provider of infrastructure services is, "Am I getting the most out of my local network and my internet bandwidth?" This is the one...
Recently, we upgraded Confluence to 4.0, the latest revision and was pleasantly surprised by the process. The upgrade was seamless, well documented, and no major issues found. Upgrading confluence would have been really simple if we wanted to retain the same server....
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the '80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the '90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it's all about the cloud. Of...
Macs running OS X have been around for quite some time, but only recently have they gained enough traction with our customers at SPK to be used as their day to day desktop environment. Historically, IT organizations have been reluctant to embrace this change. This...
What is an SSD? The term SSD (Solid State Drive), can refer to any drive that uses solid state components to store information, or more to the point - has no moving parts. When we hear terms like 'Flash Drive' or 'Thumb Drive', we typically don't think SSD, but...
Some time ago, I wrote an article about CPUID’s wonderful tool, HWMonitor. Today I want to follow up on that and give a few tips on how to make it more useful. Firstly, HWMonitor is a free tool, but CPUID publishes a Professional version of the product, predictably...
Dell Latitude ST This is the Dell Latitude ST, which can be had from the Dell Outlet store for about $300. It’s a 10-inch tablet slate running an Atom Z670 and 2GB of RAM – like a Netbook without a keyboard. Instead, it has an N-trig digitizer that supports both...