I received an e-mail recently from my good friend and book co-author Chris Stakutis, who is also vice president of emerging technology at CA.

Chris can have very different ways of looking at things, a quality that makes him well-suited for his job. The e-mail I'm reprinting below (with a few edits for brevity) is a case in point.

From time to time, one of the organizations that specializes in counting things speculates that in the next five years, humans will generate many yottabytes of data. Here's an example from IDC. (Yes, you can yotta yotta data.) These … Read more

Compellent's C-Drive event last week drew about 300 storage administrators and IT generalists to downtown Minneapolis one week before EMC World. While that's small show by EMCWorld standards, it was a big event for Compellent customers.

I have yet to meet a more evangelistic group of storage users. Compellent's architecture creates a unique storage management environment. While the architecture supports a variety of RAID levels and RAID-based array configurations, one has to leave pre-conceived notions regarding management and functioning of traditional RAID arrays at the door. These people behave as if they had seen the light and … Read more

The bigger a company becomes on the Web, the more likely it is to be accused of privacy violations. Google has been fending off privacy concerns for years, but it's now Facebook's time in the limelight.

An increasing number of people are concerned about Facebook's privacy policies. And while some are reportedly looking to jump off the Facebook train, most continue to complain...on Facebook.

Enter the Diaspora project, an open-source social network that eliminates the midddleman, the "anti-Facebook."

Diaspora attempts to solve Facebook's privacy problems at the infrastructure layer, using a decentralized, peer-to-peer … Read more

Entertaining America is our No. 1 job at CBS, so staying on top of the latest home entertainment gadgets and technological trends is central to everything we do. Times change, strategies shift, yet certain themes persist. Time and time again, platform innovations have sparked revolutions in programming, from radio to television, black-and-white TV to color, standard-definition programming to HD. With each breakthrough technology comes new potential for creative storytelling and an enhanced home entertainment experience.

Here's a list of three noteworthy trends we've got our eye on in today's digital home.

In an attempt to copycat Apple's hardware-plus-software vertical approach to the mobile market, the Linux industry is fragmenting fast and risks undermining its best chance for beating the iPhone.

The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. Whereas Linux has been a rallying force in the enterprise server market, with diverse competitors and partners collaborating on a common code base to save costs and boost innovation, in the mobile market Linux has tended toward entropy.

Such entropy … Read more

Once upon a time Red Hat was content to be the enterprise Linux leader and VMware was happy to be the dominant virtual infrastructure vendor.

No more.

As the two companies have sought growth, they've increasingly stepped on each other's toes, with recent VMware marketing taking strong swipes at its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, highlighting Pizza Hut as a high-profile customer defection from Red Hat to VMware.

Can't the two companies just get along?

Probably not. Back in 2006, Red Hat and VMware announced an "expanded relationship to support customers and ISVs who are deploying virtualization.&… Read more

Google attracts an ever-growing horde of Android-loving developers. But can Google's developer growth outpace Apple's?

It's not clear, especially as the developer battle spans both client and cloud.

I'm a big fan of Google's open-source approach, but there are signs that Apple's control-all-delete-competitors approach is working and will continue to work. That is unless, of course, Google can effectively counter consumer lust for Apple gadgets with compelling cloud services that tie to a broader range of devices.

Google, while making a lot of progress with Android, has a long road ahead of it. However … Read more

Open-source software had a very good 2009, and all indications are 2010 is on track to be even better.

Enterprises turned to open source to shave money in the economic downturn and are staying with it now to drive greater innovation and productivity.

This brings great hope to open-source vendors, anxious to cash in on open source's rising popularity, but it also introduces some specific challenges as they scale their organizations to meet demand.

Specifically, since support is the lifeblood of any open-source business, how can companies expand their support capabilities while simultaneously scaling profitability? The two don't … Read more

We are now in the thick of development season in the TV business.

The process of getting a show on the air resembles a pyramid: it starts with our programming executives meeting with writers, producers, and agents to listen to pitches of new show concepts.

Television is a business of ideas, which makes new show development a thrilling experience; you never know where the next great project will come from, or the indelible mark that a resulting TV series could have on our culture.

Past performance, buzz, and the general zeitgeist all play a role in grabbing early attention. And … Read more