Diane Greene is my hero

10/27/03

When I met Greene we spent a half-hour talking about the internals of the company's flagship host-emulation software, VMware. We chatted about the ugly part of emulating a CPU without breaking things, restarting instructions, register models and memory management. Fascinating stuff. I came away impressed. But the last thing she said to me stuck: "Don't just test our software, use our software."

How much did Microsoft's quality cost you today?

09/15/03

The world made Microsoft rich because Windows gave them personal power. But the power is waning as frustration levels mount. What new holes will be found?

Driver me crazy

06/23/03

Once a great hope for stability, driver certification programs have become just another profit center for operating system makers, say hardware makers, and they're partially right. We all suffer for lack of cross-industry standards for everything from driver nomenclature to traceability.

The big-picture view on product testing

05/26/03

Is it possible that security product reviews could actually be bad for the consumer in the long run? Interesting question. By focusing on things one can measure, and bypassing things one can't, one could argue that product reviews might encourage buggy, less secure products.

Five Nines, by the book

04/14/03

The kid caught me flat-footed, and I realized I was passing along 'spoon-fed' information about an important subject. I needed to educate myself on what five nines really means.

Let's hear it for latency

03/24/03

Throughput is meaningful, but only when a network is heavily loaded. Another metric, delay, is meaningful for all traffic, all the time, on all networks.

Documentation isn't what it used to be

01/13/03

Unfortunately, the number of vendors that supply clear, easy-to-follow hard-copy explanations of how to use their products is declining.

This is a test, please join in

11/18/02

Which features of .Net are most important to enterprise users?

Settling an argument on IP telephony features

10/07/02

IP telephony, while it promises to alter the way we use that hunk of plastic sitting on our desks, is still in search of its "killer app." Consequently, changing perceptions about IP-based telephones as an adequate replacement for TDM-based systems has been slow going.

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