Paul Rubens

Sometimes, things aren’t as they seem. Apple appears to have been doing splendidly over the past few years, with OS X expanding its market share quite dramatically. After almost disappearing off the face of the earth before the return of Steve Jobs, Apple’s share of the end-user operating system market a few months ago was […]

Microsoft’s operating systems have exploded in size during the past 20 years or so as their functionality increased to include thousands of features that weren’t considered necessary in DOS. Nowhere is this more true than Microsoft’s Vista — a classic case of an OS so bloated and unwieldy it barely crawled along on machines that […]

A revolution that will see solid state drives (SSDs) sweep away a large percentage of conventional hard drives in servers and enterprise storage devices is about to begin. The onslaught of solid state drives in the consumer gadget market place has already become unstoppable, with manufacturers ditching spinning hard disks in everything from iPods to […]

There’s an old joke about the classic 19th century novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: It’s a book everyone wishes they’d read but nobody actually wants to read. It’s heavy going, in other words, but well worth it in the end. Microsoft must be wishing that enterprises felt the same way about its latest […]

Even if you’re not sending industrial secrets out in your everyday e-mail, there might be plenty of things you’d rather not have winging around in the clear. One way to make sure your e-mail is free from eavesdroppers is through the use of public key encryption (PKE). PKE isn’t just the preserve of large organizations. […]

When you’re out and about with your laptop, you probably like to frequent spots where you know you can score easy access to the Internet via a hotspot. When you’re outside your own home network, though, which you’ve probably secured with a password against strangers, you’re often at your most vulnerable. You never know who […]

If you ask Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner, he’ll tell you this: “Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard.” That’s what he said at the MidMarket […]

Imagine a trailer hooked on to the back of an Indy car – the effect on performance would be similar to what happens when you hook up hard drives to a server. That’s because a hard drive is a slow, delicate, mechanical component attached to a computer system that is otherwise made up of solid-state […]

Which lasts longer: an Apple computer or a jelly baby? One reason Apple will never supply enterprise operating systems is that the company treats its customers’ investments in its products with contempt. It encourages them to buy machines based on a particular processor or OS, only to turn around and abandon it as the company […]

Hold on to your horses! The wheels could be about to come off the OS X Apple cart. The Cupertino-based gadget-maker is well known for its highly successful iPhones and excellent iPod media players, but it is still trying to convince the world that it is serious about its legacy computer business as well. The […]