consolidation Archives - The Silicon Underground

Central Hardware, St. Louis history

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 11:00:54 +0000

St. Louis-based Central Hardware was one of the first big-box home improvement chains. It peaked in 1993 at 39 stores in six states in the midwest, employing 3,700 people. It was once the 19th largest hardware retailer in the United

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SSDs might be getting less interesting, but that’s not necessarily bad

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:04:14 +0000

Ars Technica has a story about SSD news coming out of CES. Basically, they’re predicting that the big news this year will be consolidation and lower prices. That may be bad news for someone who writes about SSDs for a

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Kids these days, not knowing the name Grace Hopper

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 05:25:15 +0000

The guys at Hackaday dug up a video of the late Commodore Grace Hopper (the rank is now called Rear Admiral, but the rank of Commodore just seems appropriate for a computer science pioneer) and the poster admitted he’d never

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If the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is dead, good riddance

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:08:34 +0000

If you haven’t seen, the Department of Justice voiced its lack of support for AT&T’s buyout of T-Mobile USA. I find myself agreeing with Sascha Segan’s analysis at PC Magazine. A leaked letter a couple of weeks ago indicated that

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First impressions of VMWare

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 03:38:58 +0000

I've been setting up VMWare ESX Server at work, and it's quirky, but I like it. I shut it down improperly once (logging into the console on its Linux-based host OS and doing a shutdown -h now resulted in a system that wouldn't boot anymore) so I'm afraid of what may happen. The upside is since every virtual machine is just a collection of files, disaster recovery is dirt simple: Build a VMWare box, restore those files from backup, point the VMs at them, and you're back in business. No more need to worry about locating identical or close-enough-to-identical hardware. For that reason alone, I'd advocate running all of my Windows servers in production environments on VMWare, since Windows isn't like a real OS that will allow you use a disk or image on dissimilar hardware with minor adjustments. We get some other benefits too, like allowing us to put all the toy servers in one box with RAID to protect us in a disk crash. We've lost far too much to disk failures on desktop PCs recast as someone's pet-project server.

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I’m back.

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 20 Jun 2001 17:11:44 +0000

Very interesting. Just as everyone's proclaiming Linux dead, Red Hat goes and turns a profit for the first time. Yes, there are too many Linux companies. Yes, there'll be consolidation. No, I'm not convinced that selling it at retail is necessarily the best way to proliferate the system.

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Hardware developments

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 05 Oct 2000 17:41:45 +0000

Hardware news. Lots of stuff today. We'll take it one at a time.

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