John Hazard

Catastrophic events such as storms, wars, financial meltdowns and disasters offer a unique opportunity for captivating observation (blow by blow news coverage) during the event and, later, exhausting review (post-event analysis). Hurricane Ike is no exception and for anyone interested in data center operations, backup and recovery, redundancy and how the hell to maintain 10,000 […]

There is no longer any doubt, Hurricane Ike is headed to Houston. Hewlett-Packard, with more than 8,000 employees in the Houston area, decided to close shop today, tomorrow and Sunday to let employees prepare homes and family for the storm, which most likely means evacuating. Houston is the primary home of HP’s Personal Systems Group […]

It’s been called the search for the God Particle, the very origins of the universe and the beginning of time. The effort is massive, akin to early days of the space program that put men on the moon in less than two decades. It involves extreme equipment – the Large Hadron Collider is a 16 […]

Arthur_ashe_stadium_interior.jpg When tennis player Mardy Fish relives his unexpectedly strong performance in the U.S. Open quarterfinals, he might be impressed with how he hung on against the world’s top player. He might also kick himself when he realizes how close he came to unseating the Wimbledon and Olympic champion, Rafael Nadal. Any coach, broadcaster, player […]

Richard Sarwal, VMware’s executive vice president of research and development, resigned his VMware post Sept. 2 and announced he is headed back to Oracle, from whence he came just nine months ago. VMware said Stephen Herrod, the company’s CTO and senior vice president of R&D, will “assume day-to-day responsibilities for VMware’s research and development organization,” […]

Silicon Valley could be the next Flint, Mich. Imagine it, once-manicured corporate campuses overgrown; corporate cafeterias where gourmet meals were once served to throngs of the well paid now serving as soup kitchens to the khaki-clad masses; grocery stores forced to sell inorganic brand names; Niman Ranch beef and $16 appetizers reserved for special occasions. […]

“UPDATE 2: Sarah Palin’s reps were full of it. Palin, the 44-year-old, first-term governor of the Kodiak state is and presumably always was McCain’s VP pick after all. I’ll blog on this later to see when Palin’s prospects first popped on InTrade and how it progressed.“ “UPDATE:So much for Crowd Sourcing … Pawlenty says, it […]

very_old_computer.jpg It is little wonder that the Federal Aviation Administration’s flight plan IT network crashed shortly after lunch Aug. 26, shutting down takeoffs at more than 40 airports nationwide. It is little wonder that the FAA’s IT staff and contractors had the system back up and running within a few hours. Smart, dedicated crews always […]

Microsoft Photosynth, the company’s three-dimensional photo reconstruction software, went public Aug. 20, letting users render in 3-D photos from Yahoo’s Flickr, Facebook or Google Picasso. Microsoft Photosynth works by linking photos to other photos on the Web where they overlap. It lets users combine an array of photos of a single location into a navigable, […]

Are you LinkedIn? Your resume on Monster? Your mug on MySpace? Your face on Facebook? Do you Yahoo? YouTube? Twitter? To listen to conventional wisdom, finding, keeping and excelling at your job now involves the tools we were only recently beginning to accept as tools for finding love. Still, not everyone Twitters, Monsters or LinksIn […]

IT Report Cards yesterday and this week were a mixed bag. The big names of enterprise IT showed little sign of an economic slowdown or recession. “IBM profits rose 22 percent on sales of services and software, much of it overseas“ “Intel profit rose 25 percent as demand for notebooks and desktops zooms“ “Microsoft revenue […]

Dreaming of being your own boss? Keep it between the sheets because this is no time to leave your employer to start up your own shop, say the brains at Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an executive placement and research firm. Credit is tight, inflation is driving the cost of doing business out of control, consolidation […]