Useful Vendor Swag

Inspired by a question from @jfrappier, here is a bunch of vendor swag I’ve received over the years that has actually proved useful. Hopefully this will help marketing at the various vendors to invest in useful swag and not pointless landfill. The biggest issue with swag is its marginal utility:… Read More

Why SWOT Sucks

SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) continues to be popular for some reason, and it’s great, because it gives me a very fast way to figure out that someone doesn’t know what they’re doing. It saves me time, and that’s lovely. SWOT is conceptually simple to understand, which is also… Read More

Erasure Coding For Fun and Profit

As part of Data Field Day 1, we spoke to a company called HGST. A team from HGST actually invented the hard drive back in the 1950s, not far from their current office in Silicon Valley. They’ve been bought a sold a few times, most recently to Western Digital, and… Read More