Stories by Cameron Laird

Ian Murdock: From Debian to clustering

The ian in Debian Linux stands for Ian Murdock, a former research staff member at the University of Arizona and coauthor of the Swarm storage system. He's now president and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Progeny Linux Systems, headquartered in Indianapolis. Progeny is commercializing Progeny Debian and the Linux NOW clustering system, which emphasizes manageability at least as much as performance, the traditional selling feature of Linux clusters.

Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is ubiquitous. At least, it's sometimes seemed that way; he's known to computing specialists as the primary author of the open source definition, the former project leader for Debian, a senior programmer with Pixar, the creator of Electric Fence, and a prolific advocate of GNU/Linux and related open source matters.

The warp and woof of data storage

We all know the future of computing storage. Well before Amazon.com Inc. common stock pays a dividend, there'll be essentially three kinds of computer storage. First, tiny holographic biogelled libraries the size of a dime will be able to hold your entire digitized life history under your skin, or the dashboard of your personal mover, if not your toaster. Really large projects will offload to storage-over-next-next-generation-Internet-Protocol. Backup will be as much of a utility as potable water, with pro-quality encryption and super-high availability assumed. Finally, there'll be a few magtape readers and writers, because ... well, just because there'll always be magtape.