When I was in my teens, my dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, a slice of pizza cost a nickel. I didn’t think much of it. I was getting a slice and a coke for a buck at that time. Not too bad, I thought. Things change. Now as a father myself, I understand what he was trying to tell me. Cost has certainly gone up over the years. Pizza for my sons costs quite a bit more than when I was a kid.
Category Archives: Computing
Leaving Your Comfort Zone
I have a confession to make: although I work for a software development company, I am not a geek, and I don’t like change in either my hardware or software. Some months ago, I needed a new smartphone. I know people who get excited about new smartphones. But even after I chose a new one, and held my new phone in my hand, I could only fret about how it was different from my last phone. Of course, I got used to it (rather quickly as it turns out). Then, I got a new tablet. Again, my reaction was to stress about how I don’t know how to do everything I want on my tablet. Hmmm, I think I see a pattern here.
Included Free: Runs in the Cloud
We saw one of those signs while out shopping this weekend: “We’ll beat the competitor’s price or its FREE!”. So we enjoyed a good chuckle, because who is going to give anything away for free? But they got to use the word “FREE”, and I guess that’s all that matters. Along the same vein, today’s spam included one with the subject “Harness the Speed and Security of the Cloud”. Another chuckle for me…but I don’t think that was the goal of the sender.
The Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing admits that the popularity of the term “can be attributed to its use in marketing”. We recognize that emphasizing being a “cloud solution” can be marketing hype and so we don’t talk about “the cloud” as often as we talk about our features.
At Spitfire we are all about the functionality of our Spitfire Project Management System. A very significant portion of that functionality was created as a direct result of listening to our users. We are proud of both that functionality and the technological foundation that has allowed us to build an amazing feature set in our software. So, we talk about our features. A lot.
We don’t want to stop focusing on those features–and we promise we never will–but that same technological foundation that supports all those features was also designed to scale really, really well. Therefore, I’m taking a moment today to emphasize that, yes, of course, the Spitfire Project Management System runs “in the cloud”, and that is equally true whether you think that means Software as a Service (SaaS) or software that scales incredibly well and runs on redundant virtual servers not tied to any local footprint. Continue reading
TweetChoosing Project Management Software
Most companies embark down a surprisingly unplanned and unstructured path when looking at project management software.
Sometimes the initiative starts from the top, sometimes it starts with Project Managers, and sometimes it starts with an IT department. However, it is surprising how often these searches begin without the other players knowing about the search, without evaluation criteria being established, without budgets being established – basically with no plan at all.
TweetData Deduplication and Single Instance Storage
Okay, so this article is for the IT Crowd, or at least those who thought the British comedy was funny. You see, sales told me that the fact that our system includes automatic and transparent Data Deduplication is so darn dry and boring that they couldn’t imagine including it in a fact sheet anywhere.
Apparently, the feature is so obscure that even Google Chrome’s spell check doesn’t believe “deduplication” is a word. Maybe that’s why Wikipedia has entries for both Data Deduplication and Single Instance Storage.
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