David Bottomley's Blog

Being in IT for over 20 years, having been there, done that, I have seen just about everything under the sun in the IT industry, so it takes quite a bit to get me to 'geek out' and get excited about a solution, but Amazon AWS and Cloudberry Backup together create a very slick solution.   Previously, I used GreenGeeks for my web site hosting, and Crashplan for my backup service.  I had no issues with either service, but they were both coming up for renewal and since I had pre-paid for both services years in advance, I was losing the associated discounts, and both services would revert to $10 per month each.  Granted, that is not a lot in the enterprise world, but there is no sense paying more than necessary especially for personal and not professional use.   I run a Windows 2016 server at home for my home network- it controls Active Directory authentication for our family, DNS, DHCP, and is attached to a Drobo redundant storage device.  There are critic...

According to a Center for Immigration Studies report in 2017, 21.8 percent of US residents (67 million people) do not speak English at home.  That statistic has doubled in the last 27 years- it was 11 percent in 1980.  In America's five largest cities, 48 percent of residents now speak a language other than English at home.  Their report states that "In New York City and Houston it is 49 percent; in Los Angeles it is 59 percent; in Chicago it is 36 percent; and in Phoenix it is 38 percent."   " Of school-age children (5-17) who speak a foreign language at home, 85 percent were born in the United States."  " Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.9 million (39 percent) told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well." Those statistics should be alarming.  Don't get me wrong- in today's world of charged immigration politics, let me be very clear.  I have absolutely no issue with legal immigrants (and neither does...

"Don't be evil" was once the corporate motto of Google, from 2000 to 2015.  Many silicon valley companies were created with lofty goals and ideals, including Google's mission to index the world's information, protect the privacy of it's users, and respect content creators.   Sadly, Google, including it's subsidiaries such as Youtube (and even Blogger where I write this) have strayed from their worthy foundations and into the realm of evil.  Evil behavior clearly includes censoring the content of its users, even if that content is perfectly legal and ethical, but simply goes against the political beliefs of those in power at Google.  This level of interference in the free exchange of information, causes not only a direct effect in terms of censorship, but also an indirect and much father reaching chilling effect on content creators.  You would think "don't be evil" would not be a controversial corporate motto, but alas Google dropped the motto...