Fact: You can run Accpac’s Database Dump utility while users are logged in. Myth: The resulting files will always contain a consistent copy of the data. Please note that the comments below have nothing to do with collation issues, which are a se...

  The clamor has started in the investment community for Bill Gates’s return as CEO of Microsoft. This led me to reconsider a favorite conspiracy theory once presented to me by Captain Eyeoh. Here’s a watered down version.   “Bill and Steve figure...

“After increasing for decades, computer clock speeds have essentially been stuck at about three gigahertz for the past several years.”- Scientific American, June 2010“These vendors … are bringing unprecedented levels of performance computing power...

“We had NO server for ten years. Two years ago we bought our server. Why would we need a second server now or at all?” I’ve struggled to answer this question in a way that would make sense to the poser. If someone out there in the cloud has a ...

A few days ago, I read, “The iPhone OS has overtaken Windows Mobile, moving into third place behind Symbian and BlackBerry, says a Gartner study.” I don’t usually get sentimental about Microsoft, but something about this seemed sad. Microsoft ...

The January / February Oracle magazine had a picture of Larry Ellison stroking a new Sun Oracle Database Machine (Exadata V2). A skeptic could say that the Exadata was nothing more than a welcoming ceremony for Oracle’s latest acquisition. I h...

During the holiday season, I happened to be remote-desk-topping within a remote-desktop session and got caught – a web site I visited was painting diagonally falling snow across their pages to simulate winter weather. My machine slowed to a cr...

This is a follow-up from last month’s solid state drive post. If you are reading this article out of desperation, here’s a quick tip: review Accpac’s recommended database settings and make sure that the server and workstations are in complianc...

Today’s press releases, such as “MySpace dumps server hard disks for flash drives” may not seem to have any relationship with Accpac. It does. If you follow certain lines of reasoning, flash drives could mean massively faster performance character...

Is IBM Dead? You might think that IBM is irrelevant after reading a book like Rick Chapman’s In Search Of Stupidity, or by looking at the battles for computer industry dominance between Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Apple. Teenagers who know the n...

What can we make of Bing, now that the announcement frenzy has died down First, let’s provide a tiny bit of context. Microsoft is engaged in 3 major wars for computer industry dominance. Microsoft’s challengers are Google, Oracle and Apple. There ...

A lot of people at Insights stopped me to say, “Hi Don, I remember you from your passionate Accpac keynotes. By the way, how did you get ready for speeches like that?” Let me answer that here. I started by taking a long, meditative walk in the woo...