Dell may soon go the way of the Dodo bird. All the signs are there. Some of their recent announcements are setting off warning signals.

These include:
1) Announcements of additional job cuts (5,600 more jobs in addition to the 3,200 already announced).

Voltaic Systems Inc. will be releasing a solar-powered laptop bag that will charge laptops carried inside. The company already sells solar-powered bags that carry and charge cell phones, MP3 players and PDAs. This new bag called the "Generator" and will be the first bag designed to charge laptops.

Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Virtualization seems to be the buzz word all in IT are using these days. It can mean a bunch of different things depending on who you talk to. Refer to Wikipedia for many of the latest definitions. For our discussion let's define it as a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources in a way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.