Best of the blogs: A stressed out reader seeks the sage advice of Bob Lewis regarding a demeaning boss who lets emotions get in the way of proper communication. That's not to say Mr. Lewis goes easy on our reader, though. "There are effective ways to provide employees with guidance about how they are performing and how they should be performing. It appears your manager doesn't know them," he explains. "She should, but she doesn't. That means it's up to you to make the communication between the two of you more productive."

Storage: Very fat, hybrid disk drives just might emerge in a not-too-distant future, thanks to Fujitsu, reports Mario Apicella in this Storage Network post. The company is moving toward terabit per square inch drives in the form of thermally assisted magnetic recording, aka TAMR -- a combination of magnetic and optical recording. "Sounds promising," Apicella comments.

The news beat: Google bids adieu to Google Answers, its fee-based research service, without providing a reason for the shutdown, though speculation that it's in no small part because of Yahoo Answers comes quite easily. Oracle launches the Identity Governance Framework to create specs for sharing data across applications. And Nokia is looking a bit two-faced by simultaneously creating mobile application services and technology to enable operators to deem the services a low priority.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 29, 2006 11:11 AM