Links of interest for 2 Sep 2009 - 24 Sep 2009:

  • IBM Throws Out Microsoft Office - Welcome to the party IBM. Sun did this years ago. 99% of people don't use half the functionality in MS Office anyway.
  • Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge' - ... and it's suffered on average a 2% decrease in performance per release over the last 10 releases making a cumulative drop of 12%. How are the Linux advocates in the corporate world substantiating this drop in performance? Solaris customers certainly wouldn't accept it.
  • Ellison: Sunacle is an IBM killer - `Ellison was adamant: "We are keeping everything. We're keeping tape. We're keeping storage. We're keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology - and we're going to increase the investment in it."'. Now if only the EU would hurry up and pull finger.
  • Why Oracle Wants Solaris - Forbes.com - This is very encouraging and now with Oracle's money and marketing machine (Sun's marketing has always been terrible) maybe we'll see Solaris rise back to the levels it enjoyed in the dot com boom.
  • Some perspective to this DIY storage server mentioned at Storagemojo - The bits about the super cheap BackBlaze "DIY-Thumper" that most people don't think about and that BackBlaze won't be advertising any time soon. So if you're contemplating one of these over a Thumper, have a read of this post before parting with your cash. You'll be glad you did.
  • Not every cloud has a silver lining: Cory Doctorow - This is exactly why I've not really embraced "cloud computing". I have no need for it. Yes, I use online storage like SmugMug, but that's only to share with the world, not to keep my originals.
  • Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage - This is pretty impressive and very very cheap indeed. One thing I must disagree with though is the use of Linux and JFS. Being slightly biased I'd say these bad boys are prime candidates for OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 and ZFS. Management would be a dream, performance brilliant and redundancy would be sooooo easy to implement.