...more recent posts
Anandtech review of Intel X25-E SLC SSD vs. Seagate Cheetah 15K SAS vs. Western Digital 1TB SATAII RAID Edition.
...[T]he fact that eight [Intel X25-E] SLC drives need 129W less power than eight SAS drives while offering 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance is a small revolution in storage land....For me these SSD (i.e., solid state drives - no moving parts, data is stored much like it is in memory) are still too expensive. The Intel units run around $12 per GB, while the monsterous WD 1TB drive comes in at an amazing $0.19 per GB. But the SSDs already make sense for some applications, and in a few years the prices will come down. I can't wait. CPU speed almost doesn't matter for what I do (well, it does matter, but they are already so fast and scaling well,) it's disk I/O that is always the bottleneck. So SSDs are how computers in my life will get faster. If not in my next server for sure in the one after that.
[T]he Intel X25-E is nothing short of amazing: it offers at least 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance at less than a tenth of the power consumption of the classical SAS drives. We frankly see no reason any more to buy SAS or FC drives for performance critical OLTP databases unless the database sizes are really huge. From the moment you are using lots of spindles and most of your hard disks are empty, Intel's SLC SSDs make a lot more sense.
Flash z-index problems supposedly solved.
Q & A with Charlie Miller who won $5000 by compromising a fully updated MacBook through a Safari vulnerability. Ouch. To say he's unimpressed with OS X would be putting it mildly.
More campaigning to stop the madness that is Internet Explorer 6. Of course it won't work. But I did learn that Windows 2000 doesn't have IE 7 or 8, so a lot of businesses (that's mostly who would still be using Windows 2000) have no choice but to use 6 if they're going to use IE.
In case I get the new client I'm talking to this is the first thing I'm going to send him: The 300 million dollar button.
Pretty important Clay Shirky article: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
Accept credit cards anytime, anywhere, using the iPhone. Wow, that looks amazing.
A couple cool new to me tools: htop is top on steroids, and iftop is like top for network usage. Very nice.
Rumors that IBM might buy Sun. I'm generally skeptical about huge deals like this. But I definitely want the cool Sun technology - especially ZFS - to stick around and mature. And if that means IBM needs to buy them then I'm good with that.