Thom Holwerda Archive

"In a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid."

The open-source Mozilla Foundation released the latest iteration of its Firefox Web browsing software on Friday, promising faster navigation, increased customization and improved security in the third beta version of its upcoming application. Labelled Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 3, the new installment of the Web browsing software claims many of the same types of improvements as the last several test versions of the application.

The first preview release of (K)Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake has been released. You can download Ubuntu here, and Kubuntu here. Screenshots can be found here and here.

"Well, it is that time of the year again. With Halloween done and over with its time for Thanksgiving and, before you know it, the holiday season. Every company realizes this and has made sure the stores are packed with cool new gadgets, gifts, and gizmos. This guide is going to go over a few of the items which appear of the wishlists of a few of the staff members. Nothing too formal, but you can get an idea of some of the cool products to keep an eye out for this season."

A major UK retail store and three of the largest PC vendors worldwide still have no plans to sell the version of Microsoft Windows that does not contain its media player, five months after the version was released. Microsoft started offering Windows XP N, a version of Windows without a bundled media player, in June of this year to comply with last year's antitrust ruling by the European Commission.

Intel's Hyperthreading Technology is being blamed for server performance problems. With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry.

"In such a scenario, Microsoft is investing money in software development, and even though the final product is great (and I use that term loosely) by itself, it is not so significant a change that people will upgrade immediately. I expect a lot of people to stick with their current office suite even when Office 12 becomes a retail reality; same could be the case with Windows Vista. Having said that, it's also a given that there is no way software development can come to a halt. What option does that leave the software industry with?"

SUSE Linux 10.1 alpha 3 has been released. Changes include: "Update to KDE 3.5 RC1; update of GCC to the current 4.1 development version; removal of linuxthreads support; NetworkManager will be the new way of managing changing network interfaces, Kinternet is now in maintenance mode; update to Linux kernel 2.6.14.2; /dev on tmpfs is mandatory, a static device directory is not supported any more; udev is now the sole program for handling hotplug events, superseding the old hotplug package."

"So who blinked in Tunis - the US or everybody else? After two years of bickering, it looks like it was everybody else, and that the US will still control the root directory of the Internet. Of course, that depends on who's doing the spinning."

"If you shop around, you can actually get a functional computer for $500 (EUR 425,-). But as we become more budget conscious, $500 seems to be a bit much for a standard machine, so what's our next target? Why, it's an over ambitious $100 (EUR 85,-) notebook. How companies accomplish this is their business; what we are interested in is what they ship out for a product when all is said and done. As of now, however, there is one thing that interests me even more, and that is, why would they want to sell me a $100 notebook in the first place?"

Teo Wan Ping, IBM Singapore's brand manager for information management, said that IBM could "potentially offer" a free starter edition of DB2, as part of the company's strategy to gain mindshare for its database product. IBM currently does not have a free version of its DB2 product, unlike free competing products like Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and Oracle's Database XE released recently.

Dr. Dobb's Journal has published the first articles in a series on the popular Google Summer of Code. These articles cover the following four projects: 'Apache Axis2 JMX Front', 'CL-GODB: a Common Lisp GO Database Manipulation Library', 'Wide Character Support in NetBSD Curses Library' and 'gjournal: FreeBSD GEOM Journaling Layer'.

"When Office 12 arrives sometime in the second half of 2006, you may stop hating Microsoft Office. We looked at an early, private beta version of the suite and found a lot of improvements. Although the interface is radically changed, a lot of the underlying features and commands remain the same. We won't promise using Office 12 will be trouble-free, but so far it looks like a big step forward." Another look at beta 1 can be found here.

MIT has unveiled its $100 hand-cranked laptop computer to the United Nations technology summit in Tunisia and said that it hopes to make millions of the devices to give to the poorest people in the world. The lime-green machines, which are about the size of a text book, will offer wireless connectivity via a mesh network of their own creation allowing peer-to-peer communication and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply.