True, this transition has been underway for a long while, mirroring what occurred when Apple ditched PowerPC. The whole process makes a ton of sense for Sun, considering x86 is overwhelming the workstation market. In additions, strict RoHS requirements for large businesses have probably put some pressure on UltraSPARC’s power hungry, heat belching chips. Sun’s efforts with Fujitsu to release their next-gen version of SPARC for servers should attract the attention.

All these news tidbits about the UltraSPARC brings feelings of nostalgia. One of my first “Real” workstations was the pizza box SPARCstation 10. A truly great learning experience that opened the door to OpenBSD. It didn’t take much convincing to remove the aging version of SunOS that came preloaded on the box from the garbage heap.

This article from PC World does a great job at breaking down the current state of the union of XP. Basically, the public has been presented with:
Windows XP will no longer be available for purchase from Microsoft for general retail and OEM partners as of June 30, 2008

Curious about this statement, we contacted a vendor (who happens to be Dell for this instance). It was interesting to know that their OEM education/government sector has a relationship with Microsoft which can change daily. Thus, a firm answer cannot be had. The only way to ensure your order will ship with XP is to call your sales rep and have them check.

Based on the article above, there are various ways to getting around the June 30th cutoff. One of them is the “Vista downgrade,” which could be the failsafe way to order OEM during June. It appears that ongoing support and patches will be carrying on until 2014, so no need to panic. Happy ordering.

Any way to increase your insight into a drives health is critical if you are concerned about uptime. According to a citation in Wikipedia from Seagate:

Mechanical failures, which are usually predictable failures, account for 60 percent of drive failure.

Distilling this idea to the core, all drives constantly monitor for an impending failure. In a user environment where reboots are a regular occurence, your bios may catch this failure in time. However, when using a unix/linux server, you will want to keep a watch on any hints from the drive. Enter Smartmontools.

In true Sourceforge nature, crossplatform instructions are included for smartmontools. This small utility simply polls your drives for any failure state indicators at specified time intervals. From here, you can instruct the daemon to log your events and issue notifications via email. Full instructions available on a superb writeup on Howtoforge.

For those of us who rely on Firefox 2 on a daily basis, you may notice that the memory usage gets out of hand after a while. For the users who keep a browser open for days, this can be a problem. Trashing is apparent when checking out old tabs, as they were probably thrown into swap space.

This article dives into techniques used by the dev team to hunt down memory leaks. This goes beyond the basic malloc trimming as expected. Since the browser is cross-platform, it goes into learning to track allocations in XP, Linux, OSX. Very helpful for extension builders. Not surprisingly, cache is getting also tune-up when dealing with images. The benefits are shocking. Keep diving, because they lay out a black and white comparison to IE. Bottom line:
Firefox 3 ends up about 400mb smaller than IE7 at the end of the test!

Why wax poetic about little Firefox 3 memory usage improvements? The answer is simple. Just ponder the new business model of productivity software. Large corporations now have the option to buy hosted solutions to handle their word processing, spreadsheet, email, etc… The end result is very similar to the offerings from google. You now subscribe to software which is centrally maintained and secured. The only client side installation to maintain will be your browser. The improved memory footprint of Firefox 3 should greatly improve this experience, especially those of us who keep open 20+ tabs at once.

It just so happens that the iPhone is filling the gap more each day. Considering I’m in the market for something with tight PIM integration, it is no wonder I would consider the iPhone. However, with all the favorable opinions and market share pointing to the Blackberry, it has been difficult to choose otherwise. Strictly speaking, what consists of a “Blackberry Killer?”

Ballmer said it- Developers. It should be painfully obvious that recent announcements by Apple are downright huge. Huge in the sense of computing platforms. (without a keyboard) First off, iPhone 2 software, now the SDK. Until now, the common way to use custom software was to use simple, yet warranty-breaking “hacks.” Much of that mentality will disappear with the ability to use Java SDK and Apple’s own SDK. This software will actually be legitimate, and take direct advantage of on-board controllers like the accelerometers. We can all think of some cool use cases here.

On the corporate side. Push email. Exchange server. What more do you need to know? Apple has made an initiative to tap the connection to thousands of businesses who already have a solid installation of Exchange. “I want an iPhone, but we have to use a Blackberry because of Exchange” - No longer will you hear this. Yes, we are aware that the current ATT edge network isn’t the most speedy for mail use. Apple counters with a 3G net?work capable version announcement. Watch the smartphone market share tables turn this fall…

My concern was the overhead of a network protocol, but they claim theirs only contains basic read/write.  Stuffed directly into the ethernet frames.  Other protocols such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel exist, but they are at a much higher price point.  Essentially, all you have to purchase is a rackmount frame full of drives.  From there, you have the flexibility for any RAID variety, using the file system you choose.

CORAID

One has to admit Time Machine has a great presentation, but backups can be done a million other ways using the userland tools built in. Nothing wrong with offsite tapes! The mirrored dock probably won’t create a frenzy, but the ‘new’ features such as virtual desktops should.OS News Review of Leopard

All bias aside, this distro seems to boast a clean look for those that are already users of Google services.It is available as a downloadable live-DVD .iso to try on your PC.