Links for 2011 Apr 9
Pamela Jones, aka PJ, plans to retire Groklaw on May 16th. I was rather surprised to read that she started Groklaw eight years ago. Seems like yesterday that I was excitedly emailing links to her articles when SCO, aka M$’s proxy, tried to kill Linux. They’re still trying. But, as PJ says, now they’re going after Google, and Google can well afford to defend themselves.
Russ Cox makes an appearance on The Setup. I always find the articles interesting, and sometimes they help remind me not to take others too seriously. But Russ is an engineer’s engineer, and I’ve learned a few things I will make part of my toolkit.
FB, to my surprise, have done something v interesting: Open Compute. It’s not that their server design makes them cheaper than a box from Dell, but that they’ve made a very efficient server. There is very little power wasted. On a Dell, HP, or otherwise generic server, much of the power delivered to the box is thrown away. Every university data centre I’ve visited in Canada (three of them) all have capacity problems. They always seem to be just one plug short of a complete failure.
Mike Loukides wrote a brief article demonstrating the power, and utility, of a handful of command-line tools. You can do a lot with a little. But it takes a long time to become proficient with the tools, unless you’re able to use them daily.
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