The Pervasive Data Center

At the end of July, Sun posted a screenshot from "Project Renaissance," an effort aimed at creating a new user interface (UI) for OpenOffice. The prototype includes a "ribbon" UI in the vein of the one that Microsoft introduced for Office 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the user comments were critical and devolved into Microsoft bashing.

I never got the ribbon-hate myself. Well, OK, that's not really true. A lot of people don't like change and a lot of people like ragging on Microsoft for whatever reason.

However, I always found it more than … Read more

"Database" has come to be largely synonymous with a relational database management system (RDBMS) or, more specifically, a relational database that is accessed using the SQL query language. Some simpler products run on desktops, but if you are talking about products used for serious business computing on a server, SQL it is. The widespread adoption of open-source products such as MySQL and PostgreSQL only cemented SQL's dominance by making it available to a broad audience that couldn't afford licensing fees for products from Oracle and other large database vendors.

An RDBMS stores data in the form … Read more

Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn't sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.

Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that "For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related … Read more

As human beings we like analogies. Admittedly, we sometimes overextend them and end up obfuscating rather than clarifying. Such is arguably the case with cloud computing and the electric grid. However, a good analogy can not only make the new and unfamiliar more comprehensible but can even bring fresh insights based on history and past patterns.

Many of you are probably familiar with the computing-in-shipping-containers theme that Sun most popularized but that a variety of vendors has picked up on in various forms. The idea is that a shipping container is the largest thing that can be easily transported around … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Cloud-computing events are in vogue these days. Wednesday's CloudCamp Boston (actually held across the river at Microsoft's Research and Development facility in Cambridge, Mass.) was a good one.

To be sure, I read a few online commentators who were of the opinion that the material in the formal part of the event--CloudCamp is organized as a combination of pre-organized talks and an unconference format--was far too basic. However, a lot of the questions I heard and conversations I had at the event suggest to me that a lot of people are still trying to get their … Read more

[Update: Additional commentary from Stephen Hemminger added.]

Microsoft set off a barrage of commentary earlier this week when it released three drivers under the GPL v2 to be part of Linux. The main purpose for doing so appeared to have been to make Windows Server and Hyper-V more effective as a virtualization foundation for Linux guest operating systems.

I was less shocked by the news than some. It struck me as a smart business move by Microsoft to further dispel both the reality and appearance of not playing well with other operating systems and tools. From a practical perspective, offering … Read more

Standards evolve in a lot of different ways. However, broadly speaking, they fall into two main buckets: de jure and de facto (to use the Latin-derived legalese). By law and by fact.

In high tech as elsewhere, it's often a matter of historical accident and political maneuvering that determines which approach wins out in a particular area of technology. And it can be a high-stakes game for the companies involved, with big players often seeking to position their approach as a "standard" even if it's only standard in the sense of being ubiquitous (think Microsoft Windows) … Read more

VMware's financial results from the second quarter of 2009 are out. They beat revenue and income estimates but those estimates were far less euphoric than during VMware's spectacular growth days of a few years back. Second-quarter revenue was $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008. Operating income on a GAAP basis was down 38 percent from the year-ago quarter and down 14 percent non-GAAP.

International revenue saw about 3 percent growth but this was counterbalanced by a similar decline in the U.S. International revenue is now almost equal to those in the U.S.--$… Read more

We've been hearing a lot about thinner client devices of late. Netbooks are a hot topic, whether or not they're really a distinct category of device. I've wondered if there might not be a role for a sort of ebook-on-steroids. And Google's Chrome OS, pitched for a browser-centric world, had the digerati all in a flutter a few weeks back.

A lot of this activity reflects a general move away from software that is locally installed and run on a traditional PC to software and services housed on servers out on the network--in the cloud, to … Read more