Out of curiosity, I very briefly tried the new Server 2008 Release Candidate (freely available from Microsoft). I’ve been using Vista 64-bit since I need to see all the memory in my machine and, while it works mostly OK, there are some low-level scheduling issues with it – for instance, sound is really choppy on battery power, no matter what I do with the power settings, so I can’t use the thing to watch a DVD or listen to music on the plane. Many others seem to be having the same issues, despite the funky Multimedia Class Scheduler nonsense that Microsoft put in the OS that makes networking slower (great info here), even though older incarnations were not suffering from media playback issues under load. And no, if I disable the Multimedia Scheduler it does NOT work better, it actually gets worse, which means that the service is there to fix some other kludge-y issue Microsoft introduced with the scheduler or something like excessive power throttling of certain devices.
My opinion on the Sun/NetApp altercation: Both companies should be grateful instead of resorting to lawsuits
Since opinions are like you-know-what, and since I’m decidedly anatomically complete in that respect (some, indeed, claim all of me is composed of implied anatomical part, so maybe that’s why I’m so opinionated), I thought I’d throw my $0.2 in the pot and not stay silent. The whole issue irks me quite a bit, actually.
Ate at the Staghorn steakhouse in NYC
At the insistence of my colleagues (that seem to enjoy the steak posts more than the high-falutin’ technology ones) I decided to visit another NYC steakhouse.
Ate at The Old Homestead in NYC
I’ve been hopped up on uppers all day (relax, just a huge amount of chocolate-covered high-test espresso beans, though the amount of caffeine was surely enough to get me disqualified from competing in any sport – every time I pee it smells like freshly-brewed coffee). Needing something to relax me, and since my bowel movements have been altogether too easy lately, I thought I’d go for steak. Two birds with one stone.
WAN acceleration for remote workers
The deluge of WAN accelerators from Cisco, Riverbed, Juniper, Expand, Packeteer,Bluecoat, Silverpeak etc. etc. is proving good for datacenters. Not sure how many vendors will remain viable in a year or two, but the selection at the moment is decent.