Clouds

DoubleCloud » What Lessons You Can Learn from Google on Building Infrastructure

I’m going to add this site to my blogroll. The author is one of VMWare’s R&D honchos. Interesting tid-bit on how to DOS Google if you’re so inclined. Some of the search queries can cause huge IO. One example Jeff gave is “circle of life” as one phase enclosed in double quotation marks. It could incur 30GB I/O before. As I just searched on Google, the phrase is now a song name.

Yet another reason not to trust “the cloud”

Courtesy of Intuit Works to Restore Online Access – WSJ.com: Intuit Inc. said it is trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night, leaving consumers and small businesses without access to online versions of the company’s accounting and tax software. Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.

The iPad Will Be The Best Thing To Happen For Desktop Virtualization & VDI Adoption

More iPad tastiness – “The iPad Will Be The Best Thing To Happen For Desktop Virtualization & VDI Adoption” – Liberty Technology Blog. Excellent read on the iPad as a desktop virtualization thin client. If you’ve seen any science fiction (StarTrek, Babylon 5, etc) they all use iPad/tablet like computers. The traditional laptop/desktop form factor requires you working at a desk. If you’re doing anything standing up, normal computers fail.

The Problem with the Cloud

Is that you need to have ubiquitous Internet to make it work. Google OS: the end of the hard drive? – CNN.com. This looks like a neat device. But if none of my data is stored on the device, it is useless for reading email or working on documents. Wifi coverage is sporadic and expensive. Cellular coverage is even more expensive. WiMax (aka Clear) is only available in a few markets.