Somewhere out there!

AnandTech: The MacBook Air CPU Mystery: More Details Revealed:

Why did Apple and Intel opt for a hotter than necessary chip for use in the MacBook Air? Here’s where our trail goes cold but we suspect that in order to bring the smaller CPU/chipset packaging to market earlier, some tradeoffs had to be made. Remember that CPU packaging controls far more than how big the chip is, but also governs FSB frequency, power delivery and getting data in and out of the chip itself.

The shiny die connects to hundreds of pins on the bottom of the package. The more pins that need to be connected, the higher the FSB frequency and the smaller the chip the more strain this puts on the packaging technology itself. It’s quite possible that one side effect of the small form factor CPU package is worse power delivery, requiring that the chip be given a higher than normal operating voltage.

The bigger concern however has nothing to do with packaging technology or operating voltages, but overall thermals. The MacBook Pro runs very hot and while the 20W TDP of the MacBook Air is significantly lower than the 35W TDP of the Pro, it’s high for such a small chassis. We won’t know for sure how hot the Air will get until it’s in our hands but the SSD route seems like an even better bet now that we know a little more about what we’re dealing with. Cutting down heat in that thin chassis will be very important, and moving to solid state storage is the only real option you have there

After seeing this post about Contact syncing with Zimbra and Thunderbird by Zindus. I figured I also see what progress the Mozilla Calender project had made.

Last time I checked Mozilla Calender was at 0.3, it is now at 0.7 and has come a long way. Installing 0.7 and adding an ICS shared link calender link from Zimbra just works and is very cool. It is possible to add events from Thunderbird, but I’ve noticed some issues deleting events. Tasks can also be added, but with Zimbra 4.5 they don’t seem to appear in the WebUI.

Some even further cool is the Provider for Google Calender, which also allows you to sync via the Private XML link to Google Calenders. Adding and deleting events seems to work with this provider, but not tasks.

Update: Zimbra events in Thunderbird can be “deleted” by cancelling them. (note from p24t: As of 5.0RC1 and earlier, Calendar events cannot be ‘deleted’ from Tbird. They must be marked as ‘Status: Cancelled’ through the properties dialog ‘More’ section (lightning 0.5) or from the menu Options -> Status -> Cancelled (lightning 0.7RC1) )

Remember The Milk for Gmail:

Remember The Milk for Gmail is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail complete, postpone, and edit tasks, add new tasks and connect them with your emails, contacts, and Google Calendar events, automatically add tasks for starred messages or specific labels, and much more.

From Paul.

This post on Is ZFS ready for primetime? is disconcerting. I’ve put a lot of effort recently in engineering a zfs based storage server to backend a xen cluster. I haven’t put much up here and a back injury has restricted the amount of seat time. Without much tuning I’ve put together a TB+ system that provides 85Mb/s over NFS to a RAIDZ2 pool.

Throughout the whole period it has been a constant struggle to get Opensolaris working, figure out ancient Solaris ideas about system management. Sort out a kernel bug that caused crashes when running bonnie++.

Being held ransom by the idea of needing a Sun support contract at some future unknown date due to a bug in zfs seems to me as a losing position. Being forced into that position I think misses the point of opensource. Zfs provides striking advantages with checksums and simple snapshots, easy offline remote replication. But without the idea that your data is safe there is no point.

I can put together a Linux storage system without thinking and manage it without much thought. The lack of constant time snapshots is going to hurt, but at least I know the exact same system will still work in 2 years without any changes.

VLC problems on Visata? Switch to the opengl output driver.

I set of flash demos look at Nexenta Operating System. Particular interest at creating zones and using BrandZ for etch. The demos seemed to be based on the new NexentaCP server platform which is the basis for NexentaStor.

A clear look at CIFS in Solaris by Alan Wright:

Many people assumed or desired that the Solaris CIFS server project would be like Samba but what would that achieve? Sure, it would avoid breaking any eggs, i.e. avoid making substantial changes to Solaris, but Samba is available on Solaris today. There is no point in creating another Samba. If you truly want an integrated CIFS implementation, that can really inter-operate with Windows at a fundamental level, the operating system has to support certain core features. Eggs will have to be broken.

An interesting commentary on the different business models for the new phone platforms, Apple vs Nokia: Nokia, the N810 Tablet & the Long View « GigaOM.

To be sure, both the iPhone and the N810 are phenomenal pieces of engineering. But Apple is actively trying to restrict what runs on the application in an arms race of unlocking, software updates, and bricking. This has forced many firms (Skype, Webot) to get “applications” on the iPhone through the Safari browser.

Contrast this war with Nokia’s handset, which is based on Linux. Nokia is building a platform that can run arbitrary software. It’ll be messy, and will go through several iterations. But in the end, we know how this story plays out: iPhone is Compuserve; Nokia is the Internet. (Google’s (GOOG) much-speculated mobile device is also rumored to run a pared-down Linux.)

Caution: Killing Germs May Be Hazardous to Your Health is a good article on “our war on microbes has toughened them. Now, new science tells us we should embrace bacteria.”

Nexenta Systems the guys behind the Debianised version of OpenSolarias have release a commercial storage appliance version of Nexenta:

Nexenta Storage Appliance is designed and built to operate as 2nd tier storage alongside pre-existing commercial storage, providing online continuation of data for months and years, with tapes relegated to archival purposes only. The appliance is targeted for 2nd-tier NAS and iSCSI applications requiring extremely low cost storage as well as dramatically simplified provisioning, expansion, backup, replication and archiving. NexentaStor can also be used as a primary NAS in businesses that wish to expand at closer to commodity pricing.

They have a VMware based evaluation version for download, and access to the bare metal install requires talking to their sales team.

From Martin Man.