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SanDisk Releases 32 GB Solid State 2.5-Inch Hard Drive

A couple of months ago SanDisk introduced a 1.8-inch flash based hard drive for notebook computers. It has now announced a more mainstream 2.5-inch 32 GB capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) that could be dropped into any UMPC or micro-notebook and work right out of the gate.The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is only going to be available directly to PC manufacturers initially, and it will be offered as a drop in replacement for replacing existing hard drives.

The cost to PC manufacturers will be about $350 per drive when purchased in bulk.

At $350 per 32Gb 2.5″ drive or $11/GB, Solid State is going to be hitting the mainstream very soon.

Technorati Tags: ssd, hardware

KVM was announced a few months ago, it’s already in the Linux kernel and now has live migration:

Techworld.com – OS and Servers Insight – Linux-kernel virtualisation — finally on the fast track:

On the other hand, KVM appears to be on the fast path. This project first surfaced in October 2006; it found its way into the 2.6.20 kernel a few months later. On 25 February, KVM 15 was announced. This release has an interesting new feature: live migration. The speed with which the KVM developers have been able to add relatively advanced features is impressive; equally impressive is just how simple the code that implements live migration is.

Technorati Tags:   kvm, linux, virtualisation

Finally some sense shown about public transport. After being rejected by local government, central government has agreed to reopen the Onehunga train line.

Delight at Government’s decision to reopen Onehunga line:

Finance Minister Michael Cullen announced yesterday that the 3.5km branch line between Penrose and Onehunga – opened in 1873 but abandoned by regular passenger trains 34 years ago – would be reinstated for around $10 million.The Auckland Regional Transport Authority expects that a new station at a site yet to be determined, and extra trains for more than 500,000 passengers a year, will cost it another $3 million to $5 million.

Trains leaving Onehunga every half an hour from 2009 should give passengers a run of little more than 20 minutes into central Auckland, compared with bus trips sometimes three times longer.

Given reopening the train line is only 10 million and some of the roading projects are several billion dollars it struck me as incredibly short-sighted to ignore this project. Especially with 500,000 potential trips per years and Onehunga designated as a growth node.

Technorati Tags: onehunga, train

The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux and other operating systems. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. Most POSIX file system operations are supported, with the exception of full file ownership and access right support.

It seems to be quite stable, and is based on FUSE. Interestingly this does not seem to impact performance at all: NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver Performance.

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This graphic is very interesting.

‘Virtualization’ Is Pumping Up Servers
There was a surprising slowdown in unit sales of x86 servers in the fourth quarter, according to two prominent research firms, Gartner Inc. and IDC. For example, IDC found that sales grew just 1.1% to 1.85 million units, compared with 8.8% growth in the third quarter. That is the worst performance for the market segment since the dot-com bust, and IDC analyst Matt Eastwood lays the blame largely on virtualization.

Technorati Tags: xen, virtualisation, hardware

Useful extension, especially for those self-sign SSL certs: rmd for thunderbird too.

Technorati Tags: thunderbird, extension

From O’Reilly’s Radar, 95% of their incoming mail is spam: Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam.

• 829,890 SMTP connections made to our two gateway mail servers
• 904060 attempted message deliveries
• 49194 messages accepted (I think this is actually a little high due to a configuration problem with our Zimbra server.)
• 94.6% of all messages were rejected

I thought this was the most interesting comment for Paul Vixe:

every potential smtp improvement or replacement that could do anything to actually stop spam, has been systematically patented. the crap that’s left isn’t going to do any good. we’re headed for walled gardens.

If SMTP had been patented, modern email might have been still born. By extension the digital commons created with SMTP is now suffering greatly because software patents prevent better usage models.

Balancing the need of innovation against public good is hard, however 20 years+ for a software patent is just too long.

Technorati Tags: spam, patents

Conary: An innovative second-generation package manager

I agree with the review that all the conary jargon is very confusing.  Seems to be worth the effort though as conary might provide in the long run a good system for not just building software appliances, but a useful system for managing a large number of Linux systems.

Technorati Tags: conary, rpath

Configuration Automation & Centralized Management With Puppet on Ubuntu from HowtoForge.

Puppet seems easier to setup the cfengine, hopefully it will be as easy to use.  Using puppet to push up apt-get updates seems like a worthy task. Hopefully someone puts together a howto on the best practice for that.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, puppet