gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

It’s not unheard of to have servers that can’t withstand an unexpected surge in load. Every system will break at some point. It’s just a matter of the capacity you plan for or additional capacity available that you’re able to reallocate automatically to handle the load.

I would’ve thought that this might have been a great way to show and use Windows Azure, the cloud computing initiative Microsoft is working on. This kind of thing was funny when Microsoft was a software company that was a little challenged on the IT management side of things, but when you’re starting to host people’s e-mail and try to get into hosting business applications for your customers it gets a bit more serious. I guess someone at Microsoft – in addition to the admins – might lose some sleep over this.

The call for speakers is still open for Impact 2009 until January 16. I’ve never been there, but from all I read and heard it sounds like an impressive SOA conference. I only saw a few repeat sessions and hands-on labs at WSTC 2008 from Impact 2008 and they were all of extremely high quality with excellent speakers.

Don’t know yet if any of my customers will be there or maybe even presenting. We’ll see.

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post titled “Do ads work?” and poses an interesting question…

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?

I’ve never thought about it this way, but it’s an interesting point of view.

So what’s the future of Microsoft? InfoWorld dreamed up five scenarios that I don’t really agree with. They all sound unlike anything I read or have seen about Microsoft. Many of these would either not make any sense looking at their partner strategies or the platform that they built.

The article by Steven Levy in Wired magazine about how Ray Ozzie wants to push Microsoft back into startup mode sounds much more believable and also shows some strategy that makes sense, something totally missing from the InfoWorld article. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do.

“Worried about the safety of your personal information? On second thought, maybe you’re not — if you shop with your American Express card, surf eBay or use an IBM system.” – Most Trusted Companies [via w3]

According to FSF’s filing Cisco’s Linksys divison is accused of distributing parts or whole copies of the GNU C library, Coreutils, Readline, Parted, WGet, GCC, Binutils, and GDB as part of some of their products. The filing further details that due to Cisco allegedly not providing the appropriate source codes to customers to which the binaries are distributed the licenses granted are void and the distribution constitutes copyright infringement.

The FSF seems to have been in contact with Cisco for quite some time, but due to lack of progress decided to file a suit against Cisco.

“We’ve been given this on a silver platter,” says Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM. “We might as well use it as an opportunity.” – Big Blue’s Big Plan [via Bobby's blog]

I wasn’t able to understand the article in the NYT about this so I haven’t posted about it, but Irving’s post about Living in a Smarter Planet actually does a better job of explaining this idea. Thank you!

Update: More links on Bobby’s blog.

“It meant that because Porsche had not declared the proportion of VW shares it controlled, traders may have been indirectly and inadvertently borrowing shares from Porsche, selling them to Porsche, buying them back from Porsche and then returning them to Porsche.”

Just in case anyone was wondering how our financial system actually “works”. [via vowe]

Interesting post over on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog about the troubles in Atlanta and how the IOC relationship came to an end.

This all happened long before I joined IBM and the only time I heard about the Olympics in Atlanta 1996 was in the PMF course where most of our scenarios and exercises were based on the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

I’m sure this was quite an interesting project to work on and it’s interesting to see that we already started using the Apache HTTP Server with custom extensions 12 years ago :-)