Windows Longhorn slips again, becomes megaproject. Gates holds forth on Microsoft's next Big One [The Register]

Skip the Fortune interview with Bill Gates and read this analysis instead.  This is good news from Microsoft.  Bill wants to create a great operating system.  If Microsoft doesn't get distracted, they could do it; they definitely have the developer talent to make it happen. 

1:35:44 PM   

InterTrust sues Microsoft (on just about everything). Four more patent claims [The Register]

We should start voting on who should receive the Business Death Penalty. 

Two years ago I would have voted for RAMBUS to get electrocuted, and look how much pain and suffering that would have prevented.  Today I'm voting for InterTrust to get the death penalty.  If your business doesn't actually produce anything useful, but aggressively initiates patent litigation against businesses that do produce products that are successful on the open market, your business deserves to die.

10:32:26 AM   

Start-up builds absolutely enormous NAS device. Zambeel breaks cover [The Register]

This is a great idea, and once they demonstrate realiability they might actually succeed.  Of course every machine can still have a "system disk" it boots to, but instead of shoving a bunch of disks in each and every server, just allocate space for each one on the NAS cluster.  Much easier.

For most categories of applications, you won't see a huge difference in performance.  You'll have to be sure to separate "messaging" traffic (what usually goes on the LAN) from "storage" traffic by adding an extra NIC dedicated to the NAS network.

10:12:37 AM