DarkWyrm Unabridged

Dave Probert, a kernel engineer for Redmond, has recently received publicity for his view that "The current approach to harnessing the power of multicore processors is complicated and not entirely successful, he argued. The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the operating systems model." Really. That's surprising. How long have we had multicore machines? Oh, wait. We've had multiprocessing since the, um, 1990s, right? With Intel's Core i7 having a quad core processor with Hyperthreading on each core -- a total of 8 processing threads -- isn't it time that Haiku had its day? I highly doubt that any of the regular OSes can pull this one off. BeOS really was ahead of its time and only now are people really getting it. My favorite quote from the article: "Responsiveness really is king. This is what people want." Duh.

My school is going through some changes between this year and next. In an effort to save some money, I volunteered to research some alternatives to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. So far, the only workable, totally free solution which should meet its needs is Scalable OpenGroupWare (SOGo), currently running on CentOS 5.3. It's a groupware solution which is totally free, mature, and supports CalDAV, unlike Citadel. With me being a big Ubuntu, this is a bit of a jump, especially when I'm kind of new to Linux in an enterprise context, but I've learned quite a bit already. What have I learned? The combination of Postfix and Dovecot is pretty darn easy to set up e-mail. There are also some definite head-scratcher moments when dealing with PostgreSQL, having only worked with SQLite before. Next stop, OpenLDAP. Oog. Even if my boss decides to ignore me, and my FOSS advocacy, at least it won't have been for nothing. It's been fun, too. :-)