Apple Discontinues ZFS Project

Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that ‘The ZFS project has been discontinued.

All signs point to licensing issues being the primary reason for Apple to cease development on the project. It is an unfortunate loss because ZFS was one of the more promising things I wanted to see included in MacOS X. Some have pointed out that

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

The goal for Google in this case is to dynamically adapt to the requirements of their workloads. It sounds great in theory. Ten million servers is an incredible number of machines to manage, without some very sophisticated software it would be quite a difficult task. If they can pull it off there are numerous benefits.

…including a “follow the moon” strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.

In increasingly large and complex environments it is clear that sophisticated automation will be required to address the inherent challenges in managing large numbers of servers and applications.

Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter ended September 26, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share.

Amazing that in a weakened economy Apple, who basically sell a luxury brand of consumer electronics is able to innovate their way to record breaking profits.

Dow Jones industrial average tops 10,000 again

The Dow is up a spectacular 53 percent from the 12-year low it reached in March, but it must rise 41 percent from its current level just to match its October 2007 record high.

The psychology of round numbers may have some influence on conditions, but everything I’ve read says we’re not nearly out of the woods yet. Still, it’s an encouraging sign.

NPR Gets $3 Million Grant For Hyper-Local News Initiative

The new funding will allow a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations with the resources to provide in-depth, hyper-local news on a topic that is most relevant to the community where the station is located. The grants also allow the stations to hire new “journalist bloggers,” who will focus exclusively on reporting and aggregating news about a topic relevant to that city. The pilot radio and TV stations have not been chosen yet.

Interesting, I wonder which cities will be chosen.