Geeking out and coming down from the US ISV CTO Summit

Last week we put on our first successful US ISV CTO Summit. The previous two weeks before the conference were crazy as we encountered all the typical last minute speed bumps. It was very much worth the effort from all the feedback that is still coming in. Congrats to Suresh and Larry for pulling this off.

As we come to the close of the fiscal year, this week is filled with housecleaning and ironing out last minute changes to our next fiscal year goals and objectives.

With the disappointing announcement of WinFS and its future, I wanted to go out there and check out the state of the union with today’s modern filesystems. I found a fairly objective decent review here:

http://www.answers.com/topic/comparison-of-file-systems

I also gleaned Hans Reiser, father of the ReiserFS filesystem, has a good sense of humor as I collected this quote from his footnotes on namesys.com in reference to NTFS:

Their FS design is perhaps optimal for floppies and other hardware eject media beyond OS control. A less serialized higher performance log structured architecture is described in [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. That said, Microsoft is to be commended for recognizing the importance of attempting to optimize for small files, and leading the OS designer effort to integrate small objects into the file name space. This book is notable for not referencing the work of persons not working for Microsoft, or providing any form of proper attribution to previous authors such as [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. Though perhaps they really didn't read any of the literature and it explains why theirs is the worst performing filesystem in the industry....

Note to self: don’t mess with very intelligent individuals, they come up with the most ingenious ways to insult you. (The above footnote had me ROFL.)

On the other hand, I’m seriously thinking of taking Jonathon Schwartz up on this offer from his blog:

So... here's an invitation to developers and customers that don't want to move to Solaris, want to stay on GNU/Linux, but still want to take advantage of Niagara's (or our Galaxy system's) energy efficiency - click here, we'll send you a Niagara or Galaxy system, free. Write a thorough*, public review (good or bad - we just care about the fidelity/integrity of what's written - to repeat, it can be a good review, or a poor review), we'll let you keep the system. Free.

For almost 10 years of my career, I’ve had a Sun workstation of some type in my office. Do you think the they’d let me keep one for a review posted on my blog? BTW, I couldn’t tell what video card comes with an Ultra workstation and I’d love to play around with XGL.