I've been grumpy for quite a while about how Sun's Java RPM mutilatesyour system . Since I don't like my systems mangled,I've avoided installing Sun's Java on any of my systems unless Iabsolutely had to, and if I had to I tried to do it on an expendabletest system. This has been vaguely annoying, because even in Fedora 10there are things that don't work with the substitutes.

(One of them is the KVM over IP portion

Suppose that you're building some custom storage backend that issimply too big to be backed up, so you have only redundancy; thisis probably common if you're building a cloud-style environment or are otherwise dealing with a hugevolume of data. This leaves you with the redundancy history problem , where you're protected againsthardware failures but any mistakes are 'instantly' replicated to theredundant copies.

Suppose that you want to do better than this; you somehow want togive your redundant storage system

Despite what I wrote last entry , I think thatthere is an energy efficiency optimist's view and that it has a lot ofvalidity. It goes like this:

First, there are an increasing number of interesting devices on whichpower efficiency really does matter significantly, either because itsaves you money (such as compute clouds where you are charged veryprecisely for resource usage) or because it lets you run at all (laptopson battery power, low-power netbooks, cellphones, and so on).

Second