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Tech News: Killing Two With Just One

Kill two Windows servers with one Xserve

At its core, Xserve is a two-socket Core microarchitecture Xeon (Woodcrest) rack server. As I wrote in my review, in hardware design, Xserve lives up to market standards. Some touches, like the SAS/SATA drive bays, a PCI-X slot for existing expansion cards and the SuperDrive dual-layer DVD burner, help tip the scale in Xserve’s favor. But the reason to buy Xserve is OS X Server: No other server app platform rivals it, and no other server system runs it. If you want OS X Server, you need a Mac, and Xserve is the only Mac that’s equipped with external drive bays and a baseboard management controller.
by Tom Yager.

Faster external drives arriving–slowly

Brace yourself: there are good odds another port will start popping up on PCs soon.
This one is for eSATA, an external version of the technology that’s used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives, so the technology would be welcome for those trying to back up digital photo archives or who need added capacity for storing digital music or recording video.
by Michael Kanellos.

The battle for wireless network drivers

BSD and Linux programmers have had a lot of success in creating drivers for new computer hardware in a timely manner, but much of their effort has been without the support of major hardware manufacturers. Intel, Marvell, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, though separate and competing entities, seem by one consent to prevent non-Microsoft operating systems from working properly with some of their most widely-used network chips. To find out more about this situation, I interviewed representatives from network chip manufacturers and programmers from free software operating systems. Their answers are below.
by Jem Matzan.

1990-1995: Microsoft’s Yellow Road to Cairo

Automatic PC sales of DOS rapidly made Microsoft one of the largest software companies of the 80s. As its market power increased, it gained a reputation as a vendor with staying power. Nobody wanted to invest in the software of a company that might go out of business.
Microsoft used its new clout to introduce a product vision called Cairo in 1991; it disrupted development and marginalized competition throughout the next decade.
The tactic worked so well that Microsoft repeated it in the following decade as Longhorn. Here’s how it happened, and why Microsoft won’t be able to repeat the same fraud again.
by Daniel Eran.