prostoalex writes "At QCon San Francisco, Aditya Agarwal of Facebook described how his employer runs its software stack (video and slides). Facebook runs a typical LAMP setup where P stands for PHP with certain customizations, and back-end services that are written in C++ and Java. Facebook has released some of the infrastructure components into the open source community, including the Thrift RPC framework and Scribe distributed logging server."

Lucas123 writes "Linux, Vista and Mac OS perform differently with solid state disks. While all of them work well with SSDs, as they write data more efficiently or run fewer applications in the background than XP, surprisingly Windows 2000 appears to be the winner when it comes to performance. However, no OS has yet been optimized to work with SSDs. This lost opportunity is one Microsoft plans to address with Windows 7; Apple, too, is likely to upgrade its platform soon for better SSD performance."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false. Computer simulations have shown that at pressures like those in the center of the Earth the inner, core, electrons of lithium also interact."

Dan Berlin writes "After announcing that Browser Sync was being discontinued, a lot of people asked for Google to open source the code so development could continue. Well, they've done just that. The code for browser sync is now available on code.google.com, and a blog post about the release can be found on the Google open source blog"

An anonymous reader sends us to the site of Science Magazine for news that will interest those who have followed experiments to slow and stop light. Research groups in Canada and Japan have succeeded separately in storing a special kind of vacuum — a "squeezed vacuum" — in a puff of gas and then retrieving it a split second later. Such experiments might lead to advances in quantum encryption. At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.

willdavid writes to tell us that Sam Ramji over at Port25 has a nice succinct list of the major open source principles that have been used while developing Windows Server 2008. "Overall, we've learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market. I've focused here on 'what Microsoft has learned from Open Source' - and ironically, I've agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on 'what Open Source can learn from Microsoft'. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we'll learn from each others' best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward."

jsuda writes "The preeminent general reference source for Mac OS X has always been the Missing Manual Series written by David Pogue. The latest iteration in the series is its Mac OS X Leopard Edition, completely revised, and it is the biggest, most comprehensive, and most useful of all the editions in the series. It covers the Mac OS X desktop and file system, the free applications included with the Mac OS X installation, the system components and technologies, networking and online features and components, and includes welcome appendices on installation, troubleshooting, Windows/Mac comparisons, and a Master Keystroke list." Read on for the rest of John's review.

ianare writes "Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products. Seagate is the first major hard drive manufacturer to announce such plans, though others will likely follow suit. That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals."

An Anonymous Coward writes "US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children. Their statement came at the end of a Senate hearing in which civil liberties groups were not invited."