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Mary Jo Foley asks Could Yahoo’s ‘openness’ be another anti-Microsoft poison pill? Yahoo traditionally has been and continues to be a big open-source backer. It runs its datacenters on open-source software (something Microsoft officials have said they don’t intend to rip and replace immediately — while avoiding saying never). But over the past couple of weeks, Yahoo has really been banging its “we’re more open than ever” drum.” Yahoo announced in mid-February that it had implemented what it believed to be “the world’s largest commercial application of Apache Hadoop Java-based distributed-computing framework.” Yahoo is using Hadoop to process its Webmap, which is its “application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo Search,” according to the Yahoos. I can honestly say from my vantage point that openness at Yahoo! has nothing to do with Microsoft or any other would-be suitor.

There's a job on my job board that some of my readers may find interesting. I won't quote the whole listing here, but Architect/System Architect at Time Bridge could be a fun role for someone who wants to get into the world of Web 2.0 business applications.

I hope that nobody is surprised by Wal-Mart's decision to stop selling Linux boxes (in the form of the gPC) . Despite what some folks may think, Linux on the desktop is perpetually one year off.

I'm not about to call this a trend yet, but I've seen a few meetings at work in recent months that advertised and enforced a "no laptop" rule.

It's hard to believe that this video has been on YouTube since 2006 and I hadn't seen it until yesterday, but the Internet has a lot of tubes. It's hard to watch 'em all. Anyway, I suspect that most readers are familiar with expressions built around the phrase herding cats :

Today FireEagle launched as an invitation-only beta for developers to start testing. I think of it as a personal location service platform, but the more formal description comes from the announcement on the YDN blog :

Thanks to Thomas Kruse, I present you with the video of an Airbus A320 making a difficult crosswind landing in Hamburg, Germany.

If you have a slow cooker (or "crock pot") and enjoy tortilla soup, here's a good recipe to try out.

As part of my Linux backup scheme (which I need to write up someday) I've recently been swapping and upgrading/replacing some USB hard disks at home. There's a Linux box at home (a Thinkpad T43p running Ubuntu if you must know) that has a 320GB disk attached and mounted as /mnt/backup and was running fairly low on space.

When I thought about writing this last night, I didn't realize that FriendFeed was launching . Good timing. My intent was to point out two things, really. First off, usage of FriendFeed seemed to be really picking up steam in the last few weeks. In retrospect, that's probably because they were letting more and more folks into the private beta as they got closer to launching.