Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has a blog post about office productivity and the vision for sharing information over the Internet as your 'workspace'.

Using Internet storage is something that many different companies have tried over the years, and the level of success and usability depends on a number of different parameters.

First up, the services themselves are varied, but are often based around a single idea that can be extended or expanded into other areas. For example, Apple's .Mac service is based around the iDisk concept, which is then married up with additional functionality like email, Photosharing, web sharing and synchronization and backup services designed to improve the integration and functionality of Mac OS X. For example, I share my address book, mail account info, keychain (stored passwords), and bookmarts between my desktop and laptop.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has a blog post about office productivity and the vision for sharing information over the Internet as your 'workspace'.

Using Internet storage is something that many different companies have tried over the years, and the level of success and usability depends on a number of different parameters.

First up, the services themselves are varied, but are often based around a single idea that can be extended or expanded into other areas. For example, Apple's .Mac service is based around the iDisk concept, which is then married up with additional functionality like email, Photosharing, web sharing and synchronization and backup services designed to improve the integration and functionality of Mac OS X. For example, I share my address book, mail account info, keychain (stored passwords), and bookmarts between my desktop and laptop.

Many people are surprised and fascinated when I tell them that I met my wife on the Internet. That isn't strictly true - we met while both talking at an Internet seminar and only got to know each by email - but people are even more surprised when I tell them we've been married for 10 years and together for 11.

At those Internet seminars - for we went on to do a number of them over the first couple of years - we used to give out copies of Zen and the Art of the Internet. First published in 1992 by the infamous Brendan P Kehoe, Zen taught people about the basic functionality of the Internet and how it could be used.

Many people are surprised and fascinated when I tell them that I met my wife on the Internet. That isn't strictly true - we met while both talking at an Internet seminar and only got to know each by email - but people are even more surprised when I tell them we've been married for 10 years and together for 11.

At those Internet seminars - for we went on to do a number of them over the first couple of years - we used to give out copies of Zen and the Art of the Internet. First published in 1992 by the infamous Brendan P Kehoe, Zen taught people about the basic functionality of the Internet and how it could be used.

I've been reading Johanna Rothman's blog here at ComputerWorld and it sparked a thought from me which is worth passing on.

Although you may not have noticed, I'm on holiday at the moment. I've still been posting to my blogs, but I've had a bit more free time than usual.

It's amazing how much of a difference it makes to have that free time - and I don't mean being able to relax. I mean in terms of how much the brain is allowed to think about things without the daily processes of doing your work. That break gives you the ability to get such an excellent outside view of what is going on in your work and projects.

I've been reading Johanna Rothman's blog here at ComputerWorld and it sparked a thought from me which is worth passing on.

Although you may not have noticed, I'm on holiday at the moment. I've still been posting to my blogs, but I've had a bit more free time than usual.

It's amazing how much of a difference it makes to have that free time - and I don't mean being able to relax. I mean in terms of how much the brain is allowed to think about things without the daily processes of doing your work. That break gives you the ability to get such an excellent outside view of what is going on in your work and projects.

I've talked before about how significant I think the open-source approach of Open Solaris is going to be, and how the effect of allowing OpenSolaris to be provided in distributions will start to have an effect on Linux.

Early versions of OpenSolaris were an impressive, but obviously contained a few issues which needed to be addressed.

Now Belinix, the second distribution (after Schillix) has had a second version released.

The first version was CLI based only, the new version, released just 25 days later, includes the X Windows System, a range of open source tools, multimedia tools (including graphics, audio components and libraries) and Firefox and Thunderbird.

I've talked before about how significant I think the open-source approach of Open Solaris is going to be, and how the effect of allowing OpenSolaris to be provided in distributions will start to have an effect on Linux.

Early versions of OpenSolaris were an impressive, but obviously contained a few issues which needed to be addressed.

Now Belinix, the second distribution (after Schillix) has had a second version released.

The first version was CLI based only, the new version, released just 25 days later, includes the X Windows System, a range of open source tools, multimedia tools (including graphics, audio components and libraries) and Firefox and Thunderbird.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I'm in the process of consolidating my machines down further into a a number of smaller, but more powerful units.

Obviously I'll be using technology like VMware to add some much needed virtualization, and I'll probably look into Xen as a way of compartmentalizing my machine into a number of servers, probably using Gentoo.

Before I even get this far though, I need to find and choose the machines that will be my new server pair. That's proving more difficult. It's about more than the choices I have to make, like CPU, disk interface or the maximum amount of supported RAM.