Hardware: Most IT shops would say that the more reliable a server, the better. But not Google. Instead, the search engine builds its own back-end boxes at a cheaper cost, knowing that its software will work around any outages, according to one exec. "For us that's the right solution." It also reduces energy and helps Google avoid cooling costs.

Podcasts: In Zero Day, Bob Garza interviews Deloitte and Touche's Brian Geffert, a partner at the firm. The two discuss Deloitte's recently released security survey, which touches on a range of issues you should be watching out for even if you think you've got a bulletproof infrastructure. Listen here.

Best of the blogs: Matt Asay confesses that he can't pretend to be hip in London's restaurant scene. "The only way to remain perma-hip is to sell things," he explains in On hipness and open source. "Lot of things. Perpetually." And Mike Barton on the mysterious case of Dell's exploding laptop.

The news beat: Red Hat inherits a lawsuit from JBoss that concerns Hibernate 3.0, which FireStar Software is claiming infringes on patents for mapping between an object model and a relational database. Google debuts its online payment system, otherwise known as Checkout. And India stays cool to open source. Come to think of it, "cold" might be a better descriptor as a mere 2 percent of the country's developers contribute to open source anything.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 29, 2006 11:07 AM