The best article to read about these drives is the one from AnandTech though the TechReport one is decent also. The AnandTech review does a great job investigating the cheaper solid state drives to uncover their performance issues with high latency. Their conclusion is to avoid any JMicron JMF602 based SSD’s. That’s too bad for me since I’m laptop shopping and I was thinking of supplementing my laptop with a reasonably priced SSD. And I still may but it’s probably just as likely that I’ll wait a while and see how this data shakes out. The folks at OCZ are investigating these issues. As for the Intel X25-M I’d say it’s out of my price range. Of course I wouldn’t mind a smaller capacity drive, say half the capacity for the half the price and I could become interested very quickly.

The new release of VirtualBox includes the most lacking feature for me: 64-bit guest support. I'm considering what it would take to move back from my current KVM/QEMU/Qemulator setup. I'd have to convert my qcow2 images back to vdi which is not an appealing prospect. At one point I had heard that there was a consortium working to design a cross platform disk image format and I wonder what became of that. The only format supported across the board is VMDK but there are performance penalties for several virtualization solutions (QEMU/KVM/Xen) as well as compatibility issues. I'll probably stick with my current setup but I am interested in seeing what VirtualBox has to offer in this new release. Perhaps I will at least begin recommending it again as a desktop virtualization solution. The best information about VirtualBox 2.0.0 is available in its ChangeLog.

I decided to look at what lightweight browsers were available in Ubuntu 8.04 as alternatives to Firefox. The caveat was that I didn’t want a browser with Gnome or KDE dependencies. Here’s what I found.