technology

It's that time of the year again. In time honored tradition, the giants of the internet announce the most stupendous projects imaginable on April 1st. Just don't take their announcements at face value.

In this exclusive interview, we talk to David Preston, Marketing Development Manager of Awardspace.

Please tell us about yourself and your position in the company.
I am Marketing Development Manager for Awardspace.com and have been working for the company for over 2 years now. I am responsible for the marketing strategy of all services and work on the business development with close cooperation with our CEO Dimitar Dimitrov. Apart from my current position I also have 10 years of experience in the field of sales and marketing mainly in the field of online business.

According to ReadWriteWeb, the five big data center trends this year are blade servers, green tech, virtualization, scalable cloud platforms, and Linux in the enterprise. In the full article, you can read their rationale for choosing these technologies.

If you are in the market for a solid state drive (SSD), you might as well hurry up, because Google has started buying. Unnamed sources are reporting that the search engine giant has ordered from Intel the first batches of SSDs for use in the company's HQ.

PHP 6, currently under active development, will include full support for Unicode strings, in effect allowing the use of non-ASCII characters in PHP scripts, alphabetical sorting across different alphabets, and more. This will be useful to web developers worldwide -- Unicode maps the characters of all human languages, and the list of new additions (and removals) is likely to ensure the continued wide usage of this programming language.

WHIR TV has a new video interview with Niko Nelissen, VP of business development and co-founder of Q-layer, discussing a new paradigm for datacenters. Video after the jump.

MySQL AB, property of Sun Microsystems, reversed its decision about releasing advanced MySQL 6 features under a closed source license. Last month it was announced that the upcoming version of the widely used database server would not contain certain closed source encryption and compression backup extensions. Reportedly, those would be included only in a paid enterprise version. Now, according to a blog post at mysql.com, the decision has been reversed and MySQL will remain fully open source.

Earlier this week Sun, the new owner of the MySQL brand, announced that upcoming "high-end add-ons" will be included only in the paid MySQL Enterprise. So far, the open source database has established itself as the best option for small and medium-sized web hosting companies, and by extension -- for millions of clients. Will they need to reconsider their choice of database server?