Ken Jacobs departs Oracle. Linus loves his Nexus One. And more.

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# As Matt Asay noted, Ken Jacobs’ departure from Oracle is a significant loss for MySQL.

# Linus Toravlds gave the Nexus One his personal thumbs-up.

# Glyn Moody outlined the H.264 video standards debate.

# Oracle job cuts affect GNOME accessibility work but, as Joe Brockmeier pointed out, the blame lies with everyone.

# SourceForge project administrators can now

EC2 is nifty, but it doesn’t appear suitable for all needs, and that’s what this post is about.

For instance, a machine can just “disappear”. You can set things up to automatically start a new instance to replace it, but if you just committed a transaction it’s likely to be lost: MySQL replication is asynchronous, EBS which is slower if you commit your transactions on it, or EBS snapshots which are only periodic (you’d have to add foo on the application end). This adds complexity, and thus the question arises whether EC2 is the best solution for systems where this is a concern.

When pondering this, there are two important factors to consider: a database server needs cores, RAM and reasonably low-latency disk access, and application servers should be near their database server. This means you shouldn’t split app and db servers to