Half Xeon, half Linux

Editors like to maintain the comforting fiction that magazines are smooth-sailing ships, vessels that run with machinelike precision. We’ve got well-established workflows, long-range schedules, daily deadlines, and editorial calendars, which lay out article plans months in advance. Then a week like this one comes along and — blam! — all plans and fantasies of an ordered universe go out the window.

You see, the issue you now hold in your hands started life as a Linux-only affair, timed to coincide with this week’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. In addition to an in-depth comparative review of four enterprise Linux distributions and a feature on the state of corporate Linux adoption, we had plans for a LinuxWorld Expo preview in InfoWorld and daily updates at InfoWorld.com.

Then we met with a few folks from Dell Computer’s server division. In the course of the meeting, they mentioned that Dell’s new PowerEdge line, running Intel’s upcoming 64-bit Xeon Nocona, would be available Aug. 2 — the official launch date of the new chip. We’d known Nocona was coming, but that was the first time we’d gotten a confirmed date on availability. The editors in the room exchanged furtive glances: We knew our Aug. 2 issue was about to get much thicker.

We’re used to responding quickly. In fact, our News department writes articles right up until the moment the magazine ships to the printer. But reviews and testing-based features are a different story. They generally take months to plan and implement. We had just more than two weeks.

Times like these require extraordinary measures and extraordinary people to pull them off. As it turned out, we were in luck. Senior Contributing Editor and all-round hardware guru Alan Zeichick had a two-week window in his calendar and a hankering to run those Dell servers through their paces (see “Nocona injects more power in Dell PowerEdge line”). But the sheer volume of required systems-level testing meant Alan wouldn’t have time to review the Nocona processor itself. For that, the obvious candidate was Senior Contributing Editor Paul Venezia, our go-to guy on chips. Unfortunately, blogmeister Paul (weblog.infoworld.com/venezia) was already up to his neck in work, reviewing Linux distributions for the very same issue.

But we had a card up our sleeve. We knew Paul had just built a new house, and to pay for that house, he has to do loads of review work for InfoWorld. So we asked ever so politely and crossed our fingers. To our delight, Paul agreed and threw himself into the project, abandoning such mundane notions as sleep, free time, and human interaction. The fruit of his labor is “Intel strikes back with Nocona.”

Thanks, Alan and Paul. Here’s hoping you have a few weeks to recuperate.