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After Saturday's explosion at The Planet hosting facility, which disrupted 9,000 servers belonging to more than 7,500 customers, we are fully back. Thanks for your patience!

Kevin Hartig asked "What is Cloud Computing?" this week and went on to provide an excellent stab at an answer, explaining how it overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing. And Scott Lowe also generated some interesting feedback recently when he asked "Does Virtualization Mean the End of the OS?"

Questions, it is said, focus our thinking. Some go so far as to say that it is "better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." And good questions, it is generally agreed, outrank easy answers. Here then is a round-up of some of the "good questions" asked recently at SYS-CON.com, as part and parcel of our ongoing, 24 x 7 x 365 coverage of the interlocking worlds of technology and business.

Eric Newcomer, another SYS-CON.com regular, asked recently: "Have We Got It All Backwards with Software Assembly?" and followed that question up with another one, "Do Design Patterns Help Software Assembly?" - both articles continue to attract interesting feedback.

As did Nexaweb Founder & Chairman Coach Wei when he asked "Why Do 'Cool Kids' Choose Ruby or PHP to Build Websites Instead of Java?"

Some other recent interrogatory articles include:

• Is the UX Meme Is Reaching the Enterprise at Last?
  
  
• Is the Cloud There Yet? - A Brief History of Cloud Computing
  
  
• What RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang for our Buck?
  
  
• Where Have All the SOA Standards Gone?
  
  
• So You Think You Know SQL?
  
  
• Do We Need to Teach Designers Programming?
  
  
• What Drives Successful Technology CEOs?
  
  
• Is Yahoo! Too Large a Company to Force into Microsoft's Ways?
  
  
• What's the Fastest Way to Get Data to AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, and JavaFX?
  
  
• Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang for Your Buck?
  
  
• Who Will Win the Next Battle for the Desktop?
  

"Good questions" are a feature too of SYS-CON Events' technical, strategic, and business sessions at all our upcoming conferences.

For example Egenera's CTO Pete Manca will in June be asking "What's Next for Virtualization?" while JoeMcKendrick inquires "Where We Are and Where We Need to Be With SOA?"

Further interrogatory sessions from our next three upcoming events include:

• SOA and Virtualization: Friends or Foes? (SOAWorld 2008 East)
  
  
• Are B2B, SOA, and BPM Converging? (SOAWorld 2008 East)
  
  
• How Can You Build RIAs Without Browser Plug-Ins?   (AJAXWorld 2008 West)
  
  
• How Do You Find and Resolve Capacity Bottlenecks in Virtual Server Environments?  (Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 West)