By Debasish Ghosh · Justin Sheehy · Kresten Krab Thorup · Steve Vinoski.
"In this
paper, we first present a history of programming languages
and distributed systems, and then explore several alternative
languages along with modern systems built using them. We
focus on language and application features, how problems of
distribution are addressed, concurrency issues, code brevity,
extensibility, and maintenance concerns."

Old but still largely correct. Fails to capture what "mutability" is really about.

In-depth look covering the good stuff; good if you don't know much about the internals of either.

1 and 2: Git's repo efficiently content, compressing deltas across all files in the tree.
3. Git keeps track of names carefully.

Three things someone doesn't like about puppet that chef supports: dependency graphs, an overly limited language for specifying recipes, and hard-to-access-client-info-from-server templates. (Not really sure I understood that last one.)

Two tools to manage configurations and automate setting up machines, both successors to cfengine. A very balanced and well-written comparison, interesting comment thread too.

Exactly nailing all the problems with the Nexus One from a usability stand-point.
And I've never really used an iPhone/iPod-touch.

"In the paper, I categorize the scalable data stores into four groups:
Key-value stores, like Redis, Scalaris, Voldmort, and Riak.
Document stores, like Couch DB, MongoDB, and SimpleDB.
Record stores, like BigTable, HBase, HyperTable, and Cassandra.
Scalable RDBMSs, like MySQL Cluster, ScaleDB, Drizzle, and VoltDB."

Comparison of 10 or so modern DHTs along three axes: scalability, data and query model, and persistence design.

Nice blog post by Ted on the difficulties in scaling hard-link based backups and a long discussion of different backup systems and their relative merits.

A survey of various DHT-like systems. It's probably a failure on my part that DHash is not listed there. But then, DHash was a research system and if I were to do something in production, I'd probably want to re-write it...not to use libasync, for example.