Category: Geek

Fascinating and detailed post about Google’s datacenter, now 100,000 servers strong. “One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google’s data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes.” I didn’t realize that Google’s “Snippets” service requires them to store the entire web in RAM. Speculation about the ultimate capabilities of such an unimaginably huge cluster computer. A commenter wonders “How many servers would you need to emulate the human brain?”

Thanks Ludovic.

Fascinating and detailed post about Google’s datacenter, now 100,000 servers strong. “One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google’s data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes.” I didn’t realize that Google’s “Snippets” service requires them to store the entire web in RAM. Speculation about the ultimate capabilities of such an unimaginably huge cluster computer. A commenter wonders “How many servers would you need to emulate the human brain?”

Thanks Ludovic.

Is Google’s new plan to hand out free 1GB email accounts legit, or an incredibly elaborate April Fool’s day joke? If it’s a joke, it’s been exquisitely executed – there’s much more to this than a press release — they’ve set up a subdomain for it (gmail.google.com), a FAQ, even a signup form. On the other hand, the idea of giving out 1GB of storage free for the asking almost seems preposterous, even with cheap drive space, even with advertising support (one poster on MacSlash estimated the cost of supporting 10 million such users at $28 million in RAID platters alone). And the press release seems pretty flip in places. On the other hand, $28 million may be a drop in the bucket compared to the ad revenue they’ll earn over time (they earn around $3 billion / year in ad revenue from search engine text ad placement already). Remember that Google has built elaborate prank sites before — pigeonrank anyone?

Forbes and The Guardian are taking the story seriously. So if GMail is for real, why announce it on April Fool’s day? To get fools like me to post about it, that’s why. A game that will turn out not to be a game?

And I suppose the ad placement plan ties neatly into existing theories about Google’s plans to database the heck out of your life in order to deliver ads appropriate to your lifestyle and interests with surgical precision.

Microsoft exec Jim Gray: ‘The thing I’m puzzled by is how there will be a software industry if there’s open-source.‘

So Jim, if I read you right, you’re saying that the commercial software industry is like a charity of sorts, and that customers should pay money for software even if equally good or superior open source solutions exist, because commercial software engineers are somehow entitled to the customer’s money?

While my experience with BeOS and Mac OS X make it clear that some commercial involvement results in higher quality products based on open foundations (due to cohesive vision, clear direction, etc.), it is also clear that many purely open source projects have resulted in products that are as good as or superior to their commercial counterparts.

Want to keep your customers? Then beat open source products on features (or service) — but don’t fool yourself that people will pay needlessly for software just to artificially prop up the industry.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is playing matchmaker – introducing deep-pocket funder BayStar to SCO, resulting in a $50 million windfall for the company that has made it a life mission to suck the wind out of open source’s sails. Microsoft downplays the connection. Riiiiiight.

In the spirit of open source development, MIT invites their user community to submit homepage designs: “We’ve found that homepage designs work best as an interactive process…” Check the gallery for historical results. Love the idea. If anyone wants to send a drop-in replacement style sheet for this blog, I just might run with it.

Amazing results of grep searches through recently surfaced (partial) Windows source code. Of special note: References to Windows users and other MS programmers as “idiots,” open acknowledgment of lots of “ugly hacks” and “dangerous” bugs and of certain functions being “total bullsh*t.”

What really goes on behind the scenes when you call for tech support? It’s worse than you think.

Once I was a valiant warrior against HTML in email, and rallied against it every chance I got. Now I am tired from that fight. There are still lots of reasons not to use it, but I’m not going to argue with the dean, and today modified the Events database to send out formatted announcement emails, rather than plain text. Felt like a traitor to “the good fight” for about five minutes. Then the feeling passed.

PHPMailer enhances the native PHP mail() function with all kinds of goodies, including ability to send 100% standards-compliant HTML emails that work as well in text mailers as they do in Entourage (yes, I pine tested :)