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Air Raid

A happening today at Berkeley… the monthly emergency preparedness sirens went off at noon on the first Wednesday of the month, as usual. And just as they did, a caterwaul arose, huger and more textured than the sirens, nearly but not quite drowning them out. People came out of their offices and into the courtyard, and looked up to the dorms across the street. There, atop a roof six stories above the ground, were four students with guitars and Marshall stacks, plugged in and improvising a wall of sound to interplay with the sirens. A free concert of artfully tweaked distortion and dada rock and roll improv. Should have AudBlogged it.

Music: Black Cat Orchestra :: Introit from Requiem
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Storing The Web in RAM

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.

Music: Dils :: Mr. Big
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Storing The Web in RAM

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.

Music: Dils :: Mr. Big
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Nous N’Avons Pas Vote Pour Lui

bagtagcbrown bought a bag for his computer and did a double-take when he read the wash and care instructions, in both English and French. After the banal “Do not machine wash, do not iron” were three extra lines in French, which translate as:

“We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Speechless
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Is GMail a Joke?

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.

Music: David Thomas :: Pedestrian Walk
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A Sign From God

Caught this on the way home from work tonight — a reverend in El Cerrito apparently has a political bent and a sense of humor:

rumsfeld_churchsign

Sounds approximately up my alley – may just try and attend the sermon this weekend.

Music: Sun Ra and His Arkestra :: Jazz And Romantic Sounds
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Risk Analysis Webcast

Webcasting Carolyn Raffensperger on Risk Analysis and the Environment right now. This is a first for us in several respects: First time webcasting via WiFi, first time switching from Sorenson3 to MPEG-4 (actually using 3ivx rather than Apple’s built-in MPEG-4 codec) and first time using a new function I built into the events database that lets staff change the event mode between five states with the click of a button: no webcast, webcast scheduled, webcast in progress, webcast complete come back tomorrow for archive, and archive now online. The state of the switch drops the right QuickTime object code into the page to handle the condition.