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Barry proposes in "ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam" that spam is impossible to block, and so instead should be legitimized and regulated, with a central, not-for-profit company charged with collecting fees from spammers and distributing those fees to ISPs that receive the spam. Of course, there have been many other plans for charging spammers to send spam, but those plans mostly have the fees going to the ISP that sends the e-mail, rather than the ISP that receives it and has to deliver it to the end-users. I'm the author of this piece, also the author of the InternetWeek piece linked to at the top of this thread. I must say, I've never had the same article /.ed TWICE before.

Ok, I'll try and be a little more accurate. this article states that google buys servers from rackable systems and king star computer. It looks like a 250W power supply is pretty standard on these small rack servers (king star ones anyway). But from what I understand, a 250W power supply doesn't draw 250 watts continuously all the time, that more of a max rating. So lets grab another number out of the air. Say 150 watts.

150 WATTS * 10,000 = 1,500,000 * 3600 / 1000 = 5.4 million killowatts * 24 * .00346 =

$448,416

They don't directly inccur power costs though, their respective colo facilities do. I know google probably has at least one cage in Equinix from the (rather old article) above. And if you're a colo facility, I'd be willing to bet you might be able to get a better price on power than your average home user.

here's another google article for those interested.

Here's a brief summary of what eBay are currently running....

For the middle-tier and back-end they've got a couple of Sun Starfire E10K servers (with a third on standby for hot-swap fail-over). The back-end db is Oracle, most of the other software is by Veritas. This all uses a 400 disk RAID array (also made by Sun), which is also mirrored in real-time.

They're using seven Sun Enterprise ES450s to provide the iron for searching, and the web front end is served by sixty-or-so Compaq servers.

It seems impressive! ....but it's worth noting that some of the above may be a bit out-of-date, as it's based on the info in these articles, which are quite old now:-

IBM Retail Store Solutions has been offering Linux solutions for quite some time.. see link here..

Linux and Java support from IBM Retail

So I guess we haven't been paying too much attention to what goes on behind the cash registers..

1. Google runs on linux
2. FreeBSD is Open Source 3. I should not respond to trolls

Circuit City is moving in the same direction. They're headquartered here in Richmond, VA. An acquaintance of mine is a lead programmer on a team responsible for creating custom GTK apps for their POS systems. I don't know all the details, but I believe they're using Red Hat as their base distro (which, I guess, isn't that suprising).

Other people that are deploying Linux are Home Depot, Burlington Coat Factory, and The New York Stock Exchange. Of course there's also IBM, but they hardly need mentioning.

I think it's fair to debate how well Linux fits certain needs, but so far there has been solid proof that it fits some very large needs for some vary large companies. By 2003, I think the outlook is nothing but positive. Shooting for world domination is a grand goal, and capturing the desktop world would seem to be a huge piece of completing that goal. As much as we talk about it, I think we all understand that our grandmothers won't be using Linux anytime soon. In the meantime I'll be perfectly happy knowing that Linux is being used for the high-scale, back-end systems, while Fischer Price My First Operating System hangs out on the desktop.

The sites will run on Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition, the company's high availability, highly scalable server OS. The software will run on hundreds of Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with eight 700-MHz Xeon processors and 4 GB of RAM.

McClung declined to give specifics about the system...

I am amazed at how people buy into the myth of cheap PC?s...

You mean people like Google who run their highly-regarded search engine/translator/image indexer/Usenet archive on a server farm of 8,000 inexpensive PCs with off-the-shelf Maxtor 80GB IDE HDs?

This is where Pixar's RENDERFARM is put to work. For a Bug's Life, 150 dual-processor Silicon Graphics OCTANE[tm] workstations and an Onyx2[tm] visual system were employed.

Actually, since the early days Pixar has used Sun computers for their renderfarm. They even took out a full-page ad to thank Sun Microsystems right after Toy Story came out.

The SGI computers are mainly just for animator's worstations.

From one page about a Pixar programmer and A Bug's Life:

At one point they had about 1,000 processors in the render farm

And for Toy Story 2, it was

No less than 300 SGI Octane workstations and 120 Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, along with a 4.5 Terabyte Sun StorEdge Array and a Cisco Fast EtherChannel network - a gigabit Ethernet switched network - powers Toy Story 2.

And for A Bug's Life, it was

a switched Ethernet network of 100 Sun Enterprise 4000 servers, each with 14 processors, and 24 StorEdge A3000 disk arrays

Unions, already on the wane, have never gained much hold in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers.

This anti-unionism fed right into the hands of employers. They buttered workers up with promises of get-rich-quick options packages, funky office toys and a sympathetic environment. Who could begrudge those eighty hour work weeks when your dotcom needed you?

Those dotcom feel-good moments were already waning when tech stocks went into freefall and layoffs loomed. Unions wouldn't save everyone from layoffs. I'll be the first to admit they have their problems. But the blatant abuse of tech employees (many often not even granted that status in the contract-labour world) should be a wake-up call. Internet Week reported on a dotcom unionization trend back in January. Maybe it is worth a second look!

Unions, already on the wane, have never gained much hold in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers.

This anti-unionism fed right into the hands of employers. They buttered workers up with promises of get-rich-quick options packages, funky office toys and a sympathetic environment. Who could begrudge those eighty hour work weeks when your dotcom needed you?

Those dotcom feel-good moments were already waning when tech stocks went into freefall and layoffs loomed. Unions wouldn't save everyone from layoffs. I'll be the first to admit they have their problems. But the blatant abuse of tech employees (many often not even granted that status in the contract-labour world) should be a wake-up call. Internet Week reported on a dotcom unionization trend back in January. Maybe it is worth a second look!

Now imagine what happens when you plan the backbone around expensive fiber optic lines, costs charged by backbone providers for bandwidth and traffic utilization incurred by smaller ISPs, and a customer base using correspondingly smaller connections which, when aggragated, use up a big chunk of the big pipe while allowing some room for spikes in traffic, customer growth, etc. That all sounds pretty managable, right? Now imagine what happens when you give the users a connection that rivals what chunks of the backbone can do, eclipse the rates attainable by interfaces on routers, switches, and servers. Imagine what kind of damage someone like Mafiaboy could do? Imagine what kind of capactity problems you'd see just from normal usage?

And the use of RedHat on a large scale is clearly not an option

No comment...

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And the use of RedHat on a large scale is clearly not an option

No comment...

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Anybody out there have more nitty gritty details on the specs of the latest boxes added? I am interested in CPU speeds, gigabit ethernet, RAM. 8000 of these things! The mind boggles...

Evidently, they shun multiprocessor boxes, use big & fast IDE drives (2 per PC, one on each IDE channel), and from last year's article, use 100 Mbps links on the racks, with gigabit links between the racks. Last year's articles also quotes "256 megabytes of memory and 80 gigabytes of storage", though I imagine it's closer to 512MB (at least) and 180 GB per server now. Also says that they pack them in 1U on each side of a rack.

But, here's the kicker, "Many of the systems are based on Intel Celeron processors, the same chips in cheap consumer PCs."!

Whoops! That first Internet Week link should have gone here. Got an extra piece of punctuation there.

Consider this, and this. Businesses not only must wade through enormously complex licensing from Microsoft, but they run the very real risk of being audited - with the price of running an unlicensed copy at $150,000 per instance ! Massive effort is required to maintain software licensing compliance, with no real guarantee that the auditors couldn't find something - anything - if they tried hard enough.

It begins to feel like anyone choosing to run Microsoft software does so at grave risk to their businesses, which at any moment may be invaded by the software licensing gestapo, and be fined as much as the SPA figures they can pay.

Microsoft, faced with declining revenues, is going hard against businesses running their software to ensure software license compliance. Even a good faith effort doesn't provide enough protection.

My company has begun using Open Source /Free Software everywhere it can to reduce our software license liability. I expect that as Microsoft muscles in on more and more businesses, we won't be the last.