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They are nothing more than a mid 17th century cult that survived.

They treat their women like shit.

They refuse to buy "non-kosher" soap, which is really expensive so they bathe irregularlly

They are really nasty and disrespectful to outsiders. They've been known to attack outsiders depending on locale.

They use legal tricks to avoid paying taxes, like making all of their houses, "places of worship", which defund local services.

They've been known to settle scores with eachother with violence.

In Brooklyn there was a major scam where the Rabbis were telling people NOT to go to the cops with child molestation cases. The Rabbi bought out the district attorney. http://www.topix.net/city/brooklyn-ny/2012/05/da-denies-hes-soft-on-pedophiles-in-orthodox-jewish-brooklyn

They are not diffrent than the crazies of any other reliegon and its time the outside world recognize them as such, and its time the mainstream jewish community stops coddling this cult. At very least they need to stop telling the outside world especially the internet how fucked up we are. They are far worse than any of us.

My Feeds: Select: All 95 subscriptions, None, Unassigned A to Z Kids Stuff children http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/atoz.xml ABC News: Top Stories news http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/fp_rss20.xml About Computing Center technology http://z.about.com/6/g/pcworld/b/rss2.xml About.com Archaeology Archaeology http://z.about.com/6/g/archaeology/b/rss2.xml All Things Digital technology http://feeds.allthingsd.com/atd-feed/ Archaeology News Archaeology news http://www.topix.net/rss/science/archaeology.xml Ars Technica tech news http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf ArsTechnica: Security Content Security technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/security BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition U.K. http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition Science/Nature http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml Boing Boing odd http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag Breaking News: CBSNews.com news http://www.cbsnews.com/feeds/rss/main.rss Breitbart.tv varied news topics http://www.breitbart.com/xml/recentvideo.xml ChannelWeb Complete Feed Computer news http://www.crn.com/cwb/globalcontent/cweball/index.xml;jsessionid=L0I1HBDQISHBCQSNDLQSKH0CJUNN2JVN Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories news http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss CNN.com - Offbeat odd http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_offbeat.rss CNN.com - Politics politics http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss CNN.com - U.S. U.S. news http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_us.rss Computerworld Breaking News technology http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News Cool Tools technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools Courant.com - Connecticut News Ct. news http://feeds.courant.com/Courant/ConnecticutNews Defense Tech U.S. defense news http://www.defensetech.org/index.rdf Discovery News - Technology technology http://dsc.discovery.com/news/subjects/technology/xdb/topstories.xml Drudge Report news http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedPalooza/lwDu Dvorak Uncensored news http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?feed=rss2 Engadget robots & gadgets http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml Extremetech technology http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml Fark.com news http://www.pluck.com/rss/fark.rss FileForum software http://fileforum.b

I think if you want to predict the presidential winner, you should go with the tried and true method....see which candidates halloween mask sells the most!! That has been an accurate predictor for decades now....It appears at least so far, now that they are tracking the masks throughout the primary season too, that Obama has the lead in the mask poll .

I dunno...at this point, I figure dressing up as Obama or McCain would be equally as scary to most of us....

:-)

After all, why help the cops do their job trying to track down the person who murdered your son/daughter/husband/wife/whatever when it is so much easier to just go out, get a gun from the guy on the corner and shoot the person.

As far as the baby shot in a drive-by, there is no need for you to be an eyewitness.

Man Aren't you brainwashed. In Estonia support for Nazis is one of the most proud parts of their history. Estonia did not not have anti-Nazis insurgence (like was the case in Poland, France, Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia, or any other normal country). In Estonia Nazis were and still are admired (except Estonia call SS executioners, "freedom fighters"):
Read here about proud history of Estonian SS-soldiers: http://www.topix.net/forum/world/estonia/T9QB9D3OM K90ILNFF
Fascism supported in Estonia at government level and removal of the monuments is the sign that this process is only accelerating.

Somehow I don't think they're hurting too bad.

• SlashDot's Firehose
• Reuters AlertNet
• A 10 minute delayed AP wire page (or if I'm at the TV station, I just check the live wire)
• Google News
• Topix
• CNN affiliate newsfeed website
• BBC News
• Local college's news page
• Local news website run by a local
• (2x) Regional newspaper page
• Drudge Report

Jobs is an arrogant control-freak, and he often exaggerates when talking about the coolness of Apple products or their potential - but he doesn't strike me as a liar. In fact, he is quite earnest in his own way. Do you have any evidence of him lying?

No, but I read and watch almost nothing he says either. I bet I could find something if I tried.

I don't see what refusing to license Fairplay has to do with wanting to be DRM-free.

You said in your previous post "When [Gates] says he opposes DRM, he probably means he opposes DRM that Microsoft doesn't control." Again, how's that different from Jobs wanting to control FairPlay?

Licensing Fairplay would make the DRM even worse.

How? By not locking iTunes customers into iPods?

So, Jobs has to include DRM, as the deals with the RIAA and labels demanded it.

And the MPAA would have demanded some degree of DRM for next-gen DVDs to play on Windows.

It's strange that you say he "fought tooth and nail" to keep other people from licensing iTunes. Who was he fighting?

Hmm, Norway (which ruled FairPlay illegal in that country), France (including saying that a law that would require them to license FairPlay was "state-sponsored piracy"), The Netherlands, Germany, and increasingly others. (The first two are the best examples.)

From what I can see, Apple simply said "No, we aren't going to license iTunes. End of story." No fighting involved. After all, it's Apple's property, they have no obligation to license it to anybody. So, why would there be a tooth and nail fight?

Interesting that you don't have a problem with Apple trying to retain control of their DRM but you seem to have a problem with the words you put into Gates's mouth about not liking DRM MS doesn't control.

The average joe is lucky to get $2 CPM. Which I think is much more reasonable.

Depends on one's niche / topic / category. My monthly stock picks site U.S. Stock Screens is pretty high up there, despite lack of new / fresh content, probably because keywords like investing and finance bring in more cents per click.

Also from the money.cnn.com story you link to, "Gawker Media's average CPM is between $8 and $10". I'd say $2 is a little low, although after the middle men take their cut maybe that's what you see. Is it unreasonable to expect $24? Sure.

Page with stats from 2004 showing "Sports & Leisure" averaging a little over $8 CPM and "Entertainment" averaging a little over $14 CPM:
http://www.our-hometown.com/valuation.pdf
http://www.our-hometown.com/valuation.html

Article estimating that Yahoo earns about $4 CPM sitewide (non-search pages earn less than search pages):
http://blog.topix.net/archives/000097.html

This car looks worse than most cars of the late 70s early 80s

I think the Prius is one of the best looking non-sports cars on the road. It actually looks somewhat like a futuristic "concept car" design, rather than yet another Ford Taurus clone.

if you wanna "support your country" buy american

Or not. Ford are shutting down 14 plants in the US and moving all the jobs to Mexico and China. GM have been moving their manufacturing to Mexico too. Meanwhile, Toyota built their first US plant in Kentucky in 1988. They're still expanding into the US, they just built a big new manufacturing plant in Texas.

Tell me, why should I give my money to Ford and GM who are busy shifting jobs out of the US, rather than to Toyota who are investing in the US? How does that support the US?

By putting your life on the line, I was implying that they put their life on the line for others. I think that deserves a great deal of respect. I am by no means someone who holds a cop as someone higher than everyone else, and above the law, but that degree of unselfishness is worthy of my respect. I'm not saying that everyone who is a cop holds to the code of "To Protect and Serve", but those that do shouldn't be degraded to the level of those that don't.

May I ask if you have turned anyone in who has broken the code of your profession? Perhaps someone violating the internet usage code (browsing Slashdot during work hours may be applicable). Or maybe someone who isn't obeying the dress code. Perhaps someone who leaves work/gets to work a few minutes early or late. To say that any cop who hasn't obeyed the law should be fired and arrested would pretty much leave nobody around. Cops are human, too (excepting robocop), and that implies a degree of mistakes.

If you have tried to turn people in for what are considered minor offenses, who do you think gets the worst of it. I know that if I were to tell my boss that a co-worker was 10 minutes late for work, my co-worker may get reprimanded, but my boss gets the impression that they have a big mouth. I'm sure that the same would happen for a cop. If they get a reputation for tattling on their co-workers, it's going to be miserable for them. It's not right, but that's the way it is.

Finally, I don't know what you are talking about with cops never being in trouble. A google search for "Cop arrested for" gives quite a few relevant stories on the first page. They get away with some stuff, like non-cops, and they get caught for some stuff, like non-cops.

How about encouraging participation by actually making it easier for people to post and talk, rather than worrying about how to prevent them from doing so?

For instance, see http://blog.topix.net/archives/000106.html

The reason there's a limit on some OTC drugs (specifically Sudaphed) is because tweakers buy it to cook meth. It's way too easy to make methamphetomines for a huge profit. Meanwhile the chemicals poison the houses in which it is cooked, the addicts burglarize homes and cars, destroy their families, stay up 6 days in a row, grind their teeth out, the dealers start gang wars, the cookers rob grocery stores for Sudaphed, etc.

Tweakers suck.

Weed, on the other hand, while it does have its dangerous and seedy network of growers and dealers, just kinda makes everyone mellow out.

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=2f7b00fedef1b1 aaf8f53264f52ab593'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=e775b0954ac069d8a92b7f4de89cd184; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i='
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:55:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cbb0abd047cf9f72646099df2cb484a2; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://topix.net/r/0B=2Finhu=2B2pR5VWZkYknE0WZiWNL 0NhCfT8=2B9MWL6oIElKGAsgk1kPisf=2F=2F3R2SI5DquuKsf TXudof3cRdeIuzMw=3D=3D
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ah, so we are getting somewhere! http://www.topix.net/ is probably where ScuttleMonkey gets his news from.
http://www.topix.net/search/?q=Asus+PW191&x=0&y=0

$ curl -I "http://www.topix.net/r/0R96orA8cnXCv3fD02tmzS76ey BdqIGSBCIHxhH9xHFC=2FppW1YhQ75XPwaejjkpr1RcmsITzvT KfplNztrejYeawM8mKPHJGAXXxWCRuULi8=3D"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:59:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) (Gentoo/Linux) mod_perl/1.27
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Heh... go figure...

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=2f7b00fedef1b1 aaf8f53264f52ab593'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=e775b0954ac069d8a92b7f4de89cd184; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i='
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:55:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cbb0abd047cf9f72646099df2cb484a2; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://topix.net/r/0B=2Finhu=2B2pR5VWZkYknE0WZiWNL 0NhCfT8=2B9MWL6oIElKGAsgk1kPisf=2F=2F3R2SI5DquuKsf TXudof3cRdeIuzMw=3D=3D
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ah, so we are getting somewhere! http://www.topix.net/ is probably where ScuttleMonkey gets his news from.
http://www.topix.net/search/?q=Asus+PW191&x=0&y=0

$ curl -I "http://www.topix.net/r/0R96orA8cnXCv3fD02tmzS76ey BdqIGSBCIHxhH9xHFC=2FppW1YhQ75XPwaejjkpr1RcmsITzvT KfplNztrejYeawM8mKPHJGAXXxWCRuULi8=3D"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:59:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) (Gentoo/Linux) mod_perl/1.27
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Heh... go figure...

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=2f7b00fedef1b1 aaf8f53264f52ab593'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=e775b0954ac069d8a92b7f4de89cd184; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i='
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:55:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cbb0abd047cf9f72646099df2cb484a2; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://topix.net/r/0B=2Finhu=2B2pR5VWZkYknE0WZiWNL 0NhCfT8=2B9MWL6oIElKGAsgk1kPisf=2F=2F3R2SI5DquuKsf TXudof3cRdeIuzMw=3D=3D
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ah, so we are getting somewhere! http://www.topix.net/ is probably where ScuttleMonkey gets his news from.
http://www.topix.net/search/?q=Asus+PW191&x=0&y=0

$ curl -I "http://www.topix.net/r/0R96orA8cnXCv3fD02tmzS76ey BdqIGSBCIHxhH9xHFC=2FppW1YhQ75XPwaejjkpr1RcmsITzvT KfplNztrejYeawM8mKPHJGAXXxWCRuULi8=3D"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:59:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) (Gentoo/Linux) mod_perl/1.27
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Heh... go figure...

How about a not-so-small memory-resident database?

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

Anyhow, the article mentioned that in these early datacentres they experienced something like a 25% hardware failure rate, but that it didn't matter because the software worked around it and the hardware was cheap.

Here's a link to the page where I read all this neat stuff. It's probably mostly about the same stuff as the article we've all just slashdotted, but I won't be albe to tell for a while....

... and as long as I am at it, I have been wondering for years (especially after reading this), where is Google Hosting?

They have the infrastructure for cheap space and bandwidth, why not use it to provide a truly capable hosting solution, with the ability to install whatever you want, etc. I'm sure they could figure out some way to do that without security concerns along with a host of other things that is wrong with hosting, no pun intended.

Take this a bit further and if they could add a rich UI on top of that, voila you've got yourself a Gdrive.com. Hold files, share them with others easily, manage photos, keep bookmarks, stream your mp3s even (maybe a bit much), etc, whatever. Some explorer like interface where you can make folders, drag files around and so on and now you've got yourself thin-client computing. best of all? no need for desktop search, accessible from anywhere. I don't know how long it takes Google to develop the Javascript/DHTML for all this, but man this would be a killer. Or am I crazy?

Given the recent tales of editorial misconduct do /. editors have anything to declare?

Yahoo news crawls some 7000+ news sites, Google News crawls 4500+ English news sites, and Topix.net crawls 10,000+ news sites. Once you add in the thousands of local blogs, you will need a system like Topix.net to filter the relentless stream of news articles and posts that are generated every day. You will need something that can sort through the news, determine the trends, and ignore the old repeated stories for you and present them to you in RSS for consumption with your favorite RSS news reader.

-AS

Yahoo news crawls some 7000+ news sites, Google News crawls 4500+ English news sites, and Topix.net crawls 10,000+ news sites. Once you add in the thousands of local blogs, you will need a system like Topix.net to filter the relentless stream of news articles and posts that are generated every day. You will need something that can sort through the news, determine the trends, and ignore the old repeated stories for you and present them to you in RSS for consumption with your favorite RSS news reader.

-AS

I can actually say that I live near one of the companies that headed this project. Amazing what our little rural Pa. town can do from time to time (too bad about Agere Systems, though.)

Just hope they build one here eventually! :)

>> I actually aways wanted to visit the united states
By all means, stop over!

If you're comming to the US for a visit, I can recommend NYC or Boston (expensive!), Chicago, D.C., but there's some other places that I'd guess you'd like too:

- Portland, ME
- Asheville, NC
- Billings, MN
- Boulder, CO
- Philadelphia, PA

If you visit a big city, stay our of town, within walking distance to a rail link. The hotel room will be 1/2 - 2/3 less than staying downtown. For smaller cities, you'll need to rent a car.

>> treat me like a criminal
The last thing you're treated like is a criminal in the US. In fact, leave the airport and you'll probably not have another interaction with somebody from law enforcement until your return flight; 95% of police here are nice guys, more so when you get out of the major urban areas, so don't fear the police.

Funny that you mentioned google. There was some blog entry (http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html) (I beleive that was discussed on Slashdot earlier), where author argues that Goolge relies on high redundancy, instead of high availability of a single computer.

Topix.net factors in site registration when it decide which articles to show. Given ten copies of the same/similar story it will bias the source selection to ones that do not require registration.

-AS

Topix.net factors in site registration when it decide which articles to show. Given ten copies of the same/similar story it will bias the source selection to ones that do not require registration.

-AS

Google can tell them dudes if they don't like to be in the news they aggregate, just because they whip a few ads on the side of the page, no probs! Pull em out! They could ALSO stop listing them in their search engine AT ALL. google could even CHARGE MONEY to be in their news aggregator for that matter, at least for for-profit commercial news. They still have a lot of options available to them to combat "copyright" hysteria by the providers. Maybe we could even get rid of "subscription/registration required" news feeds being the top listings most of the time as well. I hates 'em I do. I already wrote google and asked them for a filter for that, I do NOT want to establish a subscription and login/password for one thousand different news websites out there, and eat a thousand more cookies, etc. I just as soon they didn't even show up in the google news feed. I'll take regular old traditional internet rules, "here's my website, go ahead and look at it, that's what it's for".

Anyway, for an alternative to google, may I suggest to anyoneTopix, a similar news aggregator that claims they pull from even more sources than google. I use both myself, about equally.

I've found Topix.net to be more encompassing than either site. The site was created by former Netscape employees. It categorizes news into very specialized topics. The search functions better than Google News's, which seems to have a much small database for many subjects when compared with Topix.

All of the news aggregates seem inadequate. Google News has a great interface, but often I don't find news articles on specific subjects when searching the site. Obviously, MSN Newsbot will be biased towards MSNBC. (BTW, the URL, newsbot.msnbc.com, is really redundant!) Even Topix, which I pimped up there, has some bad points too. Google remains the king for relevant and enticing advertisements, and the ads are sometimes annoying or irrelevant on Topix (tho not nearly as annoying as with most sites). And sometimes there are some repeats from other services; although, it is mostly OK. Are aggregates the "new" search engines?

(I know this is a little off-topic, so please excuse my tangent.)

Topix.net also classifies all the news into 150,000 categories including 30,000 local pages with every city and town in the US.

Both Topix.net and Yahoo News have RSS/XML feeds as well.

Microsoft is using moreover.com to supply its news (As mentioned in the Mercury News Merc Article)

-AS

The Secret Source of Google's Power

Also have a look at this Apparently google is using 1/2 (depth) unit's

One at a time:

1. Microsoft and Yahoo might actually try and compete with Google. Until recently, Yahoo was hampered by an old directory model and Microsoft's (outsourced) search was so bad that it attracted the attention of the FTC for being misleading.

Yahoo's directory is still not bad for what it does (which is *not* search - the Yahoo directory is still the core of the site). But I will probably still use Google even if they fall to #2 or 3, because I'm sure they won't cook the search for cash.

2. The rapidly declining cost of technology, computers, storage, and bandwidth (Moore's Law), will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens or even hundreds of new competitors. In a few years, any two graduate students may be able to start a search engine from their dorm room without venture capital.

But Google's employee project program, absurd number of highly educated workers, and the fact that no one rides Moore's law as hard as Google (what do they have, like a hundred thousand servers ?!), means they'll likely be the first to come up with, and implement, astounding new technologies.

(By the way, make sure you read that link above: it's really, really, really cool.)

3. Any competitor can outsource software deployment to India, Russia or China, which will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens of new competitors. Google can also reduce software costs by outsourcing, but the fact remains that with lower costs of entry, there will be more competitors.

Of course outsourcing is always a good idea. I discovered that when I tried contacting Sony for support on my VAIO desktop and had to hurdle a language barrier. Briefly, cost is not the only thing that makes a worker desirable.

4. Remember AltaVista.com. Like Altavista.com, Google's "customers" are not locked into Google and may quickly abandon Google.

Someone posted earlier that GMail is a lock-in technique, though I doubt it -- I wouldn't consider any webmail service to be sufficently locked in, as there's no proprietary aspect to the protocol.

But again, the fact that they are trying not to be evil (and the details of their IPO prove this is still a great concern) is good enough for me. I think in the future, when other companies finally decide to follow Google's lead, this may become one of the biggest selling points a company can have. It would be a unique, unexpected triumph of capitalism if this happened. (HINT: Someone feel free to debate me on this -- I'm not sure that this will occur at all.)

5. Google's revenue source, contextual Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), is causing a race to the bottom as the most expensive/profitable products outbid less expensive products for the limited PPC positions. Consumers may eventually learn that they are paying for the high PPC costs and look elsewhere for more affordable products.

Except that Joe's Jam Emporium will pursue a much different search space than Mercedes-Benz. I think Google even has rules that the AdWord purchased must have something to do with your business.

6. Google's revenue source, Pay Per Click advertising, may be blocked by ad blocking software. While Google's ads are not intrusive as pop-up ads, given a choice, people may decide to block Google's ads or replace Google's ads with more useful third party content. Just as Google's toolbar blocks (competitor's) popup ads, other products block Google's ads - especially those that "block ALL ads."

This is one of the most egregious flaws in the article. People don't block ads because they're ads, they block them because they're bloody annoying. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there who hate the very notion they're being advertised at, but I think most people who hate ads do so because of their ubiquity. Google's don't pop on top of, or under, your web pages, they don't consume lot

Another wonderful speculation about Google infrastructure which You can find it here.

...but rather (all this according to the article) their own distributed, fault-tolerant Google Filesystem (GFS) [PDF]. Apparently each of their 1/2 depth 1U servers has only one or two drives. If a server fails (which happens routinely with 100k servers) then it's simply left in place and the data is automatically replicated onto another server from one of the redundant copies.

Very cute (the marketing and the tone of the site, not the girl). Google seems to have pioneered the image of the humble personally-maintained website.

It looks like the typical homepage of any CompSci geek student, but it's backed by computing power of Skynet proportions and the company is valued at over $15 billion.

Don't let the way it looks fool you - it's all deliberate and contibutes to it's popularity.

They're going to have mirrors, snapshots, backups, offsite backups, remote replication... Expecting them to purge your email when you delete your account is crazy.

Not according to the blog mentioned in this Slashdot article. Basically, it appears as though Google has implemented its own distributed file system which stores your data in three different places and runs on 100,000 very cheap computers. Can you imagine having full or even incremental backups of the data on 100,000 servers? Can you imagine mirroring 100,000 servers? Neither can I. However, I can imagine having my data on 3 of the 100,000 servers and designing the file system so that it replicates deletions of my e-mail.

Searching the three line greenbar yellow page listings is ok, but Google's keyword coverage seems a bit spotty. "94303 chinese food" doesn't turn up local results, but "94303 chinese" does.

The free text geo-categorization seems to depend on finding full addresses in the web pages, not as sophisticated as Metacarta or Topix.net

If you go to disk, just once, you need about 9ms just to get the disk heads in position. If you're reading a file system of complex database, you now have multiple disk seeks and reads. That adds up. Seeking in RAM is orders of magnitude faster. That's why all the good search engines keep *everything* in RAM all the time.

That is why Google has multiple copies of the entire web in memory.

-AS