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Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?
beat.net writes "Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up: "The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.""
"Maybe Google will end up becoming the first sentient AI, if storing and finding association patterns between data is the essence of conscious thinking. The amount of information that Google has at its disposal is staggering, and poised to continue its growth with the introduction of Google Mail. What makes Google more than an extra-big database is the software that sits under that database, and its ability to continue scaling up. Jason Kottke has a great post on the big-picture trajectory of Google's technical efforts, and hits an essential point by noting that Google's focus has always been about what people are doing - searching, talking, shopping, and soon, emailing. Google's focus is human activity and the relationships between trillions of interactions. When I think about that , and then think about how much the daily use of the web has come to rely on Google, my joke about the system becoming sentient, by intent or by accident, seems a little less funny. " source : http://www.holycola.net/archives/000423.html
...little steal. I hope they're thinking about security.
a Beowulf cluster of these puppies...
...Oh, we don't really need to Google seem to be building one.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Has anyone given any thought to how many of these peering points have excess power capacity for 5000 Opterons? Hmmmmm?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's a nice idea but that thing must need some serious amount of power to run. Add the massive cooling system needed to keep the box runnning without melting. If they intend to just "drop" it anywhere... they have to think about security. You don't want some geek with a saw to steal your 3.5 PB array! Omni
Sounds like Google may be ready to go starbucks.
Someone's hopefully optimistic...
If most Google employees don't know about the storage container, how does THIS guy know about it???
5000 Opterons? It makes sense to put those near power plants / ice bergs. That's at least 500 kW of heat dissipation.
...I know what I want for Christmas this year.
Maybe they will put the label "InternetOffice" on it and place this "black box" to your nearest peering point so you'll have access to your on-line remote office applications built on the top of Mozilla with excelent speed that M$ will not be able to beat...
;-))
Maybe they decided to give a new dimension to the old term "boxed software"?
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
>Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers
:o)
I haven't yet met one that didn't think they were very bright. Industrial Designers invent stuff that takes 'ordinary' engineers years to throw away and build something else that will fly. No danger of anything happening here folks
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Its another milestone for Google's attempt to take over the world! First my homepage, next the internet, finally the entire world under the thumb of Google! ...Or it might just be something really cool.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
I don't understand how a few boxes full of Opterons automatically means taking over the Internet.
In my opinion, Google has penetrated the American market with its services as much as it can. It is probably looking to other places in the world to prop up its cash flow. You know, like a business, rather than a collection of world-domination-bent nerds?
Google is trying to take over the world sooner or later. We have to kill the daemon in its birth before it get too late. No one wants another Microsoft in the world.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
The following will rant is going to get marked troll, because that's usually what the painful truth gets. And after all what I am about to say is Ad Hominem etc.
.. P2P backup, he thought that was some sort of new idea of his when there were companies pre-existing that were already doing/trying to do what he was saying. Furthermore his "predictions for the next year" that he does every year are so damn obvious .. anyone who reads any sort of tech news would be able to make them. Yet he thinks he's a genius for making predictions, half of which he read elsewhere.
I havent read the article. I can tell you in advance it's going to tell us what we already knew. The guy is a fool. I never read anything on his site that wasn't obvious that everyone knew. Yet he that he offers new insights or vision. A typical example
I already blogged this... oh my website
But for me, I will love Google even more if its efforts are steered towords making Microsoft and its procucts irrelevant in this internet age.
I am looking atat especially this:
One solution would be adopting Fuendo's java technology to stream video.
If an Opteron produces say, on average, 50W heat output (I know this isn't accurate, but just as an example), 5000 Opterons would produce 250kW of heat. That would require an air conditioning unit larger than the building used to house the container.
If they were planing on building 300+ of these things, why not have built-in broadband wificasting ability... and just replace the internet without having to lay all that expensive cable?
The Admin and the Engineer
The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
Er, they plug a bunch of servers into the Internet and suddenly it's the Internet that's doing the processing and storage, not the servers? Sounds magical. Maybe I can plug my Playstation into the Internet and turn the entire Internet into a giant game.
Perhaps they can pair it with the CIA's renewable energy shipping container.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Skynet, begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29.
-Foxxz
I have it on good authority that Google is planning a series of truck stop masturbation booths featuring HD porn.
Great Article. It just shows how quickly Google is becoming a global enterprise right under the nose of all the other huge companies such as Microsoft.
google.slashdot
The article makes it sound like google wants to have a live backup of the entire internet. It sounds neat and all in theory, but how would one really justify the expense? Unless google is going to get into the co hosting business (they may be already I admit I don't know for sure) I don't see how this would makes sense to help with making money off of ads. Google is already pretty fast all the places I have tried to access it from. Maybe a few of these would make a difference to when added to what they already have, but I am not sure most would notice. I understand that google is trying to expand into other areas of connectedness so maybe adding these as needed for that expansion of services would work for them. I am certain google has a better idea of what they are doing than myself or Mr. Cringly so they must have a better feel how buying all this stuff and giving away services for free is good business.
there's no use speculating these scenarious. what will come, will come.
Why spread them out to 300 locations? The only reason I can think of is to minimize risk of disaster from fire, earthquake and so on. However, when trying to do that, companies usually split it up into a handful of locations. Not 300 locations.
Sounds like video on demand to me...
Another promise waiting to be fullfilled.
X.
>>We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage
They're just getting ready to run Windows Vista when it comes out.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The tone of the article...
It sounds so malevolent!
"overnight" should be replaced with "under cover of darkness" though.
300 data centers with so much heat will surely contribute to global warming.
Don't try and slashdot omni please.
Skype is in the same situation - they've been able to support so many users simply because their bandwidth is only used to setup the initial connection between the two parties, after that it's the telcos who are supporting and providing the infrastructure for the service that threatens them most. Now that Skype can make real money from its pay services, look for them to do something simliar to Google, to ensure the availability of their service.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Wouldn't this distributed network make for the ultimate bit torrent network??
"off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk ..."
OK, so how does he know so much about it and Google's super secret plans?
Wow, where do I even begin with this work of fiction.
As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.
Yeah, except for the first time your ISP has an issue (how many people can afford backup connections and dialup is just not an option, especially with slow AJAX applications) or you lose power. What about security? Is Google going to securely encrypt this transferring of data? Do I really want the sexual escapades of my fiancee and me to transfer in some low encryption method for anyone to sniff out of thin air?
And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.
Oh you mean the disaster that was the first Web Accelerator, whose demise had nothing to do with improper hardware is back? Oh joy, I'm going to start celebrating Christmas early this year.
And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.
Yes, because the Internet in the US is so up to speed with the rest of the world already that the network infrastructure is in place for all to even have broadband at this point. Exactly, how has Google infiltrated the flatland states and what infrastucture do they have there? And the Internet does exist outside of the United States, something the author seems not even to brush up against.
Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.
Where the author lost me for good on the objectivity scale. Exactly what resources does Yahoo! have that MSFT doesn't that makes them a "probable"? Internet advertising is one FireFox extension or hostfile entry away from being eliminated.
Hagrin.com
Cringley may be a fool, but he's almost right on this one. There's a saying in networking that you can't buy latency. The speed of light is just too low for Google's AJAX applications to take over the world - for many apps you can never get the latency low enough if you use only a few datacenters. So, the shipping container is irrelevant to the important part of this story. The key is that for Google to succeed in making online services as effective as desktop applications, they have to get the latency down. And there's only one way to do that, which is to move the servers close to the customers. To do that, they need a lot of data centers, and they need a lot of bandwidth between them, because when you connect they need to move your data to the nearest data center to you. So, they really do need to have a way to provide data centers quickly and easily to places all over the world. But Cringely doesn't seem to have realized why this is the only way Google can succeed in the long run. It appears you can buy latency after all if you spend enough. - Fzz
This is the man who brought us the mathematically impossible 6.5 mile 802.11 link with a passive repeater. The repeater that he never showed to anybody. He also shows us an idealistic world of a community cable and telephone company that nobody's ever seemed to find evidence of.
Saying that, when it comes to technology at least, he is speculative is something of an understatement. Take what he says with an extremely large grain of salt.
what's the point of putting network latency between all those shipping containers? if they want to use them for computing, why can't they just put them all next to each other in the same room?
Google cutting in on Akamai's territory here?
http://www.akamai.com/
Half the big boy websites I visit seem to run through these guys. They seem to provide fat throughput for mega sites, apparently hosted in a distributed geographical fashion. I could just be imagining these things, though, because I really don't have a clue.
Googly: In cricket, a cricket ball bowled as if to break one way that actually breaks in the opposite way.
You simply gotta love it. The surprise. The unbelievable ideas coming out of nowhere. It makes me wonder whether computing community's obsession with technicalities, without imagination gives any good results.
Look at Sun's network computer. It was supposed to break MS Monopoly, and bring true computing power to the networks. Look at Linux, better than Windows and Free! Both has solid technology behind them, but Windows still runs on the vast majority of computers.
And then look at google. Excellent front end. Now excellent back end. They made the OS (middleware) irrelevent. Great technology. Even better imagination.
But finally, if google ever becomes a monopoly, MS would pale in any comparison.
Life is just a conviction.
Many of the things I used to go to Google for, I go to Wikipedia instead. Now there is a category for which I go to Wikipedia for and a category I go to Google for. Actually they were distinct before, but the category of things I go to Wikipedia for, I fancied Web Directories might be useful for except that they weren't very robust and got out of date.
One of these could heat an entire neighborhood. District heating could become a major new market in populous areas of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if Google could pull that off.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Whisper the newspost in one of those "CIA operative mission briefing" voices. It's pretty scary.
"The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. Your mission: Find and destroy Larry Page. But hurry."
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
Now all we have to do is wait for some Google employee to play a Sony CD on this and these will become spam relays.
Perfect.
The alternative is everybody running their own stations in a massive wireless mesh network.
More than anything else, this seems to be a from of psycological warfare. Can you imagine the feelings of Bill G or Steve B when they read that article?
I mean if you are at Microsoft or Yahoo, where would you throw your money at? Office/Excel/Gamil like AJAX apps, this new 300 Uber Server threat or the next thing some bored reporter comes up with?
I don't know if this is report true or not, but I do know that Google is running a very effective psy-war campaign against their competitors.
Google's growth was in part made possible by heaps of commodity hardware. Hardware that was originally meant for standard lusers, cheap and unreliable. They built their systems for it and tolerate that. They change lots of haddrives in their datacenters and god knows what else.
What I'm trying to say is that for each of those googlecubes they need staff that regularly changes whatever hardware fails. With 3.5 Petabytes of storage and 5K processors it means that something will fail every single day that beast is powered. All that crammed inside 20/40 feet space (WTF does that mean?) means that heat will kill even more hardware.
So, yeah it should be possible, but not very likely.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
That shipping crate is just their new high-end search appliance...
or municiapl heating. Just have mains water come in one end, heated water for local residents comes out the other.
...the puppy's on fire.
How are they going to cool these things?
Google is already working a design for tripods.
With 300 data centers hosted at the important Internet peering points, and only 2-3 hops away from each user, Google will be easily able to offer a personal "Google Desktop" to each person, driven by FreeNX remote GUI technology (remember, NX can make X11, VNC and RDP run a multiple speeds with fractions of the bandwidth needed as compared to the protocols run natively).
Google will manage everything for its users: software upgrades, backups, search and organisation of personal data and files. Just like ISPs 20 years ago offered a monthly rate of 20 $US to connect to the internet (giving away a 2400 b/sec modem for a reduced price), Google could ask for a 20 $US fee (and give away a Google Thin Client embedded into a georgeous 17'' LCD screen that includes a EJ45 jack) to take care of people's computers.
I for one would sign in immediately.
So, Cringely is wrong. No need for AJAX office. It will all work with traditional GUI desktop programs, over an NX link that does not consume more than 40 kBits/sec for office productivity work.
So, Cringely is also right. The operating system doesn't matter to Google.
And it has much higher bandwidth than wireless....
Having said that. This is just a cringley rumour.
Deleted
Even assuming the power and heat requirements of cramming that many opterons into that small a space could be dealt with, there's another, larger problem:
It's not fucking 1997 any more.
"Peering points" -- big, open-access traffic exchange handoffs like the old MAE-East and MAE-West used to be a big deal back in the late 90s, when OC-12 circuits were still rare and hideously expensive beasts, and Gigabit Ethernet was still a gleam in some 3Com engineer's eye.
In 2005, they simply don't matter. The big players (level3, MCI/Verizon, Qwest, SBC, etc) all exchange traffic over private fiber interconnects, and everyone else buys transit from the big guys directly or ponies up for a switch port at Equinox, PAIX/Switch&Data or some other 'carrier neutral' colocation center. Dropping a datacenter-in-a-box onto MAE-east or any of its surviving ilk would buy Google precisely nothing.
(And nevermind the fact that google is documented to own thousands upon thousands of unused square feet of datacenter space already: they went on a very well-thought-out buying spree in 2000-2001 when all the dot-com datacenter companies were going out of business, and are very well provisioned for the forseeable future as a result.)
Now, a much more interesting application of the "Google node in a shipping container" idea can be summed up in one simple word: China. Why wait for the local market to develop the infrastructure you need when you can just drop a box down and then run fiber to it? I'm still dubious though...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Time to buy some of those long dated puts folks. And no, this is not investment advice. If you want that, consult a qualified professional.
Actually this article came in on my rss reader yesterday, I did some quick back on the envelope counting, and I'm not sure you can get a container for $500.000. I read before that Google used to have racks with wheels under them, completely full with 1U servers and fully cabled. They only had to plug in power and network and they were all set. When the datacenter went bankrupt, they just wheeled the racks off to another location. So assuming that they are only using the containers for shipping:
;)
One 20Ft container is:
* Length (20Ft)
* Width (8Ft)
* Height (8.5Ft)
That means you can get about 12 * 19" racks in, using 4 rows, about 64U high. That means a total of 3072 servers, using dual socket, dual core opterons, that's 12288 cores. Each server with 8 memory sockets + 4 disks, that's 24,576GB of RAM (1G sticks) and 6,144,000GB of Storage (500G disks). With some guestimate figures on current prices, I'd say one of those container would be worth about $12,500,000.
But then again, from a quick Google, they have about $3 billion in cash, and that's a lot of containers....
PS: I'm european using metrics mostly, so they're might be a small conversion problem here and there
A 40 ft shipping container has a surface area of something more like:
(40 * 8) * 4 + (8 * 8) * 2 ==
1408 sq. ft.
which, for 1 megawatt, is more like 710 watts/ sq. ft.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...will we still love them? I get a feeling Microsoft's monopoly will look like a minor bother compared to Google's omnipresence one day. Google, the Evil Empire?
C'mon now, everyone knows the boxes contain the ORBS from Brisco County Junior, for they are the coming thing... ;)
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
a 500kw generator is listed for ~ 24,000 dollars here http://www.power-classifieds.com/index.php?rmid=89 06452946--BB2505 /. whining about problems with power is just ignorant folk to lazy to spend 5 seconds googling to get some facts
so all this
When you've only got a few machines then heat is simply something you need to find a way to get rid of. When you have this many machines in a space this concentrated - you might want to try setting up a liquid cooling system that directs the heat to one area on the outside wall of the crate so that you can turn some of that heat back into usable power using the delta between the cpu temperature and the outside temperature. Even in hot locations a CPU will be quite a bit hotter before it approaches the point of failing ...
"It's not in the Box, it's in the Band!!!"
::shrug::
Perfectly reasonable thing to believe when Bill Gates is trying to off you.
It's kinda getting to the point where google might not be competing with MS, but instead, slaughtering it. 0_o They have massive storage of data already via the search engine. Massive storage of personal data via google maps and gmail and now they're setting up to split up the internet by providing their own peer network. ( my guess anyways ) stay true google.
giant processing and storage grid
:( TV, Radio, Newspapaers, and now thanks to Google, the internet too.
You mistyped "advertising delivery machine"
Which does seem to be where the internet is heading
You want to buy, you want to buy, you want to buy... Who falls for this stuff???
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Who's to say that Google isn't buying dark fiber to write off the depreciation?
There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing.
Ok, maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't like the Idea of having all my pages load from a cache.Besides what if they stop updating the Slashdot cache, my life of sitting in front of a screen waiting for it to update will end.
Sounds like Google is trying that out.
There's nothing that exotic about this. The military builds racks of electronics into shipping containers all the time. It's mostly a cable management and maintenance access problem. You have to be able to do everything from the front of the rack, which requires some design work but isn't rocket science.
and all of those processing computer clusters. Hell, with all of that, my first goal would be to start up as my own ISP. Looks like Google has enough dark fiber waiting to be lit up, that they could seriously enter the ISP market, and possibly dominate it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I know it's been said before but I'll say it again, one corporation having this much control over everything is just plain scary.
For more than a year, ominous rumors had been privately circulating among high-level Internet pundits that Google had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Google project to the perpetually fog-shrouded wasteland below the peaks of Mountain View, California. What they were building or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place no one could say.
Given the industry-wide move towards mobile (and Google's participation in it) and Google's desire to blanket cities with WiFi, perhaps they're coming up with an interesting "Local" implementation? Thoughts?
... his calculations are obviously wrong ... but with the right numbers nobody would be interested in his story :)
What if one day googlenet becomes a place of education? Or even a government that would help locate you into your new job?
Is doing what we're told bad altogether or are people going to open their eyes?
Shipping containers are similar in shape to the modularized boxes the US has developed for use on the Littoral Combat Ship as well as other naval systems. These devices can be easily loaded and unloaded on ceiling- or floor-mounted rail systems, and can contain munition packages, targetting systems, crewspace or drone support facilities. Why they would need gigantic amounts of processing power onsite as well, I don't know. Possibly DNA sequencing or realtime cryptanalysis.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Probably he has some good friends here :)
to allow them to fit opterons and other hardware into a 1-dimensional, 20 or 40 foot box.
"These new processors use extremely low power, due to their one-dimennsional nature. In fact, they're not even powered by electrons, since they electrons wouldn't even fit on the non-existent width of the chips."
The chips and other components are reportedly composed of an exotic material with an entirely new one-dimensional molecular structure discovered by google during research on their lunar base...
Cringeley wasn't trying to set the price of the hardware in stone. He was just trying to use a nice round number to illustrate how much it would cost to deploy these systems. Also it's worth mentioning that the price of the hardware will be lower by the time they actually go through with this.
It would be somewhat hotter than that
r _40.aspx
One of those 40 foot ISO Intermodal shipping containers 40 * 8 * 8.5 feet comes out to 1456 square feet, or 686 Watts/sq ft
http://www.containex.com/en/iso_shipping_containe
I'm not sure there's much point in setting one of these up to run for just 3 days. Have you ever thought of that?
A generator would be silly as the energy cost would be many times higher than the grid. Why do you think people use electricity off the grid instead of buying a generator? As you rack up answers to that question maybe you'll realize how silly your theory is.
welcome our new cube-like processor having overlords
Anyone remember the X-Files episode where you had the person who managed to upload his consciousness into a computer or something (I think it might have been a woman who uploaded to be with her already-uploaded boyfriend..) And the last scene where they show this "data-box" (quite like what's described here) being dropped off and hooked up to a fiber line, and a camera on the outside scanning around of it's own accord..
... (to be continued..)
Headline in New York Times 2010:
"Experts Warn: Google Has Gone Sentient"
"Humanity is Doomed, some say"
Mouthing off without bothering to get informed first.
The shipping container is full of christmas presents, that's all....
Its quite clear what they are doing... The boxes will served cached copies of ALL websites, or retrieve copies if new, and all information concerning web traffic will be processed and or sent back to google hq. They will know everythign that goes on on the net by basically being the net. Crazy stuff.
Is this about that secret conference they were going to hold???
Back in 1991 I worked for a wireless company that tried using data containers for quickly deployed cellular switch and cell sites. The idea would be to prebuild these at a central location and then drop them at areas where they needed to go up.
The idea was good, except for a couple of problems.
These shipping containers are nothing but a giant metal box. Grounding can become an issue, so can accidnentally having the box be one of of the poles for a DC based power system. If you are near an active AM tower, the box becomes a giant antenna and it's virtually impossible to filter out the AM signal internally.
Last, and certainly not least, these shipping containers are vulnerable to rust and other problems due to exposure to the elements. That can take several years (5 or so) if the box is in perfect shape at the start, but if they are using used boxes then it can take less than 2 years for rust holes to be a problem.
Plus, physical security isn't all that good unless the walls are beefed up.
I'm hoping these are not "standard" shipping containers, just something that looks like them.
This grand experiment with shipping containers for cellular applications was an attempt to make it cheaper to deploy equipment to new locations. And, shipping containers (especially used) were a _LOT_ cheaper than fibrebond or other prefab buildings for that purpose. Of course, the fibrebond building had a lifespan a lot longer than 2 to 5 years. So, you get what you pay for.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Yep, why else would they need all that CPU power and dark fiber?
# "Google will manage everything for its users: (...) personal data and files. (...) I for one would sign in immediately."
------
Are you crazy? I for one am afraid of such a "Big Brother Google is watching You!" scenario.
Thanks God, Google (and the rest of the business world) is still too stupid to figure out the true potential of FreeNX. That way, I can keep it as my personal Geek toy for another year or two....
$500K for a 5K-Opteron multiproc machine is only $100:proc unit. 3.5PB:5K-Opteron is 700GB:Opteron. Right now PCs including per-processor chassis, powersupply, motherboard, IO, etc are available for $300 retail individually. Two years from now, Cringeley's deployment projection, I think that $100:CPU-Disk unit is probably about right, at today's rates - probably even better specs than that.
--
make install -not war
So you need to cool about 600KW worth of heat dissipation. A ton of ac/ is about 3.5 KW or in the neighborhood of 180 tons of a/c required that will take about 1.4 kw per ton to eject that energy. So you'll need another container-sized unit to hold the a/c and then some sort of radiator or cooling tower to eject the heat.
Clearly you're talking about serious energy density here with cooling which is on the order of what it took to cool a 637 class nuclear submarine underway in moderately cool water. Of course you'd really need TWO of those a/c units because you will want to protect that investment (still fits in the same footprint) and be ready to pay some substantial utility bills.
Agreed with this small modification. I go to google first for everything, but lately I've been noticing that Wikipedia is often one of the links I choose from the list. Wikipedia almost always gives me exactly what I'm looking for, too, and links to go deeper.
Crzmblski's Limit. Doesn't come up on Google. Doesn't come up on Yahoo.
closest match of any kind is: Krzmenski...but I got nothing from a quick scan of the results.
Can you provide some kind of link?
Isn't this the same guy who 3 months ago said that Google was only a search company?
4 9&from=rss
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/15552
I like your .sig. But I like even better "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrputs PHBs."
--
make install -not war
The crazy thing is, if it isn't in Google's cache today, it will be in the next couple of days once Google crawls this page.
Them damn cyber-SteamPunks have huge card decks that they are just waiting to compile. Just you wait - as soon as the cards are read in, the AIs will take over, and we'll all be back to coal again!
Mark Edwards
--
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
I hope they suceed and put one in my city.
ALL BOW to Google!
Ironically, the Wikipedia server is so slow, I'll often Google whatever Wikipedia entry I'm looking for. It usually doesn't require any special syntax, e.g., "Tin Foil Hat" Wikipedia although sometimes it's handy to be more explicit, like site:en.wikipedia.org "tin foil hat" Both queries (plus I'm Feeling Lucky) return the desired search result in this instance. And not only does Google tend to return the desired page faster, it also makes for more precise Wikipedia searches.
I'm confused - is that to power the trailer, or to sterilize the guy that steals it?
Oh wait, now I get it. You put the electronics inside the reactor's "Tamper proof cask", kinda like making a plane out of black-box material.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
One of the major problems you would have would be the heat. The most intelligent way of handling things, I think, would be to pump in cool water, pump out hot water, and use the hot water to heat a nearby building.
What's this really about?
It's about that Google want to be able to move Google computers around in any datacenter asap. We know that google uses a grid of single computers, that all compute the search results as fast as possible. All these computers create a space-problem (physical space) at any datacenter that Google owns. Also, shipping these computers around costs money. I bet google store this "secret package" just to be able to send it around anywhere where there suddenly is a problem with the network.. We all know how much money google loose if they are experiencing downtime...
Of course the story would be on Google News?
At least GoogleNet wouldn't be as obnoxious as SkyNet, it would just watch what your doing, and offer tasteful ads from time to time, instead of trying to extinguish you.
Interesting question, and further diversion from reality, if Google gain sentience, would it monitor its own browsing and email, and send itself little tasteful ads?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Maybe Google will end up becoming the first sentient AI,...
Not AI, try TV and broadcasting on demand. What else could you do with that much storage, CPU and memory?
My guess, and it is only a guess, GoogleTV is geting a lot bigger and going to carry some 500,000 to 1,000,000 full length movies and shows or something. And it will be so kewl for us to watch what we want and not what some clown wants us to watch. I suspect it will change ratings too as your not stuck picking from the least boring shows because there is nothing better on. No more pre-empting Enterprise.
http://news.com.com/GoogleTV+is+hiring/2100-1026 _3-5876654.html
Or maybe I am being wishful.
I could imagine fitting all this into one box makes for a tight fit. What happens when that 1 opteron breaks... right in the middle of the box. You would have to take out half the equipment to get to it.
Here's the link http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=176552 3&lastnode_id=1765513
The problem with the 40*40*40 calculation is that that would be for volume not surface area. Also, it would be the volume of a 40 ft cube, not a shipping container. Imagine a semi towing one of those down the highway! As others noted the dimensions of a standard shipping container are more like 40 x 8.5 x 8 ft.
...I immediately thought of the crates from the 'Worms' games.
BytesTemplar.com
Gridnet did the same thing back in the 90s. Except they used small prefab buildings (the same type used for regen huts). Inside were racks of modems, routers, backup batteries, and SONET transmission equipment. They would buy or rent a small patch of land in a parking lot within the magical "zero miles" of the bell central office. Truck their pre-built "point of presence" to the location, have a crane move it into place, connect the power, and start ordering circuits. This allowed them to get modems into nearly every LATA within a matter of months.
He didn't calculate the volume. The calculation was 1MW / (40*40*6) ft^2 which is about 104 W/ft^2.
I've no idea whether there is a word of truth in this article, and I guess those who know aren't saying. However, the whole thing strikes me as complete BS. Why on earth should Google want to do anything like this, as if they were running Minuteman missiles? It is really believable that Google are betting the company's future on a few dozen trucks worth millions of dollars cruising around looking for a likely lamp-post to hook up to? Many folks, including many data-centres, probably wouldn't want one of these Google containers anywhere near them. As for the arguments about sending the containers overseas, well the best most container crews could expect is a bad case of malaria and a few dozen Kalashnikov rounds through the cab before the locals turn up and confiscate the thing.
Supposing, gulp horror, Google doesn't really have much of a plan. Sure they have plans, thousands of them. But they come and go every week. Google also make a lot of opportunistic purchases and investments and launch lots of little projects. But that doesn't amount to a plan. Some of the most intelligent minds on the planet are busy trying to suss out what Google's plans may be, and so far they have come up empty.
Maybe that's because Google's most secret stash is empty.There is no masterplan. And Robert X. Cringely is busy making mischief.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
As far as I know – and I admit that's sometimes not very far – Google has two sources of income:
Is this really enough to feed Google the MegaCorporation and all their wonderous projects, or am I missing something?
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
Why then buy all the fiber ? There are areas of the country that aren't attractive to telcos/cable co.s.
I hope they succeed along with their WIFI access.
Good job boys.
One more point if anyone at Google is listening. How about a tax on chip companies to use this highspeed access. It would be nice if they could help support it since they are the ones who benefit.
Google will face a day of reckoning for all their reckless investments.
Oh no, here come the black helli.... NO CARRIER
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So, your business (or a region of 1000's of businesses gets Katrina'ed. You have contracted to *The Google* for disaster recovery (can you do that yet?). The thing about a DR vendor, is *you* have to be sure *they* have enough total capacity. Um, The Google has capacity for computation, space, mail, apps, telecommunications (voip),etc.
For themselves, or for big customers, they just drop off a replacement node, sync, and serve. - tce
Are you a physicist too? Is this why we don't have fusion yet?
By the time it finishes searching, I forgot why I wanted the information.
Hehe, no I am a computer scientist. I have studied some university level plasma physics and a small amount of quantum mechanics though, but I would far from call myself a physicist.
...if google has an end goal that they are working towards with all these things (gmail, talk, earth, etc...) or if they are just after thoughts.
Wait, does this mean that I'll have to join the Microsoft Resistance?
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
They do know that shipping containers have a bad habit of just going missing don't they?
If google is known to run a bunch of hot boxes spread all over the world, how long will it take for someone to slap "google" on a container and run a hydroponic operation inside it?
first I type e and maybe n into the address bar to get the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and then hit the down key and erase everything past that, then type my entry remembering to capitalize the first word and use underscores for spaces. I use my best judgement on whether or not to capitalize any or all of the rest of the words.
The new Opteron was made for this purpose - low heat and power consumption. SUN's brand new Galaxy line (which was made to exactly fit googles server needs) is based off of this processor as well. As for heat, which is usually more of a bane that power consumption, the new Opteron was a 95-watt thermal envelope but still deliver the same performance as the Opteron SE chips. Sounds like google is making a good call .... I say, just think of this "box" as a huge server that people can crawl into. ;-)
Horns are really just a broken halo.
n/t
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
How are they going to cool these things?
After the boxes are installed at all 300 peering points, Google obviously plans to break the dams (Google Beta test) just a few miles upriver from each location to provide the cooling fluid necessary to keep these boxes running and prevent people from physically accessing the boxes to stop them! Who will save us from this mad plan to destroy countless acres of property to provide better search results?
Only one man can save us from aquatic ruination - ScubaMan!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have read Cringley for about 20 years, but I'm now starting to see a pattern. (Call me slow.) Everything with him has a conspiracy theory behind it: from Apple taking over the movie industry, to Google ruling the Internet, and Microsoft pretty much the dark force behind everything.
I like his writing and enjoy reading his articles, and I even had dinner with him a few months ago, but the tin-foil hat stuff gets a little old.
The question is, how high are they overclocking these puppies?!?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
If you're not interested in the subject of your query long enough to wait for am answer, you needn't bother the servers.
Just my opinion.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wikipedia is a big help in refining your searches enough to use Google. A few bad Google searches are all the proof I needed to believe Wiliam Gibson's assertion that for the first time in history, the new threat to civilzation is being overwhelmed by too much information to make meaningful choices.
In addition, I've noticed that any time I don't find much help on Google, invariably I can easily rephrase what I want as a series of very general questions, and then feeding a few of them to Ask Jeeves will get genuinely useful hits. The more I have only the simple, "obvious" lay-man's questions on the subject the more some of Google's alternatives are the way to go.
The last time for me was finding useful stuff on DIY satellite dishes. If you don't yet know any of the terms (which I didn't, then), like C-band, Ku-band, LNBF, Free To Air, and such, Google gives a huge number of useless to just plain evil links. It's not just lots of people who want to sell you a overpriced 'complete solution', but 6 year old, never updated web pages that want to sell you a dish 5 meters across at 30,000$, "Christian" Broadcasters who want you to help them buy more gear and have replaced all the standard terms with "It needs a new thingee, around here we just call it a Jesus-box, won't you please help?", and Utar Pradesh complaining about how Nepal either needs to translate their G2S's signal out of Hindi, or into it.
The only way around it starting from Google seems to be running across about 5 of the 'insider' terms, Wiki for every single one of them, look for what other terms are links, keep Wiki'ing, and thus fairly swiftly refine your search. Basically, without Wikipedia or some other shortcut, you have to get to about the depth where you know how (and WHY) global positioning works differently for civilian uses (like Onstar) and Military uses, and which idiots in Congress voted which way on it, just as a side effect of learning enough to build your own TV receiver (assuming you're already a fair solder jockey and don't need to learn what a MOSFET is). That's a terribly steep learning curve.
This is for a subject that's not really all that esoteric, but it has a half dozen facets, all of which Google can't sort out by simple searches - for just one example mistaking sites that are about beaming 'politally free' info into authoritarian countries for 'own instead of rent type free' consumer solutions. In the process, you are likely to still not know many things that might be of much more interest to most people wanting to build or just own a home satellite system, such as the existence of PC card recievers and motor controllers, or if you can combine satellite internet access with TV reception when you are trying to avoid just renting a dish.
Something like "How do I get satellite TV free?" on Ask Jeeves will get you that whole list of terms and some basic definitions and diagrams very quickly. Ask Jeeves seems to try and match the whole question if it can, before searching for phrases and keywords, and that leads to pages that are set up in question and answer format. In this case, the first link back when I tried it was to a "How things work" page that gave accurate and generally unbiased info, frequently updated.
(Warning, I haven't tried this lately, for all I know Ask Jeeves has gone out of business and I missed it).
Who is John Cabal?
thats funny. I mean really funny.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
We do have fusion. It works really well, and it's the source of all the energy we use. What we haven't figured out is how to put the power plant closer than 93 million miles from the customer (or how to replace the one we have after it blows us to smithereens).
I seem to recall someone pointing out that a single Niagara server could easily keep up with a quad Opteron box (don't remember if they were single or dual core Opterons). One thing to bear in mind is that the power draw for the memory system is now approaching the CPU's draw - in the case of the Niagara, I suspect a full up memory will draw more than the CPU.
Wondering if this is why Sun was working so hard to get the Niagara out ahead of schedule?
All that processing power and storage, and the the best use for it that you can come up with is television?
Either way not sure whether to fear google or buy the stock. Interesting. What about swamp cooling the box?
With our dependance on Google growing each day, it only reminds me of how the machines took over the earth in Animatrix/Matrix..... Anyways I only hope that Google doesnot become another Micro$oft
No! It can't be true! /. already told me what Google's dark fiber is for... They're using it to build a parallel internet. I'm still waiting, but surely Google will be giving away free internet access any time now... /. can't be wrong! Their stories are always so well thought-out and fully researched!
</SARCASM>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Water cool it. 5000 CPUs heat the water insto steam. Expanding steam turns a turbine. Turbine generates power which powers the chips, which heat the water... It's just a fancy perpetual motion machine.
In its Cold War with Microsoft, Google is readying a new weapon: The Google Strategic Server Force (GSSF). This new elite mobile strike force is emerging as a main component in Google's strategic arsenal. The Government reports that Google is readying the first deployment of the G-36M series mobile data centers and predicts that they will be online in time for Santa.
More on this breaking news story here.
Physical distribution of your systems carries security and political/legal risk.
For example:
Chavez nationalizes the 8 Google containers in his country.
Or:
The Chinese Committee For Political Stability nationalize the 100 Google containers in their country.
OR:
The US's quaint anti-monopoly laws, built to stop railway barons, are ideally designed to stop monopolies that provide a federal service and break them up into several companies each serving only a a few states.
Microsoft isn't like that: their distribution presence is largely virtual, not physical. The Chinese govt can't nationalize Microsoft China and end up with a usable software company.
Judicial Tyranny Killed America in 1803 [Must read!]
HopeSeekr of xMule
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
Some people seem to think that being a huge necessarily makes a company evil, or the enemy. But I don't dislike Microsoft because they are a big company. I dislike them because they do dirty tricks to hold technology back; to ensure that their goddamn awful technology succeeds over more promising technology.
I agree.
The problem is, as you grow a company (especially quickly), you run the risk of attracting deadwood. This is especially true if your company is extremely high profile and trumpeted as being the Second Coming. Deadwood costs money, and is difficult to get rid of. Now, if you stick a lot of dedicated, talented CS geeks in a room and if they're all working with each other, you can't help but churn out amazing stuff.
Problem is, when you start picking up people that *can't* produce good work, they mean that you have to drive up your prices.
Add this to the fact that execs are expected to grow a company by N% each year, even if the company is doing a good job simply maintaining its position in a saturated market that it controls, and the fact that execs are evaluated on a short-term basis (maybe up to four years) and that it's easy to get short-term boosts at the cost of long term reputation damage by Being Evil.
Wait until Google has nearly all of the search market (they're already at what, half of all searches?). Their peripheral services are neat, but I'm not sure how much money they bring in. The pressure to Be Evil keeps increasing.
It's not that I want to blame Google. Yes, I agree that right now they are Good People. However, what many of us worry about is that we know that they will experience increasing pressure to Be Evil, we know that most companies succumb to the urge sooner or later, and that tying ourselves too closely to Google (writing applications that depend on it and so forth) is asking for trouble down the road.
How about software patents? Google has an enormous stable of computer scientists. What happens when some legal group at Google submits a report that (accurately) states that Google can make a great deal of money by pursuing patent suits against other companies?
I mean, IBM gives me the warm fuzzies today too, but I'm sure not going to expect them not to try to screw me over down the road if it suits their interests.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Taken from http://www.incendiary.ws/node/194
Crmblznski's Limit, sometimes spelled Crizmblski's Limit, has its origins in Keith Laumer's novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" [1].
The basic theorem is that there is a finite limit to the complexity of any given machine, which specifically precludes the operation of "a machine with sufficiently extensive memory banks, adequately cross-connected and supplied with a vast store of data, [that by its very essence] would be capable of performing prodigious intellectual feats simply by discovering and exploring relationships among apparently unrelated facts." The Limit is an irrational number, much like Pi, in that the total complexity of machine is wholy dependent upon both hardware and software designs.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
That must totally suck to be Mr. Christ and find out that people have subverted your teachings.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Actually it is Mussolini who is credited with making the trains run on time, not Hitler, and it's not true in any case.
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.htm
In Soviet Russia, Google respects YOU, no matter how large you get!
[quote]The basic theorem is that there is a finite limit to the complexity of any given machine[/quote] More from Hopeseekr of xMule's Blog.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
building a new data center is actually a very time consuming and difficult thing to do. Zoning laws across the country vary greatly, so getting the permits can take 1 year or longer depending on how much grease is applied to the problem. I seriously doubt google is stupid enough to think they can build their own data centers. More likely than not, they are using existing data centers that already have sufficient power.
What will Microsoft do in response?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
> That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet.
>And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's.
Google's trying to divert all of the USA's cash money to China? WOW.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Amazing how much Slashdot has changed in the 7 years I've been reading it. 5000 Opterons in a tractor trailer, and not a single mention of data havens or taking first place with SETI@home. tsk tsk tsk...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
The basic story may be true, but Cringely might be inflating the numbers a bit. It would be like him to take the wind out of google's sails a bit by overstating things.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
What's that debate "Law" that says you lose when you bring up Hitler?
Besides, the only Hitler comparison I see here is Bill Gates - even if Schmidt has the better name for it.
And Hitler didn't give us public relations - that was a corporate invention before him. Read your Noam Chomsky, I think he mentions it. Hitler himself despised the press for being lackeys of the establishment - until of course they were lackeys for him. Now they're lackeys for Israel - which means he's probably spinning in his grave - particularly since the Zionists preceded him in being advocates of "ethnic cleansing" (of Palestine.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
parent used 20 cubic feet, when he should have used 1280 cubic feet as the volume of a container.
If it is liquid cooled, all you need is a few huge radiators on the top or on the side and a few electric motors to pump the water and power the fans blowing at the radiators. One other thing they could do is submerge motherboards in mineral oil and pump _that_ through the radiators on the outside. The point grandparent tried to make is that since these things are in open air anyway, there's endless supply of it and in general it will be cooler than the stuff that needs cooling.
To efficiently cool the 5000 processors this is probably a fully submerged design - no computer cases, just racks full of motherboards, simple heat exchangers on cpu's. Pump the container full of mineral oil and there you go cooling :)
To get the heat away from container, the obvious way is submerge that too, just attach fiber and power cables and drop it in some river!
The second law of thermodynamics says it's not worth bothering. If you're running a power cycle off the waste heat from the cluster alone, (heat up water to drive a turbine, or some such), the second law dictates that the absolute maximum efficiency you can acchieve is 1-Tcold/Thot. In this case Tcold is ambient, and Thot is the temperature the processor is running at. Under realistic conditions, Tcold = 20 degrees C and Thot = 75 (293K and 348K resp.), that figure is a paltry 16%. So even if you get the maximum efficiency that the laws of nature allow, you still have to get rid of 84% of your waste heat. Generating power onsite could actually make your problems worse, because then you're powering your 2.5MW shipping crate with a powerplant, and you have to get rid of not just your 2.5MW but also the other 5MW of waste heat generated in producing it.
"Hitler made the trains run on time."
That was Moosilleenea, you moran.
yes, since the time I wrote the anonymous comment above, asking my post to get modded back down, it went from a 3 to a 4! I guess I can just add here logged in with +1:
MOD MY POST BACK DOWN -1 WRONG!
Because I wrote 20 (feet^3) instead of (20 feet)^3, my calculations are off by a factor of 400! The first reply has correct numbers:
for an 8 foot x 8 foot x 20 foot box, that's ~8% of the available space.
And one more time:
MOD MY POST BACK DOWN -1 WRONG!
Remember http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/ - The Google Grid? I bet many laughed at such an apparently outragious idea.
I wasn't particularly laughing at this idea... and I don't think anyone at Google was either. Is Google turning the Internet into one massive grid computer with these super tankers of silicon by strategically placing them at all the main intersections of the Internet? I dunno, but I do know that Google has some serious cluster computing geniuses who've had an itch to scratch. Don't Google employees get 40% time to work on their own projects or something like that? This is probably the hardware guys' 40%.
The possibilities here are endless. Even mundane ideas could be very revolutionary. Forget Blogger, what if Google actually comes out with full web hosting and wireless connectivity in major cities around these hubs? A great many businesses would fall to that giant, especially considering they could possibly do all the hosting for free by placing AdSense on all pages. Don't discount this idea at all... Google just introduced free DB hosting of sorts. Jumping into hosting a few programmable web languages might not be that great of a stretch for them now.
I'm just wondering when we'll stop calling it The Internet, and start calling it The Google.
I8-D
I am interested in the subject of my query long enough to look it up in a real encyclopedia. If WikiPedia's answers were better, I wouldn't mind the wait, however better answers are available elsewhere without the wait.
& have done for yonks
Commonsense dictates that the use of a refridgerated shipping container would be automatic, afterall have you ever seen a institution's mainframe/server computer room that didn't have a dedicated airconditioner? Remember the basic differance between a fridge & a air-conditioner is the output temperature & once you take into account the container's freezer counteracting all the heat from those CPUs, chipsets & hard drives then the end result would probably be a temperature close to that in the average office tower computer room in the CBD (I assume the power supply/s would be made in modular form as part of a external generator with the external generator outputing correctly regulated 5v, 12v & 3.3v currents directly into the container, thus removing a significant proportion of the heat that would otherwise come from the cluster)
What a coincidence, just a few days ago I wrote a "brainfart" on Google and why it is starting to scare me. Here is the text: "You plan for what the enemy can do, not what he will do" - Carl von Clausewitz Frankly, Google is starting to scare me. The main reason - the sentence above. I have to confess that I am not completely getting it (what von C. is trying to say). I will asume that he meant "plan not for what you think he will do, but for all that the enemy is able do". With the recent announcements from Google I am starting to be afraid about whet Google is able to do with my browsing habits (on-line activity information). Being rather old and very cynical I do not trust someone with power, even if he tells me that he is playing "nice" (the famous Google slogan "do no harm"). Let me make this a bit more colorful - if someone is going to have me by the balls, s/he better have taken the Hippocratic oath and wear white clothes (keep the siringes hidden please). If you think that this is too hard, please, do keep reading on. Remember the time (few years ago) when MicroSoft was pushing their Passport idea? The idea was that one can use the same online ID (username/password) to log in into multiple Websites/systems. This is generally not a bad idea and certainly many online services can benefit from universal online ID, but many people (myself included) had a problem with someone like MicroSoft (some people had problem especially with MicroSoft) knowing and tracking where, when and what they do online. So, the MS's idea didn't do very well, but what if someone is able to do exactly the same - tracking where, when and what you do online without even asking you for your permission? Some smart readers are probably getting the idea by now that I am implying that Google is certainly capable of doing just that. I am not the world topmost expert on Internet technologies, but I am a geek and I have been with the WWW almost since the beginning, so let me try to explain how this is possible. They say that in life there are only two certain things - taxes and death (going in chronological order ;-) Online, for every "browser" (ok, user - the person, not the program) there are four other certain things:
1. search engine(s)
2. server logs
3. ads
4. VOUWS (very often used web services) - mail, chat, blogs, online data storage If someone offers all these web services, then he is capable of tracking their users (trough cookies/log ins) everywhere they go and everything they do (their online activity and the contents they produce - e-mails, chat, blogs).
So far Google has covered half of these directly (search engine and e-mail) and is capable of accessing information about the rest through partners - ads and their new visitors tracking tool (Google Analytics).
Are you scared already? If you understand what I am talking about, and you are not at least warried, then I can see only two explanations - you lack imagination or you are waaaaay too optimistic.
Me? I am working on a change in my browing habits and hardening my computers again tracking.
To the optimistic readers - even if Google does no harm at the moment there is no guarantee that they won't in the future. Don't forget they are a public company now, not a group of boyscouts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. ("Enemy of the state", anyone?)
And if this is not enough for ya, keep in mind that companies can get bought. As big as Google is now, there are bigger fish out there. Just for being so able, Google can be taken over and then all bets are off what the new owner is going to do with all this power.
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-------- no carier ..... ----------------
BookDetective.net - book search engine and ranker I donate my skills to.
The point is to avoid search and go straight to the desired page.
Anyone ever read www.http://www.365tomorrows.com/09/12/the-nine-bil lion-names-of-god/
I used to admin at a company in Mountain View that sat on the same fiber ring as Google, one that was operated by SBC, the local LEC. We had nothing but problems with throughput and such which our rep intimated was due to Google's needs. I'm not sure how much of Google's service is channeled in and out of their main headquarters but apparently it's significant. Towards the end of my time at that company our service improved dramatically, which I attribute to Google going a different route.
It makes more business sense to lease dark fiber, break it into waves with WDM and run parallel OCn circuits once you start pushing a certain amount of bandwidth, which clearly Google does. This as opposed to buying OCn circuits from the incumbent LEC which is very pricey. If you're going to go to all the trouble of leasing dark fiber and you have enough smarts in-house to do it, you might as well register yourself as a CLEC so you can buy your voice services wholesale. That would also give you the opportunity to position yourself in the VoIP market, if you were interested in doing so.
This "Internet in a box" thing definitely sounds like something but I'm dubious it has anything to do with dark fiber.
So, is Do No Evil really their motto? Or is it... we won't be evil, we'll just build the bot that may become evil through self-awareness.
:P
ok, that didn't come out as well as I wanted it to... but I really wonder how far they can take their motto, yet conduct a project such as this.
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
... are you referring to the teachings of Mr. Christ...
a litle late, I know, but technically it's "Jesus who became the Christ", not "first name Jesus, last name Christ". See _Edgar Cayce on Jesus and his Church_.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com