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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.""
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.
Morality IS a popularity contest, and always has been. You can kill, steal, and whatever else in socially acceptable ways. If you kill your neighbor people get nervous, unless your neighbor happens to be on the other side in a war, and you're in the army. Even killing your brother is acceptable in those circumstances. Not because it fits some master morality plan, but because people won't disaprove.
Some people claim that even killing in a war is wrong. Other people consider those pacifists to be immoral and attempt to imprison them in war time if they resist army service, because refusal to defend your country, if it becomes popular enough, will open a nation to invasion. So far there have been no pacifist nations, despite there being many popular pacifist religions, such as Christianity.
In the end all moral judgments amount to 'approval' and 'disapproval'. Some philosophy might guide what you approve and disapprove of, but those philosophies have no other meaning or weight, and are based on nothing beyond what some person(s) at some time approved or disapproved of. There might be well reasoned or clear motivation for a moral rule, but that motivation or reasoning is itself only valid because of the general agreement that the basis or result of the rule is itself 'good'.
Example: It is wrong to kick dogs as a pastime.
Why is this wrong? Maybe because you don't believe that causing pain to animals for no reason. Why is that so? Is there any reason beyond our empathy for certain animals that are similar enough to us? That we can imagine the pain and that makes us uncomfortable or sad? The answer is no, no other reason.