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Google's Secretive Data Center
valdean wrote in with a NYTimes article about Google which says "On the banks of the windswept Columbia River [in Oregon], Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky...' What's the goal of this new complex? Expanding Google's raw computer power. It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.'
And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border -- at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking -- is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.
When I read stuff like this, I am reminded of Isaac Asmiov's Multivac stories, where the massive computer was always out in some deserted wasteland, far away from the bulk of humanity. It seems strange that the battle for Internet supremacy is taking place in the Northwestern United States. Now the question is: will the Yahoo and Microsoft data centers show up on Google Earth?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Maybe it's the storage farm the NSA makes them build to store all the queries from every google user in the world...
It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.
All of them soon to be unusable as soon as the new no-net-neutrality laws are in place next year...
While i'm sure people will have the typical "OMG GOOGLE IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD" comments, i'd like to look at the positive side. They are boosting the economy of small town america with this project. Creating hundreds of construction jobs in a town of 12,000. Creating 200 permanent jobs at the start, and i'm sure alot more in the several years folling the site going online. And not to mention what just being one of the homes of Google will do for them. Props to Google for setting up in small towns and doing it the right way. Granted they are doing this for their own reasons as well, but they're also not pulling a Wal-Mart and fucking over a community.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
From TFA:
Rule 2: Writing a spec is like writing code for a brain to execute.
Network engineers are at the very bottom of the computer industry food chain; I think you need something like a GED and a pulse to get that kind of job. (So what are you waiting for? Apply now!)
But seriously, if your idea of "awesome" is to be a low-level tech peon at a huge corporation you will quickly find that there are hundreds of places out there willing to hire you; companies love hard workers with no ambition.
Why would they build this in what looks like a flood zone?
Good thing everyone installed Google Desktop so they now have our files, and over used Google Maps so they now have our address and all the strange places we've visited, to say nothing of our email.
That's one hell of a brilliant shadow agency. It's too intelligent to be true.