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Seven Wonders of the IT World
C.G. Lynch writes "The computer closest to the North Pole. The most intriguing data center. The biggest scientific computing grid. The little kernel that rocked the world. CIO.com has compiled a list of Seven Wonders of the IT World, some of the most impressive and unusual systems on the planet (and beyond)."
From the linked list:Secrecy level: High. Two reporters from the local newspaper are the only media who've been inside the compound and written about it (See "Inside the World of Google"): Google treats any and all details as though they belong to the National Security Agency.
Well.... I know they were trying to be funny, but the authors could be more correct that they might have known given the history of Google (startup partially funded by CIA $$s) and how tight they are with NGIA (Google Earth projects), CIA etc..., it would not surprise me to see Google working intimately with NSA. After all, Google has been competing with NSA for PhD mathematicians for some time now (and winning) and it seems like a natural fit. Of course such a "hypothetical" collaboration would raise all sorts of ethical questions, but assuming one could appropriately compartmentalize those concerns, it could certainly be mutually beneficial.
Personally, I'd like to think that this little project (when complete) will certainly contribute to the creation of one or more of the Seven Wonders of the IT world. After all, we all have little wetware parallel supercomputers sitting in the backs of our eyes that can process massive amounts of data, pre-encode it, filter it and more all while dealing with a certain level of data corruption, particularly in disease.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Semi-off-topic, but Webcam #1 at the north pole reminded me: on Friday the Astronomy Picture of the Day posted a multiple-exposure image of last month's lunar eclipse as seen from the south pole. Not an IT-specific wonder, but still seriously impressive, when you think about it, that we've actually got people near the south pole who are in a position to take photos like this.
And hey, for once I can use the term "polar opposite" and know that it's literally true!
...That Job's iPod is on there, after all, it is the seventh wonder of the actual world
Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer and his Flying Chair Routine.
I dont know about other slashdotters but I was rather unimpressed with the 7 wonders of the IT world. Not much on there in the way of impressive other than my boy blue. What about impressive symbolic marvels like The Teapot which were the icons of modern Graphics shaping science and technology. Or code that drives technology like C++ or Perl, or dare I even say it, BASIC. These current wonders are very temporary whereas the original wonders are a bit more timeless, more representative of human innovation than just something that looks cool.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
WOW! A small really small computer runs Vista! This is groundbreaking!
Seriously, though, the only "wonderous" things on there were the Voyager and the supercomputer. Most of the other stuff is not the most groundbreaking or superlative for its kind out there. I thought the idea of a "wonder" was something that we can only try and imagine how they managed to do it or how they came up with the idea.
The 7 Wonders of 7 Wonders Lists
Really- is there any more tired and lame excuse to grab eyeballs out there? Please, lets end these.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
>1. North Pole webcam >Operating temperature: From a chilly minus 40 degrees F to a balmy 120 degrees F.
How can it get to 120F in North Pole?
For the most part, the list is unimpressive. Voyager is hardly "IT," wonder that it is. The whole story reeks of that article from Copyblogger about which headlines get the most Diggs.
That was the most impressive thing to me. I had no idea that it gets up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit at the north pole. And I thought our string of 100+ degree F days this summer was bad!
The lamest one was "small computer that runs Vista".
"It was a billion times better than cobol, but still really retarded." -AC
There is a deeper, underlying beef here. IT is about boring business data and came to dominate an industry that previously was the domain of science (often but obviously not always for military purposes). CIO is trying to make its readers feel good about themselves by co-opting non-business domains of computer use.
1. Webcam #1
2. Voyager 1
3. Google's Datacenter
4. EGEE-II
5. Blue Gene/L
6. OQO
7. Linux kernel
Voyager 1: "Places it's dropped by: Juniper and Saturn"
Why anyone pays money for anything from IBM, Microsoft. Oracle or MySQL AB.
Stick Men
http://www.cio.com/article/print/135700
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
Disappointed, too.
But only because they missed something I think should apply - the Storm Trojan network. I mean, come on! Arguably the world's most powerful centrally-controlled computing resource, and it's all comprised of horked computers? How is that not a wonder?
You should hate its existence. But it's still quite amazing.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linus and I love Linux. But don't forget what RMS likes to remind us at every opportunity: Linux is part of the GNU system. And GNU predated Linux by a long shot.
Stallman started the GNU project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The Linux kernel appeared in 1991. Where did Torvalds get his compiler? Where did Torvalds get his editor? Where did Torvalds find people to work on his kernel? I understand that it can be pedantic to argue about big, abstract ideas like ``When did the paradigm shift really happen?'' Maybe the paradigm didn't ``shift'' until the Linux kernel came out. But Torvalds wasn't out to change paradigms. Stallman was. If we're going to hail the concept of free software, we should acknowledge the alphabet soup of RMS, the FSF, GNU, ETC. that gave it legs to stand on.
What no storm botnet on there? It's the most powerful supercomputer in the world! Seriously though this list isn't that good and their are many things I could think of that could just as easily be on there. Doug Englebart's ideas (NLS and the mother of all demos in 68) now that is a wonder we are still trying to implement successfully and yet hardly anyone has heard of it. But instead we have world's smallest computer running Vista? Pretty lame list here folks...
The smallest computer to run Windows Vista on page 7 is soon to be overtaken by the first computer to actually run-run Windows Vista, like without crashing and stuff
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
is that IT works at all considering that the stakeholders and implementers have little common ground or understanding or sympathy for the other.
-I'm just sayin...
And the readable version
And they're not, technically, on the world.
Think of the pics from space - that's what the public cares about.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
TFA: "Pioneers knew The Dalles as the end of the Oregon trail."
I was just in Seaside this weekend, and they had a big sign next to a statue of Lewis and Clark proclaiming that that was the end of the Oregon Trail... The oceanside makes more sense IMO.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
I woulda thought that the core DNS servers.... the ones that keep the internet going, would have made the list. Without them, everyone would have to resort to numbers (which a lot of us here can do, but not the general public). Ya figure they do massive amounts of work, replying to millions of requests per minute, keep the internet going [which is critical to most developed nations economies]... yet didn't receive any attention here :(
I'm all for NASA with the Voyager probe... but in all reality, its a satellite that we barely keep in contact with, thats ~40 years old.
Who is going to make the official Nobel nomination?
NH
I was wondering if goatse.cx had made the list, so I checked it out. Lo and behold - no article, just a big Symantec ad. Must be the work-safe way to display something large and stretched that produces feces.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
is how a spammers site masquerading as website for CIO's still gets linked from Slashdot
ive seen less adverts and more content on a domain squatters/typo site, they must be desperate
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
Before 1991, most of the servers on the Internet ran stuff like sendmail and bind on Unix.
Nowdays, most of the servers on the Internet run stuff like sendmail and bind on a Unix-like OS.
Thanks, article, for going into such detail about what changed. It's like a whole different world now!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
MUCH bigger. Shhhhh
-you know who.
What is that doing in the mix with Google, Blue Gene, and Voyager. It's not even useful. It's too small to be used as a regular office PC, and too large to be a bring everywhere gadget. It should be replaced with like, Ethernet or something similar.
622677120
No group has gotten more money from the CIA than Google. Except Osama Bin Laden. Except Microsoft. OMG, did I just call M$ a CIA sponsored terrorist? What a smear. This internet thing, is not fair.
if the linux community contained any heterosexuals.
That's not that much load. Keep in mind that DNS is firstly distributed. So those servers receive only a minute portion of the total DNS load. And you can spread what they do get across a number of servers. The Google server farms are more impressive. They handle much higher loads, do significant data mining and processing, and cache some where around a billion or two webpages.
Stevie Wonders of the IT World? I dunno.. Whistler from Sneakers?
Should be at least one, should there not?
I was also disappointed by the list. Mostly because of content, but also because it contained a link to the New 7 Wonders website, which has simply got to be a joke. A list that some place put together to "represent global heritage throughout history" and the pyramids at Giza was simply a runner up?!?!? How lame do you have to be to put together a "seven wonders of the world" list where the pyramids don't warrant a place on the list, especially considering that they're the only thing still around from the bloody original list...
- dm - The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
They list The Dalles Data Center as one of the 7 wonders in the IT world, but they admit themselves that they have no idea what's inside of it? Those warehouses may be full of hay, for all we know. The design of it may be terrible and inefficient, even if it has servers. It's a pretty cheeky thing to claim on zero evidence.
Which is only par for the course. That was one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios of any news site, besides, oh, the last time
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$tar -xvf
Yeah, but do they have a hard-rockin' flute ballad, like the "New Seven Wonders of the World?" It's probably Chocolate Love or All Your Base or some damn thing, isn't it?
GAWD ... an ad page for each hop - ridiculous!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Desktop Search puts the non-technical citizens on equal footing with the Geekiest user.
Learn 1 simple app and ignore most of the Computer gibberish.
Challenge: I have better access to my Video, Music, Pics and Text than anyone on Earth.
Voyager is hardly "IT," wonder that it is.
I was also not impressed and that was my initial reaction too...but then I thought. Is the impressive thing that we shot a tin can out of the solar system or that it can tell us what it is seeing out there? I think it is really the latter so it really is a information technology marvel in the most basic sense of the term.
How can you possibly put together a list of the IT wonders of the world with out including the world wide web - especially when you put the article on a website!
"I thought the idea of a "wonder" was something that we can only try and imagine how they managed to do it or how they came up with the idea."
Substitute "patent" for "wonder" and have another go at it.
I could do no right here. At least, it's more accurate than just "Mormon".
Where's my flying car?
[p.s. CIO - worst-article-to-follow-across-multiple-pages award nominee]
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
"Number of servers: Google's mum."
The correct phrase is "keeping mum".
"Google's mum" is what you would say when implying intimate knowledge of Mrs Google, or perhaps her tendency to wear sturdy footwear.
Personally I would have put in a vote for CSIRAC, which is the oldest digital computer still in existence.
I don't see how you can have a Seven Wonders of the IT World and not include the "Any Key"
Bab72 (Not my real name)
Thanks, I was looking for this "noise reducer" post.
This article has one THE worst noise overheads I have ever seen.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've always wondered how the hell Java came to be dominant programming language for business applications!! God help us all!!
"Java is a programming language designed by two guys in a garage, and it shows."
- university professor of information systems, and chief architect at a major multinational aerospace company
Soon i am going to be the owner of one of the seven wonders of IT world.
installing security updates for vista
They left out teh goatse! And that has *got* to be the most-viewed page of all time!
C|N>K
You're both right. However, Information Technology Year was also 1995, 1996, 1999 and 2006.
The Seti@Home project. Registered in the Guiness Book of Records as the largest computation ever made.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18102/Plan-9-Running-on-Blue-GeneL
Reason why: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/hare.index.htmlReason
One of developers: http://www.graverobber.org/
http://www.cio.com/article/print/135700
For those who also hate paging through an article at the speed of advertising.
-Styopa
It might outlast Earth.
Repeat after me:
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
Your "We're destroying the earth!" is not merely run-of-the-mill religious global destruction fantasy. It's also inherently un-scientific and thus qualifies as FUD. Ditch that bullshit!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Wonder #1: I say NOAA could save themselves alot of money if they bought a better webcam. Any webcam has a thermal bountry of -40 to 120F, but it gets COLD at the North Pole, like -60F cold. What happens when it gets below -40F? That's alot of data that NOAA is missing out on. They need to place a call down to NASA to see if they have any spare Mars Rover parts. Secondly, why waste money on letting the camera drown each year? Strap a floation device to it. Wonder #6: OQO is not so great. It has a very short battery life, possibly due to the Operating System it uses *cough*Vista*cough*. What OS would use the least amnout of power?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
#8 - Bonzai Buddy, perhaps?