Slashdot Mirror
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!
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 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.
Why anyone pays money for anything from IBM, Microsoft. Oracle or MySQL AB.
Stick Men
Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer and his Flying Chair Routine.
The article said WONDERS, not HORRORS.
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.
No; I for one thought CueCat belonged in that slot.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
So I'm compiling a top ten list of reasons to stop making 7 Wonders of the world lists
1. Wasted bandwidth
2. They're only for pageview whores
3. Most of the items are only 'wondrous' because people wonder why the hell its on the list.
4. If anything really is that wondrous, humans will probably destroy it.
5. Google will sell the #1 spot to someone else.
6. I.T. is moving so fast that in a few months, most will be obsolete.
thats as far as I got. Ok, I'll finish it for you:
7. It will suffer from the Slashdot effect.
8. Most Slashdot posters won't read it anyway.
9. ???
10. Profit!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I would have put "The Internet" on the list, personally.
It gives you a research lab in all your cities too :-)
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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!
"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.