maebmij’s blog

It’s sort of sad that they felt the most broadly marketable use of a cellular wireless card was to sit at home with it.

Slashdot links to Bob Cringely’s usual brand of wild conjecture, this week about Google. But, man, this paragraph plays right to everything that I find exciting about computers:

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.

Remember that X-Files episode (perhaps one of the ones scripted by William Gibson) with a secret shipping container down at the docks full of busy rack-mount hardware and workstations?

The Internet, on the other hand, is stupid. On purpose. Its designers made sure the biggest, most inclusive network of them all was dumb as a box of rocks.

  —Doc Searls and David Weinberger

An old passage I’ve always liked, now here for posterity:

Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity. These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up on depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.

  —Hunter S Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72)