This blog has moved:
Okay, it hasn't really moved -- it's still here. But it has been superseded by a new and improved version of Geekwatch, which lives in a new location at http://www.globeandmail.com/blogs/geekwatch. It has a whole lot more blog-type features, including the ability to comment on each individual post (rather than having comments all in a big lump at the end of the entire blog) and "perma-links" or individual URLs for each post to make it easier for other bloggers and readers to link to. There's also an RSS feed, which you can import into one of a number of feed-readers -- either Web-based like Bloglines or downloadable like NewsGator -- so you can get your Geekwatch fix whenever there's a new item posted (there's more about our RSS feeds at http://www.globeandmail.com/rss). If you want to let me know what you think of the new Geekwatch, just post a comment.
To comment, click here, or email me at mingram@globeandmail.com
Turn those fans up to 11:
If you're a computer nerd -- or even just interested in the guts of what Google does and how it does it -- a story in the New York Times has some fascinating details on the new server farms the search engine company is constructing on the shores of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. Two are built already and a third has received a permit. They are as big as two football fields, and each one has giant cooling towers four stories high attached to the end, in order to keep the massive racks of servers from overheating.
Microsoft and Yahoo are apparently building their own giant server farms upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., which means that the Oregon-Washington region will likely need a few extra nuclear plants or dams or something pretty soon. Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky of FON says that when he asked Google founder Larry Page what the main factor limiting the company's growth was, the billionaire said electricity.
Just how big is the Googleplex? The Times says the number of servers the company is currently operating at its 25 locations around the world is in the 450,000 range. That figure has more than quadrupled since 2004, when Google's server operation was already estimated to be one of the world's most powerful distributed supercomputers - rivalling anything that NASA or the NSA have. Based on estimates of the power that half a million servers would consume, that means Google's electricity bill is likely somewhere between $50-million and $100-million every year -- and growing.
To comment, click here, or email me at mingram@globeandmail.com
And a big sticky mess:
By now, you've probably seen one of the "viral" videos that seem to regularly make their way around the Internet faster than the speed of light, most of them courtesy of video-sharing websites such as YouTube.com or Google Video or Revver.com. There's the teenager playing Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar (note for note) and the older gentleman known as Bus Uncle yelling at a younger man who criticized his cellphone manners -- and more recently, the visual sculpture created by two men wearing white lab coats, brandishing 101 litres of Diet Coke and about 500 Mentos mints.
Using a variety of equipment, the two men drop Mentos into the bottles of Coke, some of which are set swinging on ropes, at which point geysers of pop go spraying into the air up to 20 feet high. According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, the two men from Maine -- a professional juggler named Fritz Grobe and a lawyer named Stephen Voltz -- said the exercise had no real purpose other than to have some fun with the properties of Mentos mints and Diet Coke. They posted it to their comedy website called Eepybird.com, and it has reportedly been viewed almost a million times.
