anyone who harbored any thoughts about being environmentally friendly by taking part in the ‘new’ economy and not partaking in the sins of our forefathers by pushing bits instead of actual physical materials can now jump off your high and mighty horse:
“As California’s tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the
state’s power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord.”
“Computers consume about 13% of the nation’s power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.
The Internet’s borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.
To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ”server farms” consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. ”
i definately need to change the rhetoric box with this quote regarding bt’s brilliant patent claim:
“”We are impressed to learn that your company patented the principle of the hyperlink in the mid-70s when people were still wearing kipper ties and flares…Congratulations!””
david gelernter’s sees the future and it’s distributed and pervasive:
“The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd. The individuals in the swarm lose their identities. The computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the Cybersphere. Within the swarm, individual computers will be as anonymous as molecules of air.
“If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn’t that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination. The “site” is like a military unit in the field, the general moving with his troops (or like a hockey team in constant swarming motion). (We used essentially this technique to build the first tuple space implementations. They seemed to depend on a shared server, but the server was an illusion; there was no server, just a swarm of clients.) Could Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes. ”
surprise, surprise. apparently m$ has tweaked the webtv browser so that users of can no longer access myinternetdesktop.com. some companies never learn.
wow. i like google’s new map searching service. google continues with the minimalist interface tradition which works great for finding point locations – just type in the street address and city. nicely done.
