The late Senator Ted Stevens famously claimed the Internet was “A series of tubes” when speechifying on Network Neutrality. His maladroit metaphor immediately became a meme. Now, from a first-ever tour of a Google data center comes this photo, which appears to show he was right all along:
Inside Google Data Center. It’s full of tubes!
[Image: Connie Zhou / Google]
We’ve added a one-stop “dashboard of dashboards” that displays all the major cloud service dashboards on one page.
The page contains a “window” for each service status page or dashboard, with live, up-to-date info at a glance. Scroll for specific applications or locations, or click the link to jump to the full status page itself.
We included these services initially:
Have we missed any? If we have leave a comment with the URL and we’ll try to add it.
Very interesting in-depth article in the New York Times today on the sprawling, electricity-hungry data centers spawned by cloud computing.
Internet-based industries have honed a reputation for sleek, clean convenience based on the magic they deliver to screens everywhere. At the heart of every Internet enterprise are data centers, which have become more sprawling and ubiquitous as the amount of stored information explodes, sprouting in community after community.
the gee-whiz factor of such a prominent high-tech neighbor wore off quickly. First, a citizens group initiated a legal challenge over pollution from some of nearly 40 giant diesel generators that Microsoft’s facility — near an elementary school — is allowed to use for backup power.
Then came a showdown late last year between the utility and Microsoft, whose hardball tactics shocked some local officials.
These data centers are apparently not always good neighbors, and of course as they are there to serve our cloud needs we’re all complicity to some degree.
Unwired Planet, Inc. has filed patent infringement complaints against Apple Inc. and Google Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. Unwired Planet claims to be “the inventor of the mobile Internet.” It is now an “intellectual property
company that makes and sells no products – except patent licenses. Or as they say on their website:
Old Model: Patents Protect Products. New Model: Patents Themselves Are Products
In two separate complaints filed in Reno, Nevada, Unwired Planet charges Apple with infringing 10 of its patents, and charges Google with infringing 10 different patents. Together, the two cases charge infringement of a total of 20 patents related to smart mobile devices, cloud computing, digital content stores, push notification technologies and location-based services such as mapping and advertising.
“Today’s actions follow a careful review that we launched in late 2011 as we began to transform Unwired Planet into an Intellectual Property company,” said Mike Mulica, CEO of Unwired Planet.
In the case against Apple, the complaint specifically alleges that infringing Apple products and services include, among others:
The patents asserted against Apple are:
1. United States Patent No. 6,317,594, entitled “System and method for providing data to a wireless device upon detection of activity of the device on a wireless network,” asserted against devices such as iPhones and iPads which are able to get information, for example update notifications, when the device is switched on or moves between cells of the cellular network.
2. United States Patent No. 6,317,831, entitled “Method and apparatus for establishing a secure connection over a one-way data path,” asserted against services which use a push mechanism to get notifications to devices such as update badges sent to iPhone and iPad applications.
3. United States Patent No. 6,321,092, entitled “Multiple input data management for wireless location-based applications,” asserted against devices such as iPhones and iPads which use more than one source of location information, for example GPS, Wi-Fi and cell tower location.
4. United States Patent No. 6,532,446, entitled “Server based speech recognition user interface for wireless devices,” asserted against wireless server-assisted speech recognition for personal assistant services and dictation, such as Siri on iPhones and iPads.
5. United States Patent No. 6,647,260, entitled “Method and System Facilitating Web Based Provisioning of Two-Way Mobile Communications Devices,” asserted against Appstores for selecting and downloading applications on devices such as iPhones and iPads.
6. United States Patent No. 6,813,491, entitled “Method and apparatus for adapting settings of wireless communication devices in accordance with user proximity,” asserted against ways of using motion and proximity sensors to control devices like iPhones and iPads.
7. United States Patent No. 7,020,685, entitled “Method and apparatus for providing internet content to SMS-based wireless devices,” asserted against automated searching and information delivery based on keywords in a message from a mobile device, for example as used in Siri for iPhones and iPads.
8. United States Patent No. 7,233,790, entitled “Device capability based discovery, packaging and provisioning of content for wireless mobile devices,” asserted against digital stores with content and Apps for devices with different capabilities, for example the App Store for iPhones and iPads.
9. United States Patent No. 7,299,033, entitled “Domain-based management of distribution of digital content from multiple wireless services subscribers,” asserted against services such as iTunes or the App Store that distribute digital content to multiple domains, internationally.
10. United States Patent No. 7,522,927, entitled “Interface for wireless location information,” asserted against ways of obtaining device location information such as Find my iPhone, Find my iPad and Find my Friends.
The complaint against Google specifically alleges that infringing Google products and services include, among others:
The patents asserted against Google are:
1. United States Patent No. 6,292,657, entitled “Method and Architecture for Managing a Fleet of Mobile Stations Over Wireless Data Networks,” asserted against mass updates to applications installed on devices such as Android phones and tablets.
2. United States Patent No. 6,654,786, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Informing Wireless Clients about Updated Information,” asserted against push mechanisms to get updated information to devices such as Android phones and tablets.
3. United States Patent No. 6,662,016, entitled “Providing Graphical Location Information for Mobile Resources Using a Data-Enabled Network,” asserted against placing a location marker for the current location of a mobile device on a corresponding map, such as My Location in Google Maps.
4. United States Patent No. 6,684,087, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Displaying Images on Mobile Devices,” asserted against zooming into a map on devices such as Android phones and tablets, and providing zoomed-in images to users of Google Maps.
5. United States Patent No. 6,895,240, entitled “Method and Architecture for Managing a Fleet of Mobile Stations over Wireless Data Networks,” asserted against group and mass notifications/updates to mobile devices such as Android phones and tablets.
6. United States Patent No. 6,944,760, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Protecting Identities of Mobile Devices on a Wireless Network,” asserted against authenticated push of information from application developers to devices such as Android phones and tablets.
7. United States Patent No. 7,024,205, entitled “Subscriber Delivered Location-Based Services,” asserted against search and advertising using location, such as sponsored links in Google searches which are paid for using Google Adwords.
8. United States Patent No. 7,035,647, entitled “Efficient Location Determination for Mobile Units,” asserted against identifying the location of a device, such as an Android phone or tablet, with increased accuracy using multiple sources, such as GPS, Wi-Fi and cell tower location.
9. United States Patent No. 7,203,752, entitled “Method and System for Managing Location Information for Wireless Communications Devices,” asserted against privacy control for applications requesting access to the location to a device, such as an Android phone or tablet.
10. United States Patent No. 7,463,151, entitled “Systems and Methods for Providing Mobile Services Using Short-Range Radio Communication Devices,” asserted against devices with advanced Near Field Communications (NFC) services, such as NFC-based commerce, advertising and coupons, and access to content using NFC.
This is perhaps off topic but I wanted to post it for others to find when they have the same problem I did.
Problem: you can’t get chat to open in Gmail.
Even if the icon for it is showing, clicking it does nothing.
The icon, usually in the lower left of the page:
Google the problem and the best you will come up with is this page, which was no help to me.
Solution: close and reopen gmail. Then click the icon. BTW that can fix a lot of problems in gmail or calendar. I find both can responding after a few days of being open in Chrome for OS X.
Alexsis Madrigal offers an inside look at what Google is doing with Maps and all those Streetview photos they’ve amassed. It’s jaw-dropping in its scope and audacity — and in its implications for the future:
“…as my friend and sci-fi novelist Robin Sloan put it to me, “I maintain that this is Google’s core asset. In 50 years, Google will be the self-driving car company (powered by this deep map of the world) and, oh, P.S. they still have a search engine somewhere.”
Read the article.
First Google created, and wrote papers on, Hadoop and MapReduce, which got reverse-engineered into the current state of the art for Big Data.
But Google has moved on to Dremel, and the rest of the world is slow in catching up.
With BigQuery Google offers a simple-to-user service that doesn’t sacrifice Big Data scale OR speed.
As Armando Fox, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in these sorts of data-center-sized software platforms. put it in a Wired article:
“This is unprecedented. Hadoop is the centerpiece of the “Big Data” movement, a widespread effort to build tools that can analyze extremely large amounts of information. But with today’s Big Data tools, there’s often a drawback. You can’t quite analyze the data with the speed and precision you expect from traditional data analysis or “business intelligence” tools. But with Dremel, Fox says, you can.
“They managed to combine large-scale analytics with the ability to really drill down into the data, and they’ve done it in a way that I wouldn’t have thought was possible,” he says. “The size of the data and the speed with which you can comfortably explore the data is really impressive. People have done Big Data systems before, but before Dremel, no one had really done a system that was that big and that fast.
“Usually, you have to do one or the other. The more you do one, the more you have to give up on the other. But with Dremel, they did both.”
Reading this post on Google’s low-cost, super-fast fiber-to-the-home initiative (makes me sort of wish I lived in Kansas City) brought to mind all the other Google products and initiatives that might be empowered by it. Go read it, then come back here and consider:
Chrome OS: it takes a long time to make a new operating system and it looks trivial today, but with widely available gigabit internet at the household and small business level it begins to look like a realistic “the network is the computer” future.
Mobile OS: Google already has that covered with Android.
Add Google Drive: Ubiquitous very high speed connectivity at a low price makes Drive viable for more than backup, sharing and synch. Actually synch becomes easier if the only copy is on a server.
Add Google Compute Engine: A thin-client netbook running Chrome OS, or Android on tablets and handsets, become more appealing if you can quickly access network-based computing resources for high-performance computing tasks like video transcoding.
Add Google Voice: consider all those hypothetical hotspots. Combine with Android and Voice. Can a Google competitor to cell phone providers be far behind, one that leverages the coming Google network? All it would take is a couple extra capabilities in the fiber/WiFi box that seems inevitable. And don’t forget they now own Motorola, a top-notch mobile phone company.
YouTube/Google TV: Already dipping its toe into original programming, and fast fiber means TV will change dramatically.
Living In the cloud would become a real option for everyday consumers. What about effects on professionals and small businesses?
And what about those other seemingly sci-fi projects, self driving cars and Glass? Hey, if the car drives itself my brain then has the bandwidth for augmented reality. How might they benefit from the ability to hop from fiber-connected WiFi hotspot to hotspot?
All this based on a good search engine algorithm, and then ads next to search results? Who’d a thunk it?
Zencoder performed some initial comparison tests of Google Compute Engine versus Amazon EC2 for transfering and transcoding video.
“On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.”
Here’s one of their resulting charts:
Read the full post for details.
