The guardian has this story today:


This continues what was being speculated on earlier. Robert X. Cringely, in the November 17 edition of his I, Cringely blog:


My favorite line there is about the Opteron processors. For those without lives, there was a tedious debate in the webmaster forums a while ago dealing with whether or not Google was switching to 64 bit computing in its datacenters. Obviously, it is going to do that, and as this makes fairly clear, has already done so.

And the November 24 edition had this:

What do we learn from this? Google is thinking way bigger than SEOs, who are just scrabbling around chasing after crumbs.

I was definitely wrong about how I thought of google, these guys are thinking outside the box. All those PHDs and computer pros they've been assembling have after all been up to something much more interesting than the latest algo tweak. This is what's really behind google's cherry picking of all the top IT companies.

Now it's making more sense: keep the riffraff, the seos, and all those, watching things that don't matter in any larger scheme of things, while you're making the next logical step.

Some people think big, some people can't even seen the idea when somebody else has thought it. This is very interesting.

Re the box, my guess is that it's a cisco systems type linksys type box, if you follow such things you're aware that there's been a popular fad of massively hacking linksys WRT54G wireless routers of a certain generation, making them into full on linux networking appliances. The boxes already have flash and other types of memory, as well as small processors.


What is being discussed here is simply adding a few more ports to the box. Tutorial for hacking linksys WRT54G router.

This also explains what the firefox developers they hired have been doing: Google has been rolling their own ultra tight linux package to run on these boxes, and the interface will be Gecko/Firefox based. In other words, for all practical purposes, the interface to the OS/Hardware/Network will be the browser. Very interesting.

Now I can see why these guys are billionaires.

I wonder if this is one reason that MSN search development has been slowing down? Does MS realize that the game was bigger than they realized?

The announcement is supposed to come Friday, January 6, we'll see what it actually is.

My guess is a networking appliance with Linux as OS, but not useable as anything other than an interface type thing. We'll see what the specs are, if it will have a hard drive or not.

I've been wondering how long it would take to start scaling down processor and box specs to bare minimums, it doesn't take very much to run a browser, especially if the Office files are stored off the box, in those data centers.
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There's more coming, thick and fast. Here is the new Google Patent. The key part is here:


As you may notice, this is almost exactly what is being discussed above, a small box that sends and receives wireless signals, creating a network without any centralized receiver/broadcaster units, or far fewer than a standard wireless network would require.

It gets more interesting all the time. Google and Walmart both denied that they were teaming up to sell a cheap computer.

Which means the LA times fell for some misinformation. Clearly only a fool would want to get into the low cost PC business, anyone who has run Linux without being a fanatic knows you can't deliver a supportable newbie PC box running linux and expect to be able to support it and make money.

But that's not what Google is doing. They aren't stupid. They wil be running Linux in the network appliance. It won't be a PC, it will just be a box you plug into, phone line for VoIP, networking for your PC, and so on. A black box that is, using Linux as an embedded, more or less, OS. Gets more interesting all the time.
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