"I don’t know what the facts are but...." ...* Don Rumsfeld

"The question is: How do you actually get the applications to use the infrastructure? How do you distribute it? How do you optimize it? That's the hard part. To do that you require an insane amount of force of will..."

Well, having correctly answered the question, one then is left with A.N.Other Big Question. How do you use an insane amount of force of will?

And that would be a simply complex question to ask of the Psychotically Inclined/Psychopathically Equipped .... and the Singularity Minded.

"With GFS, a master node oversees data spread across a series of distributed chunkservers. And for apps that require low latency, that lone master - a single point of failure - is a problem.

"One GFS shortcoming that this immediately exposed had to do with the original single-master design," former GFS tech lead Sean Quinlan has said. "A single point of failure may not have been a disaster for batch-oriented applications, but it was certainly unacceptable for latency-sensitive applications, such as video serving." .... Err, the problem is transformed instantaneously from any possible failure concerns to constant energy promise whenever the single-master node design energises and mentors Novel Controls in sub systems/hierarchical legacy infrastructures, allowing the single-master node to extend ITs Powers in Stealthy Information Control and Central Intelligence Agency Captures.

And it may just be simpler to accept that the Future is going to be Completely Different for only a Few Really Need to Know how Everything Works Beta Together with ESPecial Forces Magic .... "Vijay Gill has even hinted that Google has developed some sort of magical software layer that can automatically migrate loads in and out of data centers in near time."

And "developed" rather than Phished and Plagiarised/Phormed would Guarantee them an Unassailable Lead Position? But there are other Sharks in the Search Field looking to Host and Server Novel Innovative Protocols with Virtual Cloud Covering ITs Administrative AIMachinery ....... Immaculate Source Provision.

" .... somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know.” .... http://nbfs.wordpress.com/2006/11/10/rumsfeldisms/

@Cucumber C Face

Since I'm a bit of a cynic, I'm working on the assumption that:

1 - Spammers don't waste their time trying to game Bing results at the moment. If it ever becomes popular, the spammers will flood that too.

2- Bing has no ads because for now MS are happy to piss away torrents of money in a desperate attempt to be the next Google, and not many people are keen to pay for ads on someone else's loss-leader. If it ever becomes popular, the ads will most certainly follow.

I haven't really played much with Bing, so I'm probably missing a trick or two with regards to the ergonomics. They seem to be identical as far as I can tell (apart from the big left margin, which must hack off anyone with a small screen). Bing looks like Google classic but more grey and square. The desperate me-too vibe even extends to having a googleiffic 'beta' sub-head. In fact, if it wasn't for the top-left links to MSN and Hotmail one might think that it's a product of the New Evil Empire rather than the Old Evil Empire

@Tim Bergel

A reply from him/it to your post wouldn't be unexpected. I have provoked a direct response before by simply mimicking his/it's posting style. The response came in the usual style. If it's a machine, I'm assuming it must have picked up on me mentioning it's username in my post.

There have been entirely salient posts in the past. And they're usually on 'proper sci/tech' articles rather than bootnotes or political stuff. The political stuff tends to invoke the most convoluted replies. Most replies take someone's previous post and provide an 'answer' (of sorts). I usually get about half way in before skipping to the next person's comment.

It has been suggested that it's a parody.

I offer no ideas on the new found "1" suffix.

&W

"There have been entirely salient posts in the past. And they're usually on 'proper sci/tech' articles rather than bootnotes or political stuff"

To be honest, I can't say I have noticed any of these ...

"I usually get about half way in before skipping to the next person's comment"

You're doing a lot better than me, then.

"It has been suggested that it's a parody"

A parody of what, for goodness sake? But thanks for the comments.

Are "distributed masters" the solution to DDOS?

Above my pay grade but the only potential solution I've contemplated in regard to DDOS is what I call "Grand P2P" where - say - a thousand google scale organisations (if there are that many - let's say organisation big enough to pay a $Million dollar sign up fee without whingeing) form a dedicated "distributed master net" which hosts (for example) the authentication keys we'd need to run a Trusted Surveillance system, or the black and whitelists we'd need to eliminate SPAM.

The idea being that not even the most widely distributed botnet could generate sufficient traffic to pull down such a GP2P network.

Does the GFS2 concept achieve similar protection or would there still be a single point of failure (eg the ip address or dns) which would leave the system vulnerable to attack? (a GP2P system shouldn't have that vulnerability because it would have a thousand access points)

Can someone enlighten me?

Caffeinated Abstraction

Cade, you say: "Vijay Gill has even hinted that Google has developed some sort of magical software layer that can automatically migrate loads in and out of data centers in near time."

Since "'[Data centers] are just atoms,' [as] Google senior manager of engineering and architecture Vijay Gill said", the necessary abstraction is about the "end user" (and their patterns of use of the "ultra-low latency" apps desired)... the end-user in space and time -- a spime in Bruce Sterling's terms.

> IB

@Tim Bergel

It could well be a customised version of the dada engine (http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/) , used by the postmodernism generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/).