Markoff and Hansell peg Google's 'computer' at 450,000 servers in 25 centers worldwide. If that's true, and positing 900 million computer users in the world, then each Google server supports some 2,000 users.

2,000 users is no big deal for a web server. But that can be a heavy load for many heavier, more traditional networked applications that are server based. So one wonders how scalable Google's applications, Google Spreadsheets, Writely et al. might be as more customers flock to them - especially since Google will want to keep its search engine and attached ad-serving processes humming along at top speed as well.

A few things work in Google's favor. One, Google deploys AJAX apps - apps that run on top of scripts that run both on the client, as well as the server, which helps spread the load. Two, computer power doubles every 18 months or so, which is a powerful vector in Google's favor.

One can imagine a future computer that costs $50 or so and whose only interface is a browser. It has say 5 GB of flash memory for a hard drive and a gig of RAM. It has a broadband connection, and is set up to run a host of free software - email, browser, word processor, even photo and video editing off of Google and other vendor's sites. The computer might be offered free by the ISP, or even Google...
Comments 9:37:28 PM    

Previously I'd updated Firefox and was now running Google Browser Sync, and had my Firefox session suspended from a Mac at work open on my Linux screen at home. Cool. We were on a roll - 2 Linux installs that worked, in short order, so we decided to push our luck and grab the Picassa binary.

All three apps were packaged differently - an .rpm, a tar file, and a shell script wrapped around some sort of compressed binary (ain't Linux grand?). Picassa, the .rpm, was about the easiest of the three to install: the the home page made mention of using WINE and Mozilla, so I was a bit concerned about the much-dreaded dependencies, especially on a 64-bit machine, but Picassa just worked once it was installed.

It's a good idea not to tell Picassa to search your whole hard drive for photos - it found more than 20,000, mostly graphics associated with apps and help files. The good news is that Picassa's tree view of the file system made it easy to turn off the unwanted icons et al.

The picture is a b&w I snapped with my Leica 2 years ago while I was playing with USB import on the Linux machine. It was toned and straightened in Picassa, then published to Blogger with a couple of clicks, befopre being moved to gulker.com. Picassa for Linux is just as polished, friendly and fast as it is on Windows. Nice. And, free...
Comments 8:36:59 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures