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The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). The goals-- and current design points are: * Low power-- 6kWatts per rack, and 60kWatts for the whole system * High density-- 100 Terabytes per rack * Local computing to process the data-- 800 low-end PC's * Multi-OS possible, linux standard * Colocation friendly-- requires our own rack to get 100TB/rack, or 50TB in a standard rack * Shipping container friendly-- Able to be run in a 20' by 8' by 8' shipping container * Easy Maintainance-- one system administrator per petabyte * Software to automate mirroring with itself * Inexpensive design-- So far about $50k for project management, non-recoverable engineering, and samples * Inexpensive storage-- materials cost less than 50% more cost than the cost of the disks

A portal is more than infrastructure -- it has to fit your business goals and enterprise apps to fufill its integration promise. We dove into seven top enterprise portals to find out what makes each one tick

One crazy idea I've been thinking about is what I call a "distributed virtual PC" or DVPC. The basic idea is that you have your full-blown PC with hard-drive, but the hard-drive is really just a cache, with all your data and settings being redundantly stored (and mirrored and cached) across any number of servers on the net, all transparently. The OS would need to be "upgraded" so that file changes are written through the local hard-drive cache to the distributed virtual drive on the net. If you occasionally are disconnected, such as on a plane or in the mountains, the cache changes would accumulate and then incrementally be written out to the net on future connections. Changes could also be written to a USB hard-drive or flash memory "drive" as well. Your physical PC could act as one or more virtual PCs via a logon, and more than one physical PC could be used to access each of your virtual PCs. Files on a virtual PC could be shared as defined using some access control scheme.

Ever since I came to Google, they've been talking about putting up an official Google blog. And now, less than 15 months later, voilà. Oh well, it's not like we own a recently relaunched service where you can create a blog in two minutes or something. Okay, we do. (Sorry for the plug.) But I guess other Googlers have been a little busy what with all the searching. And the advertising. And filling out purchase orders for all those hard drives. Anyway, I'm excited the blog's up. We're going to post stuff here - regular bloggy things: What Larry had for breakfast. What Sergey thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson's Creek character reminds us most of Eric. And perhaps, news about Google, and our thoughts on whatever random events cross our horizon. Oh, and we have email feedback too. So we hope to hear from you, as well. - Evan Williams

The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science--the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same."

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