

I never knew Google was this massive - edw519
http://blog.managednetworks.co.uk/it-support/googles-20-petabytes/

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snprbob86
Guido's calculator, like many of ours, is the interactive Python prompt. There
is a good reason Python 3000 will default to infinite precision floating point
calculations (or whatever they call it) ... Guido joined Google! Working at
Google makes numbers completely meaningless to you. About two months in, it
hits you, your brains melt out your ears, and the number of stars in the
universe isn't really all that big a number anymore. Python's front man is on
Google's payroll now, so Python must be able to handle the need to calculate
petabytes and nanoseconds.

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bayareaguy
Google currently enjoys a huge infrastructure advantage but it's not one that
couldn't be taken away by technical change unless they were to corner the
market in the production of new storage and network bandwidth.

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DaniFong
This may be true. Computer infrastructure isn't like, say, railroads. Moore's
law keeps halving the worth of their computer hardware investment every 18
months. The real opportunities for cornering the market are in those things
that are _not_ , so far, technologically scalable: air conditioning, data
center size, electricity, mechanical failure, number of technicians, software.
Google has expertise in these, true, but there's nothing stopping other
companies from getting it.

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michael_dorfman
Clever use of rice to drive the point home.

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ConradHex
It is, but it might be a little misleading. The "terabyte" picture of the
giant ship, for example: many new computers come with half that much space on
their hard drive already.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Sure, but a terabyte of rice is still a giant ship.

