Infoworld's CTO Chad Dickerson was walking in Times Square recently and come across what has to be the world's largest Blue Screen of Death. Pretty funny.

ZDNet has a great article on ZDNet Australia about the inner workings of Google: 30 clusters of up to 2,000 PCs each churning away day & night, breaking down regularly but with such redundance that we never see it. Go read “The magic that makes Google tick” to find out more about the numbers:
“Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
Over 30 clusters.
104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog.
One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
No complete system failure since February 2000”

As proof that everything old is new again, we have the new search engine clusty.com, which gives results “clustered” into folders on the left-hand side of the screen. Those who've worked the Web as long as I have will quickly recognize the resurrection of an idea pioneered so well by Northern Light before they inexplicably chose to abandon the general search engine fray to concentrate on paid searches of archival material. The Clusty implementation seems to work reasonably well but they have clearly only indexed a very small subset of the Web when compared to their competitors, as the results that I have gotten have been pretty weak on numbers and seem to have missed some significant sites in their clusters. I'll keep trying them as their categorization seems to work fairly well—although I think Northern Light's was better—and hopefully their index will continue to grow to a point where it becomes truly useful.

I was at the store last night and in a display of Christmas toys I saw a box of toy airplanes titled “Aircrafts”! HEY—the plural of aircraft is aircraft! I have also recently seen a lot of use of the word “softwares”. The word “software” is already PLURAL! The only way to properly indicate one item of software is to say something like “a piece of software” or “this item of software”; when referring to one piece of software it is probably much better to say “application” or “program”, both of which are already singular. These uses have primarly come from non-native speakers but I am seeing them creep into english spoken by those born and raised in the U.S. Do us all a favor: correct people when they say “softwares” or “aircrafts”. Hey, I'm sorry we have irregular plural forms in english; now get over it and learn to use the language CORRECTLY!

I know this is kind of old news to some, but there has been some serious bashing of Wikipedia over the past few months. A columnist in the Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard wrote an article citing comments from a high school librarian about the inherant unreliability of Wikipedia as an information source. There then ensued a sometimes heated discussion between Mike Masnick of techdirt and the reporter (who appears to be a real piece of work and characterized Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous").

I have been a contributor to Wikipedia for a while now, and I certainly believe it can be trusted. I have worked very hard to ensure my contributions are varifiable and, whenever possible, well documented. I know for a fact that while I may not be the authoratative expert on the subjects I am writing about, I have all of my facts straight and in some cases I am even able contribute independantly verifible information that no one else could reasonably assemble. I also know that if any information is disputed, it will normally be well documented in the discussion section of the page I am viewing. But would I trust Wikipedia as a sole source of information? Of course not! Skepticism is both healthy and an essential component of sound scholarship.

I recommend that any use of Wikipedia be tempered with the use of at least two other resources. One that I recommend highly is the use of The Columbia Encyclopedia, which bartleby.com has online at http://www.bartleby.com/65/. Personally, I would make my second resource a Google search on the topic, and then evaluate the results to see which are best.