OOh but then they will to have to learn the meaning of lean as in lean and mean. I guess they know the meaning of mean already. lean as in not equal to bloat.

So - it seems that Microsoft will go with the virtual containers after all - maybe? An age old technology but not much used - a container can be anything from a corporation to a "data center" or a message or a database view or a process or .., uniquely addressable, dynamically configurable, location independent, include and/or share other containers, and so on. A simple architecture in theory - hard one in current Windows platforms. Once done you can add services, nodes, programs, messages, routes, etc just through configuration to a living system. Same interface to every service (process, program, procedure, etc) - cuts the APIs down to a couple of dozens. Easy recovery / takeover - a service is fully location independent, etc, etc..

Anyhow - anyone who wants to compete Google needs a simple architecture, not the millions APIs as currently in Windows, .NET, Java, even Unix / Linux, whatever. And of course wouldn't make everyone happy - some just live in complexity and confusion, makes one feel important and gives a false impression of the job security.

As in a humungous medieval device for lobbing sodding great rocks / flaming faggots* / plague ridden corpses at the opposition from a long way away? Generally used to reduce some monolithic edifice putting up a stiff resistance to rubble by battering it repeatedly with heavy objects?

I knew that they were pissed off with Google, but I think that's going a shade too far.

*Note to 'merkins. Stop sniggering and go and look up what it really means.

By the time they're done, they'll have realised they need to stick all their number-crunching processors and drives in one big box, and they'll have found out they need a special operating system to run the processing. They'll find they need special boxes to house the databases on, and special databases that use the file system to partition the data, with a special odatabase operating system to manage all that.

They'll work out that they need to put as much processing as possible into batch processes, to maximise processor useage. Then they'll start sending the jobs from datacentre to datacentre, around the globe, over a twenty four hour cycle, to make use of cheap, overnight electrricity.

And by the time they've finished, they'll have reinvented the mainframe and the AS400. These people are geniuses.

"Microsoft has been running large-scale internet services for more than a decade, since the advent of MSN and Hotmail"

Err, didn't MS buy Hotmail. IIRC they left it running on BSD servers for a good while too.

But didn't google already win this patent?

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400961

Funny how it took MS 1 year to come up with the idea about 1 year after google obtained the patent. Prob just another PR attempt by MS to once again claim that they "Have those shows too". MS is the damn kid that steals your science project and then claims it as their own.

.. the fox blew his house down as it was made of sticks.

Whenever I read about these huge datacentre builds and their massive energy consumption, I always wonder if anyone is seriously looking at the efficiency of the software platforms and applications.

There are so many layers of abstraction in modern platforms that I doubt anyone knows where all these cycles are going, but most of these services are doing a fairly simple job, just at a huge scale. Do you really need a container-load of servers to run Hotmail? It's a big NAS system, basically. Big disks, yes; fast networks, yes, but this shouldn't be a CPU-bound process.

One had the impression that Google in the early days understood this, and that their search architecture was built from the ground up with Real Programmer technology (Linux, custom C++ daemons, splitting IO from processing) - now they're doing every application under the sun, have they lost that skill? Or is it just there aren't enough Real Programmers to cover all those bases?

(Mine's the one with the 1985 (confidential) ARM1 spec. in the pocket.)

... they will make their own Linux distribution for in house use (if they haven't got one already). Microsoft Linux is approaching faster than I expected.

The demand the MSNBot places on a website isn't worth the hits you don't want from MSN/Hotmail losers, and those who don't know how to configure their search engine who use MSN search.

robots.txt :

User-agent: msnbot

Disallow: /

It seems that Hotmail was developed by Microsoft... at least in Micro$oft's manner of developing software

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1997/Dec97/Hotmlpr.mspx

See the comments about prior art, as you note, Several Telcos have done this and I belive the Army do it on a daily basis. Think they call them something like Mobile Command Centres...

just becuase the US Patent office grants it, doesn't mean it will stand up....