Gmail For All

I haven't posted anything about Google in a while, so I thought that I'd mention that Gmail is no longer invitation only...finally .  How long have I had a gmail account, again?

 

I know Google could change their mind again, but it seems that Gmail is finally open to everyone.

If you don't live in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Japan (Gmail is already open there), go to gmail.com and see if you can create a new account.

 

Courtesy of the Google Operating System Blog.  Seriously, I have no idea where I find this stuff.  No lie there.

 

And speaking of our Googalian overlords, perusing the web yet again, my eyes briefly skimmed through a blog post by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and gym-rat-geek hero (which means that I can't help but like him):

 

In looking at Google's public technology discussions, it appears that a thin client, distributed computing future is exactly what they are expecting.

Google has created and continues to expand huge datacenters around the world. From whats been written, they contain tens, if not hundreds of thousands of processors all clustered and networked together. They are connected to each other via fiber, and are in turn connected by dark and lit fiber to every and any internet peering point they possibly can.

Its a critical distinction that they only have fiber to peering points rather than having direct access to homes. First, in a world with net neutrality, it means Google has the fastest access to common points connecting to the last mile than anyone else. More importantly, it throttles how much bandwidth they can deliver to the home. You can lead a 10mbs stream to a peering point, but you can't make the ISP drink it. Sure it will pass through, but there are no quality of service requirements at that peering point. Google can put some beautiful HD content out on their servers, and it will be perfect.. until it gets to the peering points, at which point it loses all its priority and becomes just another packet. Which is the downside of net neutrality. Google can't buy their way to having their packets given priority, so those who expect big bandwidth video to the home from Google Video... as both Google and I mentioned in this post, it aint gonna happen the way things stand today.

That said, Google is in a unique position with their datacenters and infrastructure to dominate thin client computing and everything they are doing seems to point in that direction..

 

Check out Blog Maverick.

Basically, he's saying that Google is THE WAY.  Obviously he's paying attention.

 

I'm old enough to remember when broadband was THE WAY and was going to change everything.  I remember the first time I used a Netscape browser to open my documents in a Windows operating system by mistake.  I even remember the first personal computer that I really used on a regular basis - it was a Bell and Howell computer, which then ran using an Apple operating system, pre-Mac, pre-Apple II, pre-everything.  Apple doesn't licence out anymore, but I remember using it regularly.

 

These days, though, are all about Google.  They are, quite obviously, doing things that nobody has any business doing, which I've posted about on several occasions (hint: check the Google label in the sidebar), and apparently have no qualms about continuing to go strong to the hole.

 

Google.

With great power comes great responsibility.  The world is watching.  Don't let us down.

 

Stan Lee rocks.