The bbq on the parking lot of the googleplex to protest this was fun. I still have the t-shirt somewhere

It’s never that easy. Some pathogens are very difficult to culture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#:~:text=availab...

So I'm not alone who knows about this series.

I concur. I miss citc & fig.

The latter. Like is it a public ID, an IP, user input, ssn, phone number, lat/long…

Very useful for any scenario where you output the proto, like logs, etc…

I mean it could also have been a sound stage in Hollywood /s

The only thing I want is to be able to play totk without horrific fps drops. That’s all

I vividly remember a discussion with designer colleague in the early 2010s that used to work at BMW. They convinced me that touch buttons in car were awful.

They totally knew.

I always like the centre console round knob in BMW, Audi and Mercedes. Clicky wheel type of haptic feedback and some buttons around it. They worked intuitively for me and you could pair them with a touch screen. I think a big issue with having a touch screen AND physical buttons is that it requires a lot more coordination between the teams to make it work well.

Well, Google already distribute hardware to various ISP - it's called GGC (https://www.gstatic.com/isp/docs/ggc-installation.pdf?sjid=5...).

We (GSA) & GGC used to source our hardware from the same supplier (Dell).

Only part of the GGC fleet are Dell machines (that pdf lists Dell, HP, and Equus). Paraphrasing one of the leads from some years back: "Single-vendor is not a vendor strategy."

Between improved negotiating position and resilience to vendor-specific firmware bugs / vulnerabilities, the additional maintenance cost associated with supporting two or more platforms pays for itself very quickly.

In this particular case, they're the air-gapped product is singly dependent on HPE servers, mostly for compliance reasons. Same reason on why it uses Palo Alto firewalls.

Though in the case of the GGC nodes, having multiple vendors was mostly a negotiating component. If we could go to HO and order 3000 servers and have them running, Dell loses a large amount of negotiating power.

Being honest though, working with Dell was significantly better than working with HP or (especially) Equus.

Former Google Employee, on GGC.

HP!=HPE for over 8 years now

Well that's fun. I was the TL of the GSA platform team and you are mostly spot on. You are missing the whole crawling/indexing & security parts though. the GWS on the GSA was, tbh, one of the simplest component.

Each GSA had a set of unique BIOS/root password generated during bootstrap though.

I edited the message, sorry for that mistake, I had assumed it was the same everywhere.

It was great to see how it was engineered, some parts were truly remarkable, my main interest was to learn about the ranking algorithm (not for SEO purposes, but because I thought it was fun and interesting).

We would have been in love 15 years ago when there was the GSA, sadly, our paths have separated :D