Google

I find all things Google pretty cool. I liked reading about Steve Hsu's trip there (and also. Well, the NYT has another article on Google's inventiveness both with respect to the possibility that they're designing their own chips and with respect to software. I liked this quote

Mr. Arnold, the consultant, said these tools created a significant cost advantage. "If you talk to guys who work in massively parallel computing operations, as much as 30 percent of their coding time is spent trying to figure out how to get the thing to run," he said. Google "has figured out how they can reduce a lot of the hassle and work of creating parallel applications."

Mr. Gates acknowledged that MapReduce was a significant technology, but he asserted that Microsoft was building its own parallel processing software, opening another front in the technological war between the two companies.

Make Bill Gates sound...like an also ran, I guess is the way to put it.

Update: Slate has a piece today predicting a Google PC:

But the real deal-breaker is trust: Are you going to let someone else handle all your data? If you use a Google-served computing environment, everything you upload, download, or type potentially passes through Google's computers. I'll be the first to sign up, but that's my blind faith in statistics. If there's a privacy breach at Google, I figure I'll be about 10 millionth in line to get hurt.

I pretty much concur, and plan on using Google's new spreadsheets program to do my grades so I have easy access from home and the office.