Seven Wonders of the IT World

C.G. Lynch writes "The computer closest to the North Pole. The most intriguing data center. The biggest scientific computing grid. The little kernel that rocked the world. CIO.com has compiled a list of Seven Wonders of the IT World, some of the most impressive and unusual systems on the planet (and beyond)."

Polar Photography

[Kelson]

Semi-off-topic, but Webcam #1 at the north pole reminded me: on Friday the Astronomy Picture of the Day posted a multiple-exposure image of last month's lunar eclipse [nasa.gov] as seen from the south pole. Not an IT-specific wonder, but still seriously impressive, when you think about it, that we've actually got people near the south pole who are in a position to take photos like this.

And hey, for once I can use the term "polar opposite" and know that it's literally true!

Slightly Dissapointed

[COMON$]

I dont know about other slashdotters but I was rather unimpressed with the 7 wonders of the IT world. Not much on there in the way of impressive other than my boy blue. What about impressive symbolic marvels like The Teapot [computerhistory.org] which were the icons of modern Graphics shaping science and technology. Or code that drives technology like C++ or Perl, or dare I even say it, BASIC. These current wonders are very temporary whereas the original wonders are a bit more timeless, more representative of human innovation than just something that looks cool.

Re:More than you might suspect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has in the past had jobs available that required national security clearance.

Agreed

[mbeans]

The lamest one was "small computer that runs Vista".

Voyager 1 is not IT

[michaelmalak]

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, about a dozen years prior to the coining of the term "information technology".

There is a deeper, underlying beef here. IT is about boring business data and came to dominate an industry that previously was the domain of science (often but obviously not always for military purposes). CIO is trying to make its readers feel good about themselves by co-opting non-business domains of computer use.

Storm brewing?

[mcrbids]

Disappointed, too.

But only because they missed something I think should apply - the Storm Trojan network. I mean, come on! Arguably the world's most powerful centrally-controlled computing resource, and it's all comprised of horked computers? How is that not a wonder?

You should hate its existence. But it's still quite amazing.

DNS Servers missing?

[Ghostalker474]

I woulda thought that the core DNS servers.... the ones that keep the internet going, would have made the list. Without them, everyone would have to resort to numbers (which a lot of us here can do, but not the general public). Ya figure they do massive amounts of work, replying to millions of requests per minute, keep the internet going [which is critical to most developed nations economies]... yet didn't receive any attention here :( I'm all for NASA with the Voyager probe... but in all reality, its a satellite that we barely keep in contact with, thats ~40 years old.

Seven Wonders Of The Security Software World

[nickh01uk]

The guys over at Three Sixty Information Security [360is.com] have published the results of their analysis on 7 of the most popular security tools in common use [360is.com] by systems administrators. The articles examines the tools on their merits and attempts to pull together common threads running through each. Finally they put forward their answer to the question "What makes this software so uncommonly good?"

NH

Re:More than you might suspect...

[BWJones]

I wish this were Wikipedia, because I'd edit your post with about 4 {{citationneeded}}. Google funded by the CIA? Really? What?

The CIA helped Google from the very beginning and has continued to fund Google's spin offs and start ups like Google Earth (Interesting side story with Keyhole nee Google Earth as the revolutionary UI of Google Earth had many in the remote sensing communities picking their jaws up off the floor when they first saw it and realized the implications for everything from temporal analysis to community supported contribution to databases). I can't give you many publicly available references, but do a little research on a company known as Peleus nee In-Q-It, nee In-Q-Tel. Note: I don't see anything necessarily wrong with this arrangement and can see many good things to come out of such an arrangement. In fact, I have been a big supporter of these sorts of cross fertilizations of business and government as long as appropriate ethical guidelines are followed.

Re:Slightly Dissapointed

[rm999]

I was amazed the internet wasn't on the list. Maybe I misunderstood what the rules of the list?

Re:Not that impressive

[totally bogus dude]

Google makes money with their farm, which makes it far less impressive to me. It takes some serious money and engineering to keep the various root server clusters up 24/7, and it's done basically by a volunteer community.

They also do have a pretty remarkable amount of load, given how rarely they "ought" to be used.

http://h.root-servers.org/128.63.2.53_2.html [root-servers.org]

The H server averaged 5 megabytes/sec of inbound traffic over the last month. Given how small DNS queries are, that's an awful lot of queries! Over 7,000 packets per second, [root-servers.org] every second.

Re:More than you might suspect...

[BWJones]

Oh, for the love of.... Use Google to find out. A quick search reveals information from In-Q-Tel's own site [in-q-tel.com] and from Google's own site [google.com] of course these investments are all part of In-Q-Tel's mission [in-q-tel.com] and there is nothing secret about it. They are quite open about their investments and why they make those investments, so what is the big deal? Also, note that there are other companies initially invested in by In-Q-Tel that Google has acquired [in-q-tel.com].

Further, the claim (again unsubstantiated) that you have a doctorate

Oh, come on now.... using Google is not all that hard, nor is clicking the links that I so thoughtfully already have provided for you. But, so you don't have to click twice, here it is [utah.edu].