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01-07-2002
Happy New Year from Total Site!
Distributed Computing: Awakening the Dormant Power of PCs If they could do with the human brain what they're doing with personal computers, we might never have needed PCs in the first place.
Using an emerging technology known as distributed computing that harnesses the latent processing power of PCs to perform calculations that are normally the work of supercomputers, 20-year-old Michael Cameron has discovered the largest known prime number (http://www.entropia.com/release_12112001.asp). The so-called Mersenne prime number contains 4,053,946 digits and is expressed as 2 to the 13,466,917th power minus 1. At the time of the discovery, Cameron and his 800 Mhz T-Bird PC were connected to the Entropia Mersenne Grid, a distributed computing framework capable of tapping the spare CPU cycles of millions of PCs around the world and using that vast processing power to perform huge computational tasks. Cameron is among about 130,000 volunteers taking part in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a mathematics research project that relies on distributed computing to search for undiscovered prime numbers.
GIMPS is a joint effort between Mersenne.org (http://www.mersenne.org) and San Diego, Calif.-based Entropia Inc. (http://www.entropia.com), which maintains the grid and created the distributed computer technology serves as its foundation. Entropia's grid works around the clock, performing 2 teraflops (a million million million calculations) per second without disrupting the normal functions of the PCs connected to it. While GIMPS participants continue the hunt for "big primes" (free software to let your PC join the search can be downloaded at http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm), Entropia works to bring distributed computing to the corporate world with a scalable system that allows companies — particularly those in "computationally intensive" fields such as pharmaceutical, chemical and materials research and financial services — to leverage the latent computing power of their networked PCs.
Many of our clients were among thousands of subscribers to the Excite@Home high-speed Internet service who suddenly found themselves without broadband access in early December when a deal in which AT&T Corp. would have purchased the beleaguered company collapsed.
With AT&T having pulled out of the proposed $307 million deal, the once-mighty Excite@Home, which not long ago controlled about 45 percent of U.S. households with broadband access, indicated plans to cease operations Feb. 28, 2002. While many Excite@Home customers saw no disruption in broadband service after the deal fell through, many others temporarily lost internet access as cable companies that had operating agreements with Excite@Home, including AT&T, scrambled to transfer those customers to different high-speed carriers. In announcing the pending sale to AT&T this past fall, Excite@Home also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a move that company officials said would help ensure that "service will continue uninterrupted through the [bankruptcy] restructuring process." Excite@Home failed to keep that promise, and now that its days are numbered, the company isn't likely to fulfill the lofty expectations set for it two years ago with the $6.7 billion merger between @Home and Excite.
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Google's Gift to Merchants If your company publishes a consumer or business catalog, Google.com wants a copy. The popular Internet search engine is inviting companies to mail in printed catalogs so it can scan the product pages, then post them on the new Catalog Search system that it launched for beta testing in December. At least for now, inclusion in the Catalog Search system is free to merchants, while the potential benefits, according to Google, are huge. "Google's enormous user base performs more than 150 million searches a day, so your catalog will be seen by customers it could take millions of dollars and years to find through traditional means."
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Distributed Computing: Awakening the Dormant Power of PCs If they could do with the human brain what they're doing with personal computers, we might never have needed PCs in the first place.
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Many of our clients were among thousands of subscribers to the Excite@Home high-speed Internet service who suddenly found themselves without broadband access in early December when a deal in which AT&T Corp. would have purchased the beleaguered company collapsed.
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Google's Gift to Merchants If your company publishes a consumer or business catalog, Google.com wants a copy. The popular Internet search engine is inviting companies to mail in printed catalogs so it can scan the product pages, then post them on the new Catalog Search system that it launched for beta testing in December. At least for now, inclusion in the Catalog Search system is free to merchants, while the potential benefits, according to Google, are huge. "Google's enormous user base performs more than 150 million searches a day, so your catalog will be seen by customers it could take millions of dollars and years to find through traditional means."
From business-to-business products to toys and games, Google Catalog Search now includes pages from more than 1,000 print catalogs. Posting a catalog on the system entails mailing a copy to Google, then sending a follow-up e-mail notifying the company that the catalog is on the way. Catalogs typically appear on the search site within several days of Google receiving them. Users can browse the pages of a catalog or search the entire database of scanned catalog pages using keywords. A search can pull up dozens, even hundreds of pages, each of which includes the actual content of the printed page, plus a link to the catalog company's own site, information on how to order from the catalog and an opportunity to subscribe to the catalog.
The free, no-strings-attached opportunity to post catalogs and product pages on Google's powerful search engine may not last long. Google says it is "developing additional elements" for its Catalog Search program to help companies boost catalog sales, including offering reporting information on user search habits and clickthrough rates, advertising opportunities for additional visibility on Catalog Search pages and establishing direct web links between scanned product pages on the Google site and the same products on company web sites. Fees likely would be attached to at least some of those services
While Total Site's e-commerce customers already have page-by-page product exposure on Google this may prove to be a worthwhile opportunity to get additional exposure.
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