In a recent story, Google has been praised for offering terabytes of free storage (along with the hardware and the support) needed for scientists to transport large amounts of data between various teams. Up to 120 TB in fact, if we look at the example of data received from Hubble.

This sounds almost too good to be true, but I’m an optimist and a believer in most of Google’s endeavours (though I choose to not hold any of their stock if only to be able to claim objectivity). This move makes sense from a business perspective when one considers Google’s mission, its business goals, its evangelical R/D approach and its sheer data-storing ability.

I have read Ed Bott’s fantastic article on Windows & WGA from this morning and almost exploded. What? How on Earth could something like this be legally possible to undertake? Shouldn’t this be the proverbial last drop before we see a massive migration to one of the Linux distros? We see stories about surviving without Windows pop up left and right; hell, this morning there was something about Linux becoming mandatory in Korea. And yet we cling on. Still, my intent is to analyze this move, not bash at it mindlessly (which may be the more appropriate thing to do).
1. WGA is poorly written. Months after it’s been released its code is still in Beta stage. I can think of countless times when I encountered problems because of the WGA mayhem. I’ve had it give me problems on an Advanced Server 2003, insisting that my copy of the server was not genuine, and although a call to MS resolved the issue, I was still forced to restore the fileserver to an earlier date, which was a nightmare considering that it also acts as my primary domain controller.