the standards have changed. instead of viewing source looking to find a clean and concise markup, you now look for some minified and mangled source. if you dont find either, condemn that site to hell.
" and at the end of the day, all your profile are belong to us."
i think this is the exact sentiment that makes FB vulnerable in many ways. as i user, i dont want a company controlling my personal bits that just shits on the user base with an arrogant attitude "we have your personal info already". What drives internal innovation if everyone goes around thinking "fuck these fish in this barrel"
think commodity... have ssd's reached the commodity level yet? from a commodity stand point, i think it would be far more likely that google would use an array of SD cards per node. SSDs are really just an array of SD cards anyway, with a pile of hype and marketing piled on. you would still get most benefits of an SSD. power usage (esp at idle) might even be less than an ssd. google could develop their own wear leveling algorithms, and the rest of the stuff that an SSD controller provides for the internal flash. replacement costs could be less as well over time.
"...most applications don't use [Google File System (GFS)] today. In fact, we're phasing out GFS in favour of the next-generation file system that is very similar, but it's not GFS anymore."
what could this be? home grown? an open source project?