Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

You can pipe anything to anything else, and usually it'll do something. With most of the standard Linux tools, it'll even do what you expect.