The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

After Flickr users asked on the site about the caricature, with some saying it was covered as transformative political speech, Flickr locked down the thread. That's hardly the first time; locking discussion threads about mysteriously deleted accounts is a routine occurrence at Flickr. It's a perplexing customer-relations move for a site that asks people to trust it with some of their most precious memories — and that faces intense competition from Facebook.

At least some discussions are allowed to run for a while before hey got locked, like this one, about a guy whose perfectly innocent account was mistakenly deleted.Flickr did eventually apologize to the guy and, unlike in most cases, was able to give him his digital photos back. Why? Because was deleting so many other people's pictures that it was backlogged and never got around to his. Progress!

(Pic: Taken at Twitter HQ by Daniel Catt.)

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. We're all using databases all the time.

But that's about to change. Chips with two and four processor cores are common and Intel hints that we'll eventually see hundreds of cores per chip, which brings us right back into the 1970s and '80s and the world of parallel computing. That's where databases start to screw up. More than just slow reads and writes, relational databases also create false dependencies between pieces of data. If one chunk of data (A) is dependent on another chunk of data (B), then no work can be done on A until all work on B is complete.

While the database guys are busy figuring out how to add more and more concurrency internally, in reality when you take a few steps back and think of a large set of commodity boxes all executing a single data munching app, then no matter how sophisticated we get, the relational database will still effectively be a single thread to that app.

To scale the Google search service, Google first had to free itself of the false dependencies. So they created MapReduce — a set of operations and a way to store the data for those operations while preserving the natural independence that is inherent in each problem, building the whole mess atop the Google File System.

Google led the way but many other companies have followed suit, opening doors to a wide range of new ways of thinking about large-scale data manipulation. Suddenly there are different ways to store the data, new ways to write applications, and new places (thousands of cheap boxes) to run such applications.

There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. Amazon EC2 running Windows Server enables this scenario for building scalable websites. In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so.

What this means in English: Companies will soon have a choice of at least two ways to run Windows-powered servers without setting up and maintaining their own server farms. Analyst Mary Jo Foley explains what this means for Microsoft:

Microsoft will be fielding its hosted development environment in an increasingly crowded space. Google, Salesforce.com and Oracle are all bidding for pieces of developers’ hosted attentions. But for now, Amazon is the big dog.

I honestly can't tell: Is a hosted SQL Server better or worse than MySQL? Where's Ted Dziuba when I need him? "Didn't you hear?" Ted replied to my plea for technical analysis. "Chrome is the new OS."

Roughly one in three Americans, the survey says, use an online app such as Google Docs or Adobe Photoshop Express. I'm honestly skeptical of that number — did respondents confuse one of Google's search features with Google Docs? But one in three store photos online. Considering how hard it was just to post a picture of your cat to your blog a few years ago, that's pretty big. I only wish Pew had asked those folks if they'd also made backups.

Mainframe terminals, or keyboards and monitors attached to a big piece of iron in a subbasement somewhere, probably built by IBM or DEC. While proponents of what until recently was called server-side computing have now opted for the friendly-sounding "cloud computing" moniker, let's not forget that Google has built some of the biggest iron around, fulfilling an even more ancient prophesy from the days of punch cards and vacuum tubes: that someday, computers would grow so large they would require their own warehouses, and require so much power, you'd have to build them next to dams.

It makes sense from a business model angle. Google can give away open-source browser code all it wants — while keeping its search algorithm and Web index behind doors firmly locked with key cards and biometric scans. When you're not passively paying Google by paging through independent tabs looking at ads, you'll be actively paying Google by using its suite of office productivity applications. The browser is just another loss leader, as evidenced by Google's history of paying everyone from Mozilla to MySpace for traffic acquisition.

Microsoft's model predicated on proprietary code distributed in paper boxes and intellectual property restrictions writ in byzantine end user license agreements has been dated for some time now. By tethering hardware to software and upstaging everyone with design and branding, Apple has done well by maintaining manicured gardens for the wealthy. But it has clearly ceded the business market by shifting focus to consumer devices, and derives much of its hipster cache from vapid anti-establishment rhetoric. IBM, the company that Apple wanted to smash? Doing quite well selling big iron and giving away open-source code, thank you very much.

That's because the cloud computing worldview is one that has much to recommend it to large institutions, and IT guys at large corporations, research universities and in the government all understand it implicitly. Access to the highest level, or root, of a really big system is an awesome power. You can mete out shares of computing resources, invade people's privacy in all sorts of heinous ways and otherwise torment the poor plebes typing away at the terminals like a true autocrat. All those computer science Ph.D.s and technology researchers Google has hired have mainframes in their blood and ambitions far beyond two measly processor cores.

Google is familiarly setting the stage for later dominance: From earning money from Web applications built for Chrome that lease computing power from Google App Engine to providing the very electricity to juice up these massive mainframes. Meanwhile, the faster you flip from tab to tab, the more advertising inventory you create for Google through their sites and through third parties. Hundreds of clicks and impressions in a day from every Internet user worldwide, from when they wake up to check email through their day at the office to when they come home and look up American Idol highlights, whether they use Chrome or not.

So while much innovation has clearly gone into the design and architecture of the new browser, Brin's ideas are nothing new. The practice of running applications and storing data on a centralized server is actually older than operating systems for personal computers. And the dream of vertically integrating all levels of a trade network — of creating a monopoly? Even older than that.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma and Alex Handy)