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Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes. At the same time, the data is being processed by thousands of individual server processes, each doing everything from figuring out which contextual ads you will be served to determining in what order to cough up search results.

The storage system backing Google's search engine has to be able to serve millions of data reads and writes daily from thousands of individual processes running on thousands of servers, can almost never be down for a backup or maintenance, and has to perpetually grow to accommodate the ever-expanding number of pages added by Google's Web-crawling robots. In total, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.

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Since the shutdown of Megaupload, stories have erupted about the life and exploits of the company's founder, a self-styled "Dr. Evil" of file sharing. Kim Dotcom's opulent digs, high-end cars, fondness for models and other Bond-villain-esque behaviors have been splashed across websites and have confused evening newscasts for the last week.

The man once known as Kim Schmitz (and as Kimble, and as Kim Tim Jim Vestor, and finally as Kim Dotcom), now awaiting extradition from New Zealand to face charges of conspiracy, money laundering and copyright crimes in the US, has enveloped his actual life in a cloud of hype and bluster that echo the worst of the dot-com bubble from which he took his new surname. In 2001, the Telegraph called Schmitz "a PR man's nightmare and a journalist's dream." 

Schmitz wrote recently that all that's behind him a now; a family man, he's even happy to meet the neighbors for coffee. But when New Zealand police arrived at his mansion outside Auckland last week with helicopters, they cut their way through various locks and then into the home's safe room, where Dotcom was reportedly standing close to a sawed-off shotgun, and they took him into custody. The worldwide raids, in which hundreds of servers were also seized in the US and in which 100 officers raided homes and offices in Hong Kong, have just added another layer to the legend Dotcom has been building since he was a teenager: god of hackers, Midas-touch Internet investor, Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer champion.

Dotcom has gone out of his way since the early 1990s to put himself at the center of media attention. He's certainly got it now. But who, really, is this guy?

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ScummVM was born on September 17, 2001, at 5:57pm GMT+1. The program was meant as an interpreter that could play classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Day of the Tentacle in a virtual machine (VM).

As for the name, "SCUMM" was the "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion," itself a reference to the first LucasArts game that relied on the company's proprietary game design tool. Expanded and revised through the years, SCUMM helped LucasArs build a huge line of popular adventure games in the 1980s and 1990s, but the DOS-based games became increasingly difficult to play on modern systems.

ScummVM addressed this problem. Little did its earliest developers know, however, that it would grow far beyond its origins, taking on a life of its own as more than 100 people contributed a million lines of code over the next decade. Today, ScummVM has become almost a general-purpose adventure game interpreter that can run on nearly any architecture. How did an ever-changing group of volunteers manage to do it—and avoid being sued out of existence?

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Welcome to 2012! If you're a consumer, you're likely getting ready for another year full of new products, drama, and intrigue from the tech world. If you're a journalist, you're cowering in fear of the upcoming CES trade show. And if you're a Mac or iOS developer—well, as always, you're wishing for bigger and better things out of Apple and its community.

While the iOS and Mac App Stores exploded in popularity in 2011, there's still plenty of room for improvement on the developer side. When we spoke with a number of iOS and Mac developers about their wish list for 2012, they didn't hesitate to let us know about changes they would like to see.

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It's hard to look back on any year of gaming and try to pull out the best and worst games, but that's not going to stop us from trying. Any list of this kind is by definition subjective, but these are the gaming experiences that stuck with the editors of Ars Technica, Wired magazine, and wired.com. They are the ones we think define 2011: the games that stumbled and the ones that soared.

Let us know what you think, what we missed, and what choices make you shake your head in anger. Sure, there were games that let us down, but we'd argue that the important part of the list are the best games. If you haven't ripped into these games yet, it's a good time to start.

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After a fairly dull year for new hardware releases, this fall's flood-related hard disk production damage in Thailand made things more "interesting." Toss in AMD's new CPU, Bulldozer, along with cheaper and cheaper SSDs, and your computer build options can be confusing. We're here to sort them out.

The bottom line remains the same as it always does—the System Guide builds get faster and cheaper.

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Google's Android 4, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), debuts later this month on the much-anticipated Galaxy Nexus smartphone. This major new version of Android includes a redesigned user interface that promises a uniform experience across tablet and smartphone form factors, and it delivers new features and a wide range of improvements across the core application stack.

We already gave you a look at the Galaxy Nexus earlier this month in a hands-on review of the hardware. Now it's time to take a close look at the operating system and the ICS user experience.

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A confession: I have little experience in the world of online role-playing games. I did not fall under the spell of World of WarCraft, nor did I ever play Star Wars Galaxies. These games have spawned their own vocabulary, rules, and—in some cases—etiquette. I understand none of it. (Though I'm learning.)

It took the Bioware name and the Star Wars license to get me to install and play an MMO, and I have a feeling I won't be the only one coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic as a newcomer to the genre. During my pre-release access, I spent the first 12 character levels trying to do something radical: playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game as if it were a single-player title. I simply don't have enough extra time in each week to become an MMO fiend—but group gameplay turned out to be hard to resist.

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As the staff of Ars Technica convenes in Chicago for some infrequent face-to-face time, we're turning the clock back to 1998. It was a time when Windows 95 ruled the desktop, preemptive multitasking on the Mac was still a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye, enthusiasts were furiously overclocking their Celeron 300a CPUs, and the attention of geeks was distracted by a unusually bright, shiny object: BeOS.

The history of BeOS is a long and sad one, and this is neither the time nor the place to recount it. Suffice it to say that Be Inc. breathed its last in November 2001 and the operating system once known as BeOS has lived something of a twilight existence ever since, in the form of Zeta's YellowTab and Haiku.

We begin our journey by looking at BeOS R4. Editor in Chief Ken Fisher penned two enthusiastic articles about R4: one on installation on the 1998-vintage Imperator's BH6-Celeron 300a Pumpmeister, and another focusing on the GUI. After that, we'll direct you to our August 2005 review of YellowTab's Zeta OS 1.0, our February 2008 first look at Haiku, hands-on with Haiku alpha 1 in September 2009, and experiences running Haiku alpha 3 on a netbook from earlier this year.

Enjoy the trip in the wayback machine.

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Hydraulic fracturing (more commonly referred to as “fracking”) involves the injection of fluid at high pressure into a well, opening or widening fractures in the rock below that free up the flow of natural gas. Domestic natural gas production has been booming as a result, but opponents claim the technique contaminates drinking water, causing serious health effects.

Rigorous studies on fracking have been sparse, and the impassioned debate has raged on. A new investigation by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a site in Wyoming is one of the first to look thoroughly at the potential link between fracking operations and groundwater contamination. The agency's report was released yesterday—and it provides a clear link between fracking and water supply problems.

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Every holiday session, millions of geeks suffer at the hands of poorly thought-out gifts: USB flash drives in Hello Kitty shapes. T-shirts that detect Wi-Fi signals. Your second, third, and fourth copies of Arkham City.

No more, friends. This year, buy the tech-savvy friends and family in your life something they actually want—or something they don't know they want until you, insightful person that you are, give it to them. Fortified with eggnog and holiday cheer, the Ars staff picked out a few of our favorite things to make your gift-giving (and gift-asking) easier.

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Upon its completion in May 2012, the 1,017 foot tall skyscraper Shard London Bridge will be the tallest building in the European Union—but its unmissable presence on the London skyline has been felt for over a year. Since the completion of its 804 foot, 72 story concrete core in early 2011, the Shard has been the tallest building in London. In a city, country, and continent not famed for skyscrapers, the Shard more than stands out.

Observant Londoners have watched as glass facades have crept up around the core over the past weeks and months. It's impossible to look at the Shard without extrapolating its lines upwards to a point, completing the pyramidal form in the mind's eye (crick in the neck notwithstanding). But mock-ups of the completed tower show a pinnacle characterized by a fragmented crown of glassy splinters, not a neat pyramid. Architect Renzo Piano, who conceived the Shard, has compared its shape to "a 16th century pinnacle or the mast of a very tall ship." But "Shard" is the name that stuck, a name reportedly coined by Piano after criticism from the group English Heritage that his design resembled a "shard of glass."

With pressure on designers to prove the environmental credentials of their high-rise buildings and to address the safety concerns of the post-9/11 era, we asked the engineers behind the Shard to tell us how they plan to keep the Shard lean, green, and above all vertical—and why skyscrapers are needed in the 21st century.

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In 2006, scientists announced a provocative finding: a retrovirus called XMRV, closely related to a known virus from mice, was associated with cases of prostate cancer. But other labs, using different sets of patients, found no evidence of a viral infection. Before the controversy could be sorted out, another research group published a 2009 paper containing an even more intriguing claim. XMRV, it said, was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a disorder that some had claimed was purely psychosomatic.

Reaction came quickly. The CFS community, viewing a viral cause as a validation of their malady, embraced the finding. One author of the XMRV/CFS paper, Judy Mikovits, landed a position as research director of a private foundation dedicated to CFS. A company associated with the foundation started offering tests for infections.

Then the story took a strange turn. A long chain of events led not only to the collapse of the XMRV hypothesis, but it landed Mikovits in jail—and brought death threats upon some of the researchers who debunked her ideas.

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From iOS and Android to BlackBerry and Windows Phone, the app store model has become the main way mobile device users find, download, and update their software. And with employees increasingly begging for access to corporate resources from smartphones and tablets, IT departments are starting to wonder whether they should jump into the app store business themselves.

"The public app store is kind of the wild, wild West," Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond tells Ars. Private app stores, hosted for the employees of a single business, are receiving “a lot of interest from the clients I talk to. Folks realize that self-provisioning is the long-term trend."

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The Nook Tablet was announced after Amazon's Kindle Fire and so seemed more like an inexpensive $249 me-too tablet.

While both the Nook Tablet and the Fire are decidedly consumption-only devices, the Nook Tablet appears to be the more well-thought out of the two. Its store is better arranged and easier to use, the battery life is better, and it's less stuttery and aggravating overall. The device still pulls some punches of its own with its e-mail client and storage, and we have some doubts about its ecosystem, but the Nook Tablet is a better device than the Kindle Fire. It's more than good enough to justify the $50 price difference between the two.

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You're likely getting ready to visit your family for Thanksgiving, it may be getting a bit cold where you live, and it's very possible you've already begun holiday shopping for your friends and family. That means it's also the time of year for one of my favorite annual promotions: the Ars Technica 2011 Child's Play Drive.

Child's Play is a charity run by Penny Arcade that was created to serve two purposes: to bring comfort to children who are away from their families and loved ones due to illness, and to put a more positive face on gaming culture. The charity has had massive success with both goals for years, and it's been an honor for us to be a part of it for three years running. Let's get this year's party started!

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The desktop benchmark scores for AMD's new Bulldozer architecture didn't make happy reading for fans of the chip company, with the new design sometimes failing to beat AMD's own predecessor architecture, let alone Intel's comparable offerings. Hope still persisted, however, that the processor's architecture might fare better when tasked with server workloads. With the release last week of AMD's first Bulldozer server processors, branded the Opteron 6200 series and codenamed "Interlagos," a host of such benchmarks have arrived from AMD and others.

One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. Some commentators have even suggested that Bulldozer was, first and foremost, a server processor; relatively weak desktop performance was to be expected, but it would all come good in the server room.

Unfortunately for AMD, it looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.

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When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, the company certainly talked up the improvements made to the smartphone's integrated camera hardware. With 8 megapixels of resolution, a redesigned lens, and enhancements to its software, it certainly meets or exceeds the needs of most casual shooters.

Still, we here at Ars have received plenty of questions to the effect of, "can the iPhone 4S replace a 'real' camera?" That's actually a hard question to answer, because individual needs vary widely. Would a professional photographer replace her trusty DSLR with an iPhone 4S? No. But, might a casual snap shooter replace a pocket camera with an iPhone 4S? It's pretty likely.

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Before it was announced, the Kindle Fire was rumored to be Amazon's entry into the Android tablet market. To get a serious tablet, even a small one, at the Kindle Fire's price of $199 would have been a holiday miracle.

But in our time with the Kindle Fire, it fell far short of what tablets should be able to accomplish. As a vector for Amazon's video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it's great. As an e-reader, it's merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon's promises.

Still, if you're looking for an e-reader and don't mind a smallish LCD screen, a lightweight video player, and a limited-use browser, the Kindle Fire can fill those niches—in its own ambling way.

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Before it was announced, the Kindle Fire was rumored to be Amazon's entry into the Android tablet market. To get a serious tablet, even a small one, at the Kindle Fire's price of $199 would have been a holiday miracle.

But in our time with the Kindle Fire, it fell far short of what tablets should be able to accomplish. As a vector for Amazon's video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it's great. As an e-reader, it's merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon's promises.

Still, if you're looking for an e-reader and don't mind a smallish LCD screen, a lightweight video player, and a limited-use browser, the Kindle Fire can fill those niches—in its own ambling way.

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