Get mail from other accounts
https://mail.google.com/mail/help/whatsnew_getmail.html

Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized 'From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled. Learn more

This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We're working on making it more available soon. Look for it in the 'Accounts' tab in Settings.

-- I like it. When the new mail comes in, a label is automatically put against it. It's nice and now I don't have to log into two accounts daily to check email...!

I'm not at all excited or turned on about hardware. Then I read about the IBM Intelligent Bricks...

"This paper provides an overview of the Intelligent Bricks project in progress at IBM Research. It describes common problems faced by data center operators and proposes a comprehensive solution based on brick architectures. Bricks are hardware building blocks. Because of certain properties, defined here, scalable and reliable systems can be built with collections of identical bricks. An important feature is that brick-based systems must survive the failure of any brick without requiring human intervention, as long as most bricks are operational."

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/502/wilcke.html

"A working prototype of such a system has been built at the IBM Almaden Research Center and performs as expected. It implements a 27-brick, 26-TB storage server. The system software is based on Linux (the OS for each processor), GPFS (the distributed file system), and Kybos (the management software specifically developed for the project). While it is purely a research project, extensive external exposure to IBM customers has yielded strong confirmation that the objectives of the project are well aligned with market needs."

Received July 5, 2005;
accepted for publication August 18, 2005;
Published online February 22, 2006.

Here's the link to the full IBM Journal of Research and Development
Volume 50, Number 2/3, 2006
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd50-23.html

I'm elated to see that Google Calendar is now available to people with Google Mail accounts. I like it.

A list of Features are here.

-sd