That may seem trite, but it’s a problem that doesn’t go away. In high speed computing the speed of light is woefully finite. When you ping someone, the speed of light costs you 1 millisecond per 150 kilometers (round trip). I’m in Boston, and that accounts for about a third of my ping to Google.

Worse still, in computation it might take a bit tens of thousands of clock cycles to hike across a single meter. It only makes sense to distribute tasks if their computation time is significantly longer than their transfer time. A grid that works over human sized distances will always have to wrestle with this problem.

Spilling coffee is forbidden under the 10 Commandments of System Administration.

This seems about right, except that a true Solaris admin wouldn’t spill his coffee.