Got time to kill (maybe you have a 4 hour commute like I recently started) and want to tickle that brain of yours? Still reading, then check out Google Papers . Of course some of the papers have been quite publicized such as the failure trends for HDDs. But there are many more interesting ones such as the High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers or MapReduce, an abstraction for large-scale computation which essentially is a programming model for generating and processing large data sets with many terabytes of data and thousands of machines. Happy Reading!