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Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

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Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#61

Post by 205guy »

VikingCoder wrote: post #36
seanv wrote: post #16

another cool thing about floating data centers in california is they're pretty much earthquake proof... built in shock absorbers (aka water). You can probably charge a premium for easily accessible highly secure data I would imagine. ... assuming megalodon isn't still around

An earthquake can cause a tsunami. Depending on conditions, the tsunami wave could be hundreds of feet high. So, not earthquake "proof."

No more Hollywood movies for you. The only "tsunamis" with "waves" hundreds of feet high are created by cliffs or glaciers collapsing. And even then, the wave height is really the run-up against another cliff or mountain. Such waves can be dangerous to boats in confined waters, such as a bay. In the open ocean, tsunami waves are mostly harmless and even barely noticeable to boats. And all this is moot because the slip-strike motion of the San Andreas fault doesn't produce tsunamis that I've heard of.

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#62

Post by WalterSear »

joezydeco wrote: post #12

How does the data get to/from the platform? Microwaves? Can that work from a slightly moving platform? My wacky guess would have been off-shore offices for employees that can't get H1Bs.

I doubt it; they would have just bought a cruise ship.

Besides, Tata and Wipro have demonstrated that you can just bring people here to work, coop them 8 to a suite in extended stay hotel rooms, and with sufficient lawyering and a couple of hoops, visas be damned.

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#63

Post by pilsetnieks »

Johnie wrote: post #38
justanother wrote: post #32

My first thought: "Finally I'm interested in applying at Google, if it involves using my captain's license!" My second thought: "Meh, the job interview probably involves writing a breadth-first search algorithm to search for known pirates in the graph of nearby ports."

No, you mapreduce the Pirate search. Send out 100 workers to check on the nearby ports and see which ones come back. You need to think at Google scale.

Or you can be sneaky. Put out some irresistable, yet covert job offers for pirates in the necessary ports, and see where the applications come from.

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#64

Post by theorique »

xd wrote: post #22

How do you get a patent for a "floating data center"..

Submit it to USPTO and other national or trans-national (e.g. EU) patent registries like any other patent.

This one's included in the article: https://www.google.com/patents/US7525207

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#66

Post by xd »

theorique wrote: post #64
xd wrote: post #22

How do you get a patent for a "floating data center"..

Submit it to USPTO and other national or trans-national (e.g. EU) patent registries like any other patent. This one's included in the article: https://www.google.com/patents/US7525207

Satire aside. My point was the ridiculousness of it. What's next, patents covering putting data centers in space, under the sea or under stairs etc..

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#67

Post by duaneb »

nraynaud wrote: post #41
fibbery wrote: post #20

Great article. It's nice to see journalists do actual investigative work, even if it is for something like this. Today's "journalism" seems to be all link-bait opinion pieces mixed in with copy-pastes from twitter.

I was thinking exactly the converse: why so much effort for gossip? It's pure tech celebrity gossip in my opinion and brings nothing to the party. Why not spend some more effort on the link between google and NSA? We still don't know how they steal our data.

> We still don't know how they steal our data.

Actually it feels to me like they're stealing it anyway they can... so if there is a legal recourse, I think it's safe to assume they've taken it, along with many illegal ones.

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#68

Post by yeukhon »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #63
Johnie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you mapreduce the Pirate search. Send out 100 workers to check on the nearby ports and see which ones come back. You need to think at Google scale.

Or you can be sneaky. Put out some irresistable, yet covert job offers for pirates in the necessary ports, and see where the applications come from.

Just send in 100 journalists and 99 of them will come back.

Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?

#69

Post by petercooper »

joezydeco wrote: post #12

How does the data get to/from the platform? Microwaves? Can that work from a slightly moving platform? My wacky guess would have been off-shore offices for employees that can't get H1Bs.

1000 4G dongles could pull down 1 Tbps and the signals run well over several miles of water.
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