191–200 of 250 posts
Anyone consider what the real estate & taxes savings will be with this? For high demand areas where you'd like to set up a data center, something offshore might save a fortune in land costs and property taxes alone.
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Its being built at an island in SF Bay. That doesn't mean its going to be operated there.
Would servers be affected by the instability of the ocean? That is, if they use spinning drives, would the heave and ho of the ocean affect it? Would that affect other electronics and components?
What is a concern is salt water, wind blowing the surface of of the ocean can add salt into the air that will eventually get into the containers. Salt moisture will be a huge long term problem.
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While we're speculating on the meaning behind the name(s) RE:wind, remember that Google acquired Makani Power a while back. They build wind generated power systems using large kites. What better place to put them into production than at sea where there isn't much worry about crashing to the ground. http://www.makanipower.com/home/
unlikely that the Makani planes would be run from a ship. They each have a huge arc, much larger than the diameter of a traditional turbine. Furthermore, what's the concern with them crashing in to the ground? It's not like they plan to install them directly over populated areas.
Doesn't sound that far fetched that they would try to anchor this to the barge to try to tap that potential.
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.
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.
I hope they fit it with sub-surface portholes and webcams. The article keeps saying "huge", but really that's tiny for a ship. Google could buy an old cruise liner and fit several of those inside. Or maybe Google is going to buy more little ships and plonk one of these in each? I hope that they have adequate security, because all that gold and copper is worth stealing for some people.
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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.
Don't you think that one of the interesting issues raised by a floating data center might be a jurisdictional one? Is it possible that google is actually considering putting some of their infrastructure beyond sovereign control? Maybe this isn't just gossip...
The territorial water is 12 miles wide, it's far. Exclusive economic zone is 200 miles wide, it's really far. Who want to be that far from the coast in the winter without a good reason on the most powerful and dangerous ocean? In the article they say 3 to 7 miles, that's completely territorial and for a good reason: on the first winter storm they'll be plenty happy with sovereign state helping them shelter the thing and save everybody.
Moreover, how do you anchor the thing in international waters? It's very complicated and expensive if the water is deep (which is more or less implied by 200 miles from the shore).
In a dystopian future, when the world as we know it is covered in water, one mythical ship traverses the oceans, powered by stratosphere kites or nuclear power. Nobody knows where it's from.
All we know is that many years ago, it became sentient.
And its name is Google.