201–210 of 250 posts
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."
A massive floating data-centre out in international waters would be a pretty powerful protection against governmental interference in your business. Well, except for the military kind.
It's been tried: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/sealand-and-haven...
It's a similar idea but comparing Google putting it's resources behind a similar idea to something like Sealand is not really a fair comparison.
The outcome could be vastly different.
With movable data centers, Google can easily move them across oceans, as popularity and usage of different Google services inevitably shifts across countries over time, in order to be closer to wherever their users are to reduce network latency. For example an "Orkut data center" would have been very useful to Google in 2008, when they announced they were moving its operations to Brazil because somewhat unpredictably…
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It's still in beta.
I see. we're slashdot now.
* tongue firmly in cheek as I knowigly contribute to the problem in the hopes of educating everyone away from it
So it appears as though Google is looking towards a future where they are an independent country, or at the very least free from regulation, visa-a-vis Seasteading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
No, this does not appear at all. It appears they want to save on real estate and cooling costs by having floating data centers. Google has owns so much real estate and immovable property in the US it is silly to suppose they are thinking of leaving the country just because they built a couple of barges.
Is this really that expensive that's still advantageous considering the costs of a barge + electricity + data link to the sea + fuel + maintenance ?
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From talking with a friend who's a retired stat arb quant, the fundamental idea is sound. My guess for why people aren't doing it yet is that first, there are still untapped locations on land that are easier to get running (example: the Chicago to NY fiber run), and second getting the data to the ocean point isn't trivial. I think if you want to look for early signaling of someone doing this, look for where telco fol…
I don't understand why it's sound. The order still has to go all the way to the exchange. Why is it better to spend 50 ms to get the market data, 1 ms to do the decision, then 50 ms to send the order (middle of ocean to exchange), when you could spend 100 ms to get the market data, 1 ms to do the decision, then 0 ms to send the order (colocated hosting at exchange)?
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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?
Protecting everything from salt spray is going to be the bigger concern.
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."
The worst thing a tsunami could do to a floating data center is break the internet connection, assuming a cable is used.