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Monday, November 12, 2012

Internet smelter


I don't quite know the criteria by which stories get to be hidden on the other side of the paywall at the NBR and which ones aren't, but Chris Keall's on Kim Dotcom and the cable seems too good to be free. Which is apropos.
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NBR:
"They [Hollywood] have what everybody wants. They just don’t know what to do with it. Guys like [movie mogul] Sumner Redstone – he's in his 80s and does everying with a pen. They don’t see it. "They pick up the phone and they say, 'F**k you Joe Biden, I’m not giving you another cheque unless you take these f***kers down and that’s how this all went down."
Kim fumes, "The political interference in this whole case is quite significant."
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It's a lengthy and interesting piece on Kim Dotcom's intentions towards a NZ-US internet cable and a Mega data centre. Keall (and the others at the meeting at the Dotcom Mansion) clearly don't buy the hype. The problem for Kim is exactly as he describes it - it's all politics - and for that reason alone any venture he is involved with that touches upon the jurisdiction of the USA will be toxic and he ought to realise this.

The discussion with Kim around the resurrection of Mega is informative in itself, but there are gems everywhere:
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Eighteen months ago, the Pacific Fibre co-founder wrote a white paper on New Zealand as a giant data centre destination. This week, he delivered it to a data centre conference in Sydney.
"We looked at Hamilton, it’s geologically stable, near a river for water, near geothermal, near Auckland enough for a [cable] landing. That’s a good location – you’d really invent Hamiltron," he says.
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For those old enough to remember the early days... the internet link for the country (and it was just emails then pretty much in the early 90s) was at Waikato University - it was the portal to the world. Now the experts reckon it could be that way again.
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But Humphrey's white paper is looking at a centre on the scale of Google's largest server farms; one that would have its own power station and consume up to 500 megawatts of electricity.
Dotcom add that if the Bluff alumuninium smelter is closed, the Manapouri power station could be redeployed to power a massive server farm.
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If that happened I would gladly take a lowering of the price of electricity through the resulting over-supply than to use it all on a server farm. Or is that just naive? What about putting the centre in Bluff - on the Tiwai Point site? iBluff?

2 Comments:

At 13/11/12 2:02 pm, Blogger Tim said...

"The problem for Kim is exactly as he describes it - it's all politics - and for that reason alone any venture he is involved with that touches upon the jurisdiction of the USA will be toxic and he ought to realise this."

Exactly.........which is why I made an attempt during the first venture to consider an alternative route for a second cable.

There are not justreasons of route diversity, but of geo-politics, and geology (such as proximity to the active tonga trench).
How about a staged approach.

Something beginning EAST of the trench, such as from Parnassus or Kaikoura, across to the Chathams, then straight up north to the Cooks. (STAGE 1). IF the yanks don't play ball by that time, then there's a nationalistic French Telecom close by to the Easr not too far away, and the Chinese giving aid to the likes of the Cooks. What's the worst case scenario of having achieved that - connectivity of NZ citizens.

STAGE 2 can either go to Hawaii, or if they continue to be so anal as not to see the inevitable, EAST from there is only a 90degree turn with BRICS participants only too willing (along with the French).

KdC (and Pac Fibre)- play the fuckers at their own game

 
At 13/11/12 8:35 pm, Blogger Phil said...

Hi BB,
Great stuff. Surprised you havn't noted the flaming of Kim Dot Com by TVNZ on Sunday night. They dug as deep as they could for the dirt on KDC. Looked suspiciously like a nod and a wink from the Gov'. Just to help balance their own position, of course. Where was the support for KDC? A very unbalanced report making the case of 'Holy'wood and Warners quite nicely. TVNZ is a failure of unbiased mainstream media. Disgraceful, but alas, par for the course nowadays.

 

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