Slashdot Mirror
Hong Kong's High-Tech Technology Incubator
Austin Huggins writes "The BBC is reporting on a new hi-tech complex built in Hong Kong to attract tech businesses. 'It has taken four years to build and comes complete with a hi-tech hotel, apartments, shops and services.' And they have a 100 mbs network to boot." As the article points out, Hong Kong has a suddenly harder time keeping ahead of booming cities in mainland China.
And if Hong Kong becomes popular enough, it launches into space!
Is that millibits? Man, and I thought 300bps was slow.
It's just a fancy name for whole bunch of office buildings wired togther with gigabit ethernet.
"We have a utility computing equivalent of 100 computers. So you can run different kinds of applications on top of it." What? You can run different kinds of applications!?!? Holy bat-computer Batman! And is it just me or did the dude in the second pic look scared to death?
I had so many unwanted daemons on my machine, I had to hire a priest to cast them all out.
That's as much as a normal server in a datacenter has o.O
Now why can't Americans try to stay ahead of the Chinese too?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Gotta love this guy's face, from the article. http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40569000/jpg /_40569261_vincent_chen_203.jpg
Why go there just for the bandwidth, when they can locate their factory in mainland China and enjoy the benefits of genuine slave labor.
"The main focus currently is on creators, managers and deliverers of digital content, because that's where we see the big niche for Hong Kong going forward."
So, basically what he's saying is that is a complex for creators of CGI Chop Socky?
KFG
Services too are being outsorced to Asia. Naturally research dollars will follow. This can only be bad for American students.
Toyota, in just decades is at the fore-front of the car industry already. This is a company that made a car 40 years after Ford and GM. Contrast that with GM, the alleged giggest car producer. You will go to every continent and find Toyota in good numbers, but not for GM. Now, Ford has been replaced by Toyota. GM will be next.
Having lived in a number of Asian countries, I can attest to the fact that Asians are simply driven to succeed. They will pirate/copy and do anything to get to where they have to. Sometimes, their respective governments support them.
Pretty soon, the Asian block will be in position to threaten "economic sanctions" on the US. After all, even the flu-shot vaccine will soon be Asian made.
My beloved country USA will be left with rhetoric as the only means to apply influence arround the world.
Open source will not help us that much because already, M$'s influence is already on the decline at least in Asia.
Where is America's edge left?
Cyberport is a MASSIVE waste of government money and worse still was just a large luxury building contract HANDED OVER to everyone's favourite Hong Kong cartel.
Anyone from Hong Kong reading this report is currently laughing their ass off at the idea that this is somehow indicative of Hong Kong 'racing ahead'. Cyberport was nothing more or less than a gigantic gift to Li Ka Shing's estate (via his son the ever popular Richard Li).
I bet you guys think our partially state-owned Disney land is a good idea too. Seriously, if you like this stuff you can have Chief Executive Tung Che Hwa. Please, take him!
Please don't bother, it was a typo!
General Motors might not sell cars like Chevrolet and Pontiac in other countries, but they are there. GM owns Saab, Opel, and Vauxhall in Europe, is the majority shareholder in Daewoo in Korea, and is involved in the manufacture of lots of other foreign brands.
br> See this for more info.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Until the local population develops respect for intellectual property, I don't expect much to happen...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You are truly stupid. Go brush your teef[sic] you stinky englishman[sic].
teef = teeth
englishman = Englishman
By aggregating digital media companies together within a single complex that meets the needs of the employees regarding all their living requirements, they are trying to enable the "campus" atmosphere of companies like Microsoft... combined with the "company towns" that were found in the US during the industrial revolution.
They're providing an infrastructure.
And yes, you can colocate a box in a data center on 100Mbps links, but how many startups have a pair of DS3s at their offices?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
their internal network is 10Gbps, with a 1Gbps external connection according to this page: http://www.cyberport.com.hk/userdata_hkcmcl/ITT_En glish/ipn.html
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
Why would one build a 100Mbit network in a modern business complex? You can get 10/100/1000-switches cheaper than 10/100 today afaik.
.hk is way behind Sweden, but a 100Mbit network does not impress us with 100Mbit internet connections to our homes.
Perhaps
>So, basically what he's saying is that is a complex for creators of CGI Chop Socky?
Yes you can laugh all the way you want, but there's a vibrant CG industry in Hong Kong. O yes they are definitely not as advanced as ILM or Dreamworks , but they've made many entries into Siggraph. Some samples on Archive.org: Cola Cola's Clay Dolls and Master Q.
How about setting up a Gigabit network in that abandoned hotel set on Blade Runner.
Looks like Asia and should be able to compete without the billion dollar 4 year price with faster networking to boot!
After hearing anecdotes about the quality of living for professionals in Hong Kong, it is getting more and more enticing for the foreign professional. If you're in the tech industry, in the biomedical sciences or even in the corporate or business law, the city definitely has it's pluses. Aside from the housing prices, the cost of living is a fraction of that in say San Franciso (or most of CA for that matter), or Boston, or Sydney, or Paris, or London. Let's say you can secure a job with the same salary as you do now, you can have housekeepers to maintain your daily living requirements at a fraction of what you'd pay in Europe, US, or otherwise. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I heard the same about foreign workers in other Chinese cities.
Linux at home
I just learned that the University of Hong Kong, the largest university in Hong Kong, has just closed its electrical engineering department due to lack of funding and enrollment. However, the Chinese University of Hong Kong still maintains its EE department.
There's no way Hong Kong can catch up technologically with mainland China now, not without heavy academic research in new arenas of technology.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
>Why go there just for the bandwidth, when they
>can locate their factory in mainland China
>and enjoy the benefits of genuine slave labor.
Yea, why go to USA, when they can locate their companies in Guantanamo Bay and enjoy the benefits of genuine slave labor.
Yeah "teef" is just hilarius.
Secondly, I'm multilingual, and was educated in a foreign language (to English), what's your excuse?
The huge new 150,000 square meter Pacific Shores Center complex still has entire buildings vacant, and it's filling up. EA and Dreamworks moved in. Shrek 2 was made there. Health club, Olympic size swimming pool, public hiking trails, baseball field, soccer field, ampitheater, cafe, day spa, and an incredible view of the San Francisco bay. Ample parking. Gigabits of bandwidth.
Pacific Shores alone is one and a half times the size of Hong Kong's "Cyberport."
So there.
If Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, Chief Secretary Donald Tsang and Financial Secretary Henry Tang were in a boat and it turned over, who would be saved?
Answer: The Hong Kong people
There's been alot of coverage of the huge number of protests against the current government and it's economic policy, and the undemocratic process in which the Chief Secretary is chosen (basically a 400 man group hand-picked by Beijing chooses it for us). The Cyberport, with it's lack of transparency on the bidding process, was a hugely controversial project which did not strengthen the support of the current government at all, and it's still to be seen it's effect on boosting the economy.
10 millibits*second? What does this unit represent? The second integral of data rate?
Why not Cyberjaya instead?
For those who don't know, Cyberjaya has turned out to be little more than a joke. It was launched by Mahathir in 1995, and now, almost 10 years later, there's little more than one giant country road with barely a dozen buildings scattered about.
Mahathir thought he can build a success with bare plantation land and big words. Not so. Very little of his big words and grand plans have materialized, to the point of being embarrassing since the project was touted as being 'world class'. It's a world class mismanaged white elephant, all right.
The 'high tech industry' in Cyberjaya is mostly call centres or ordinary offices. Much of the construction is substandard, especially the housing units in the area. The largest bunch of people are students of the Multimedia University. There is very little of anything else.
It still might become something in the far future, but that's not how it was portrayed. Their world class cyber thing has turned mostly into an embarrassingly ordinary college level campus area. And a very remote and empty one at that.
... which is here. If true, I would have thought it would merit some mention.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
hong kong is known as a one of the major financial capital in asia. parents raise their kids to be businessmen. almost all of them value success as in making tons of money that they'll never even get to spend. being encouraged to study in degrees of electrical engineering or computer science is very rare. lot of people on /. agree that people got into tech only because of the pre-bubble times, not because of their interest in the subject. well in hk, all you get are the bandwagon types. not making this up. i spent 10 yrs of my life there.
...um IT industry. at least after i finish my masters in electrical engineering here in canada, i'll have something to fall back on, knowing that i speak the language there...
it's not the educational system because math and science cirriculum is far more advance and fast paced than in canada and the US, so it's not the fault of highschool programs not preparing the kids well enough to pursue their careers in that direction.
cyberport is mostly for IT (damn i hate that term) - and the buildings were only built for the "looks". honestly, if i want to build a startup there, let's say a fabless semiconductor company, do i really need the 100 megabits a second network? we need the CAD licenses, engineers with experience and fresh grads in EE - which are tough to get there because hong kong university recently shut down their EE department...
another thing, people in hk always have the misconception that they are more advance in tech than north americans. all they see is that they have more variety of advance products to choose from, but it's not them that do any of the in-house design.
all said, it's good to know that there are still people that would invest (or throw away money) for the
my blog
What do they do in an amphitheater? Roman circus?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This facility may indeed be high-tech offices, but is by no stretch of the imagination a proper incubator.
what ? it tooks $2b to just build a complex with 100 mb network? and it is call as 'cyberport'? and some of you just called it advanced? hope of the future of HK?
.. a giant video game center?
Here is a list of reason that it is doomed fail
. HKSAR Chief Mr Tung,
. A group of Chief under Tung, who is racing to be next HKSAR Chief madnessly.
. A Govt controlled by groups of short sighted property development companies, with only money in their head.
If you add property market, with 'high speed network' and 'short sighted visioners' together, what would you come up?
Network infrastructure is just one tiny block of modern technological advances. It takes at lease the urge to pursuit knowledge, patience, respect to research and development, to the person who are in the way to push the technologies forward.
All these can be easily found in various universities in US, EU... but not in HK. Why? the Govt just slashed the education budget and made radical changes in educational system that only the Chief of Education knows what is going on.
Remember the success of Sillicon Valley? Was it a 'cyberport' before the Nobel scientist arrived?
Korea is now getting strong in technology field. Anyone remember the days in economic crisis. The govt had cash for only 100 days operation. What turned Korea history? 'cyberport' ?
With a government like that, even there were a 100000Mbps network, the tech in HK will just go flat.
and having watched the creation of Cyberport, I can say that the complex is nothing more than a property development masquerading as a high tech office complex. A single property developer was sole sourced to develop Cyberport: the HK Govt would give land to the developer and in exchange, the developer would construct a state-of-the-art facility for housing geek companies and also a set of condominiums. The HK Govt promoted the idea as fast-tracking the development of a high-tech complex that would house the HK offices of Intel, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun, etc. To the credit of the developer, luxury high-rise condominiums were built and units are being sold at the 1997 levels (on the order of US$1,500 per square foot for a 99 year lease). To the discredit of the government, Cyberport remains less than half full; public transport to the place is virtually non-existant; and it is difficult for visitors and residents alike to visit (it's a bit out of the way). BBC seems to be behind the curve on this one as the controversy over Cyberport has been in the press for the last six years in HK; with its problems being discussed almost daily (currently) because of another land development by the HK government that emulates the Cyberport model--the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Please mod parent up... this needs to be corrected, as many people were laughing that it ONLY has a 100Mbps network.
The test is:
Cyberport's Internal Private Network (IPN) provides 'bandwidth freeway' for all IT applications at Cyberport. With a transmission rate of up to 10 Gbps (within campus) and 1 Gbps (external), your demand in high-speed communications can be fully satisfied. All office floors are provided with Cyberport Optical Network and UTP Cat 6 cables, through which you can enjoy voice and data network services at your convenience.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
The negative comments about cyberport are spot on. HK is a plutocracy and cyberport was gift to richard li... hong kong now reaps the "rewards" of RL's wise leadership in this development.
Anyhow, I stayed at the Le Meridien Cyberport and found it to be a good analogue of the rest of the complex. Note that I also have worked with companies that have offices there, including MS, and have been courted to place offices out there. I would never ever even consider it.
The rooms at the Le Meridian all have mini pc's in them with high speed internet access (running on windows, y'all, and I found them easy to dump a keylogger on...). 150 tv channels piped in through a tv tuner card in the pcs and displayed on a plasma screen. none of them in widescreen format so they are all distorted (oh, and no movie channels... unless you count about 10 bollywood channels). big option on the pc's promote the dvd player capabilities of the pcs, but there is no dvd rental at cyberport nor does the hotel rent or offer. My room looked out over the ocean and also the garbage of cyberports eternally unfinished construction.
i know this all sounds whiny, which it certainly is, but it's truly representative of cyberport in general. Idea and reality separated by the gulf of incompetent execution... lots of rhetoric like "high speed" and "cyber" plastered over mediocre implementations.
From my brief impressions of the joint, the place was a complete cultural and recreational desert. Great if you want to make money and get the hell out, not much good for anything else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
but would cyberpot be the answer to HK hightech industry?? I don't think so. Not a good analogy...can another country invade US by buying weapons from them??? HK government has the money to build the best hardware/infrastructure in the world. However, they don't know how to make a background for CS/EE/CE grad to develop their skills => no experienced workers => no company want to invest => no experienced workers => no company want to invest.... It is so sad that we have good grad students in HK but no environment for them to develop their skills. after working a few years in HK _IT_ industry, I was quite disappointed and depressed. It is so hard to find a _real_ development job. Most jobs are just customization on the products built in US or Europe...SAP, Oracle...etc. Hong Kong businessmen and government don't have the R&D concept. I still remember some government offical said something like "High Tech doesn't necessary mean R&D... we may better fit to buy existing product and improve it, _repackage_ it..." Most Hong Kong public _only_ has the quick money concept, so don't even talk about putting money to do R&D. I have a lot of friends grad from CS and u guess how many of them are doing development instead of customization/consultant? almost none. Some of them do want to get deeper experience on devlopment project but there is not much opportunites in HK...