Startup Building Floating Data Centers

1sockchuck writes "A Bay Area startup is planning to build data centers on cargo container ships, which would be docked at piers in major Internet markets. The company, known as IDS (International Data Security) says it plans to use biodiesel to power its generators and use heat from equipment to manage temperature on board the ships, reducing their reliance on grid power. IDS is telling prospects that it hopes to eventually have more than 20 floating data centers docked at ports around the U.S."

Comments

Re:Try Earthquake protection.

[jc42]

And the 1906 disaster [in San Francisco] was caused by lack of modern building codes and fire protection as much as anything else.

I disagree. It was caused by an earthquake.

In some fields of discourse, there is a traditional distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. A proximate cause is the immediate event that triggered a disaster. Ultimate causes are the earlier conditions that allowed the immediate event to trigger a disaster.

In this case, the 1906 earthquake was the proximate cause of the disastrous fires. The ultimate causes were the shoddy buildings and infrastructure, which in turn were permitted by the lack of building codes and the "anything goes" frontier nature of the local government.

The earlier disastrous Chicago fire had a different proximate cause but the same ultimate causes.

And note that ultimate causes usually are plural. In languages like English that have definite articles, a common logical fallacy is to talk about "the cause" rather than "a cause" or "the causes". For most large civic disasters like these, "the cause" is usually misleading, because there are a long list of conditions that help turn what might have been a minor fire into a conflagration. California has seen a lot of these lately, with their large disastrous brushfires. These have a list of ultimate causes, starting with the climate, and ending with a buildup of dry-plant fuel from landscaping plus failure to properly thin and remove plant material.

OTOH, here in Boston, one of the largest historical disasters had a single identifiable cause, which sounds like something that the Onion's writers would make up, but actually happened and killed at least 21 people (and several horses). And one could argue in this case that the proximate cause was the tank bursting, while there were several ultimate cause such as poor construction of the tank, poor testing and maintenance, warm temperature, fermentation, etc. But the proximate/ultimate terminology doesn't apply well in this case, because all of those causes can be grouped as a single "poor construction and maintenance" cause.