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Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery
1sockchuck writes "One of year's most tantalizing technology secrets involves Apple's $1 billion investment in a new data center in North Carolina. Is it the Death Star in Apple's plan for galactic domination? Some Apple watchers predict it will be the hub for a 21st century broadcasting network. Other enthusiasts are doing flyovers to film videos of the 500,000 square foot facility. There's also an unofficial FAQ about the new data center. What is Apple up to with this huge facility?"
Is the Death Star really the technology to which you want to compare this data center? How well did that work out for the empire?
Personally, I think it's the computational center for Steve's worldwide reality distortion field. You need to really crunch the data to figure out how to bend people to your will.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
Odd that the only device that automatically sent images to a locked down cloud was the Microsoft Kin. I think you are rocking some tinfoil there.
Calm and measured reactions to rumors?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Its finally come, they are building the iChurch...
They listened and now you got a real walled garden to go to and be protected by Supreme Commander Jobs.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore.
What in the hell are you talking about?
They're trying to build a simulator for Steve Jobs ego before he kicks the bucket.
The center's purpose isn't clear, but it apparently sports many catwalks, large video displays, and exercise facilities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I know it's always tempting (and easy) to fire off a quick anti-Apple slam, but...Jesus Christ on a crutch...couldn't you take a minute to learn the source of the video? It took me 10 seconds to find out that it was made by a local real estate agent. Somebody who quite probably has a financial interest in learning more about a billion-dollar Apple data center being built in his town. Hardly an "Apple fanboi."
Amazingly, this looks a lot like Black Mesa to me.
Same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!
...for employees who leak info...
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Microsoft is the only one giving you choice, but on slashdot they're supposedly always the bad guy.
You haven't been watch television lately have you. If you were, you'd see the Microsoft 'To the Cloud' commercials ad nauseam. They are right there with all the others wanting the same thing. To the 'Mainframe' with all of them.
MobileMe is "expensive" (by which we mean $99 a year) precisely because it has no ads and doesn't vend your personal information to third parties. You can't have it both ways-- you either go Google and get your cloud for free with ads and metrics, or you actually pay money for your service.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You can't see it yet on Google Maps yet, but the Data Center is listed as located at 45.725613, -113.622258, or at 6081 Startown Road, Newton, NC 28658
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
this is obviously the Royal Tomb.
Apple employees: I have some distressing news about the company Retirement Plan...
Now that they've taken the Xserve out back and given it the 'ol' yeller treatment', what exactly is humming away in that fancy new datacenter of theirs?
Are they actually taking their own risible advice, and packing the place floor-to-ceiling with the "3 mac-pros-per-12U-shelf-what-is-this-'LOM Card'-you-speak-of?" server configuration?
Will this facility be the world's largest collection of hackentoshes? Is this going to be the most humiliating "Get The Facts" microsoft ever gets to do? Will somebody actualy be running Darwin for reasons other than perverse experimentation?
why they need to build such a huge building to hold a cloud. Surely they could have condensed it?
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Or I could had got the option to upload my pictures with javascript and all (and eventually database if needed but I doubt it is) to any web server I want (I think you can upload from iWeb to anything? Not necessary MobileMe?)
You can upload to anything you want using iWeb, whether it is just to a directory or using FTP to a remote Web server anywhere.
I know there was a guide for how to set up a FreeBSD server as a .mac account but I don't think it has been updated for long.
I don't understand why you would do this. What is the benefit over using services not posing as Apple's service?
IMHO 99 dollars was expensive. And considering how much Apple machines cost + what iLife cost I think they could had offered it for free as an "Apple advantage"...
I agree, but then neither of us has access to the numbers. I think they'd be better off trying to include it as an expense that drives hardware adoption and it would be a lot more popular and become more of a differentiator as well as giving Apple leverage when they wanted interoperability with other Web services (ala, we have tens of millions of users on our service, want to seamlessly connect to them Facebook?).
...it's _NEEDED_ for some things it shouldn't be needed for.
What?
When they first announced Chrome, they also showed saving a file to a thumb drive. The Cr-48 netbooks don't support that in beta, but I assume it will by launch. And while your data is online, you choose which web services to use. And those services aren't necessarily locked.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You are really mis-informed, Microsoft bought Danger, who owns the Sidekicks, they never had local storage, guess where your pictures and information went? Yep to "the cloud" before that was a term. And the sidekick defined "locked down". And guess who lost every sidekick owners data all at once? Yep Microsoft! Guess how much local storage the Microsoft Kin had, yep ZERO, it got uploaded to "the cloud", for the very brief time it was on sale, guess why? The bat shit insane prices they were charging for data rates on the Kin, so it made it useless without a data plan! For them to own your data in a locked down server storage as well.
Specifically, it is a high-speed, state-of-the-art rumor mill.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Its not a data center at all, its a fabrication plant where they turn kittens and puppies into iPhones and iPads.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Where is this $1 billion price tag coming from? I've seen facotries go up twice that size for under $20 million, so unless the thing is filled with solid gold doorknobs I'm doubting that pricetag. Also, all these "sources" are random apple fanboi tech sites. It's apple rather well known for spawning their own viral mysteries to help build up suspense for their next big thing? To me that looks like your standard manufacturing plant, look at the water towers... why would you need those in a data center? Maybe they're sick of the bad press from china and might start offering an american made version of some of their hardware? It's clear their customers don't care about price.
It will be as if a million Google servers cried out in terror.
Apple has already started moving to cloud based services, so most likely the data center will be for those. It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore.
So either you care about this 'privacy' you are talking about and you just don't use or buy anything that stores your files 'in the cloud', or you don't bother about where your holiday pictures and e-mails are stored and enjoy the benefits of automatically backed-up storage that is accessible everywhere, from different devices, without setting up and running your own private data center. I don't see the problem here. Meanwhile everyone and their mother have long moved on and doesn't have the same privacy paranoia as you apparently do: e-mail is stored at the ISP or hosted and accessed through a commercial entity such as GMail or Hotmail, address books, bookmarks and preferences are synced through some kind of vendor synchronization service built into computers and phones, dropbox or mobileme is used to backup, store and publish data, and so on, and so forth. Hate to burst your bubble dude, but most people don't care much where their data resides, as long as they have the impression no-one is digging through it or re-distributing it. Real privacy doesn't exist anyway, your name is in hundreds of databases, be it governmental, utility, commercial, whatever. If you want to be 100% sure no-one gets to know anything about you and your data, just don't connect to the internet, don't use a phone, don't send e-mails, and don't give out any personal information to any company, etc. I think you'll have a really hard time. Personally, I always get a little annoyed by privacy whiners, not because I don't value privacy, but because the majority of the people complaining about privacy invasion happily keep public facebook profiles online, twitter every move they make, hand out their personal data without a problem if it gets them a $1 cheeseburger discount, etc.
Anyway, what you're saying about a 'cloud based iPhone/iPad/Mac' is pure speculation, and as long as it isn't enforced you *have* to use such products, I don't see the problem.
The flashy iPhoto album stuff to[sic]?
Yeah, it's nothing proprietary.
Free of charge? Experience? Unlimited storage? Better bandwidth?
You misunderstand. I'm not asking why you'd want to go with services other than Apple's .Mac. I'm asking why you'd want to go with services that pretend to be .Mac instead of just using regular, off the shelf services for mail, jabber, backup disk, etc.
What?
For instance the remote desktop thingy
You mean Apple Remote Desktop? That doesn't rely upon the .Mac service that I know of. It's just a remote desktop client that runs on OS X (usually server).
Other examples would be Timemachine backups to whatever wireless router with an NTFS/FAT32 USB HDD.
That's not a function of .Mac either, it's just a limitation of the OS X built in backup (limited support for filesystems). The method used relies upon the journaling in HFS+ and they haven't spent the time to make it work with any other journaled filesystems, lt alone non-journaled ones. But this all has nothing to do with Apple's .Mac services.
Has nothing to do with MobileMe ...
Right, so you still haven't pointed out anything you can do with .Mac or MobileMe or whatever that you can't replicate with other services.
...but still with inconvenient solutions from Apple just so they can sell more of their gear.
It's actually a real limitation based upon filesystems. You can use any wireless router plugged into an HFS+ hard drive.
I'd rather choose options which benefits _me_.
By all means you should choose what works for you, but I'm not seeing how Apple is making that intentionally difficult other than not going out of their way to port some of their software to other OS's and filesystems.
Jesus had a sense of humor, get over it.
While were making up scenarios, why don't we just find a very profitable company that buys us all ponies to complement our phones, too?
There's a bunch of questions to be answered -- does MobileMe have a halo effect on other devices, like the phones? Could it ever? If you can find a way of answering this yes, then you're on to something. Then, you have to figure out if you have enough capacity to service accounts that have zero cost at the point of delivery -- Google does, but Apple doesn't. A low price per month defrays costs but also keeps the demands on the system low. We might see this side of the equation change when this new datacenter opens. If Apple decides it can service all of the customers they presume they'd get for free with this new capacity, and the service will pay for itself in sales, then they're likely to consider doing it. But those factors have to be in place. They can't just offer it today, get swamped for 6 months, cost them a load of money and then have the offer die an ignominious death from getting a bad reputation.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
But at least you're not a bitter person.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I'm an Apple fan, I'd have to say that of late, where are all these supposed "rabid Apple fans"? I can certainly understand when Apple was, as we dont say in New Zealand, down the shitter, but after absolutely dominating competition, who feels the need to kreech on about Apple now?
:-)
By far, the biggest whiners online are those who spend all day going on about Open Source this, shitty Nokia OS that, and the Android crowd. I dont hold it against them, but still we complain of "Apple fanboys", when I think they've been extinct for at least a half decade!
Now, onto this "flyby", what if these people had access to a plane, and were going to fly it SOMEWHERE, they heard of an interesting, GIANT building, and so decided to make their normal flight OVER THIS BUILDING, rather than fly over a few less interesting buildings?
I've recently gotten interested in Geocaching, if I were in a new area with an interesting cache about, I'd go and find that one, rather than revisiting boring ones in my own area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
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LOL Of course not, there's no simulator big enough for that!
But joking aside, I've been keeping up on this for a fair while, and amongst the more credible insiders, a lot of information has been released...
Steve Jobs is designing a new kind of Apple training facility, initially for a few people who work for Apple, but eventually it will be opened to certain segments of the public.
It's supposed to be revolutionary. Someone said it's the final solution to all our training problems. The original idea was developed by a German doctor, who specialized in a certain type of brain training, like Dr Kawashima.
The test facilities were developed in Poland due to their tax incentives, and due to the advantageous location. Though they are a lot smaller, they provide a good idea of what's to come.
Apple apparently has a severe ADD problem in their company, and its known to afflict many programmers. This results in many of their programmers being unable to concentrate, which is a HUGE productivity loss for them.
While certain concentration drugs do help for a limited time, Apple really needed a more effective final solution, which they can use to cleanse these problems. So before any higher training happens, the first stage will be concentration training.
Apparently the Jewish community is afflicted with this disproportionately when compared to the more Nordic or Indo-European races. So I believe they'll be helping them first.
Either way, I'm excited! We're not sure what it's going to be called, but I'm thinking Camp Concentration, or maybe iConcentration? Who knows, either way it's really exciting! For the opening, Apple is apparently renting a pile of trains to cart the first lucky Jews to the facility.
Apple fanboi's that don't get picked, will be so jealous!
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