In the US, the FAA is planning to discontinue VORs and omnirange stations, the non-satellite navigational aids that have run aerial navigation for decades. The Coast Guard discontinued LORAN C in 2010. This was done with the concurrence of the Department of Homeland Security, which said it was "not needed for GPS backup."
GPS is a very weak signal, and easy to jam. Satellites put out only 500 watts, spread over half the surface of the planet.
LORAN C was transmitted at power levels from 100KW to 4MW, with huge antenna farms. That kind of power is difficult to jam at any distance. VORs and omnis aren't as powerful, but they're usually located at airports, so that when you're close to an airport and need to find the runway, the signal is at its strongest.
Some people are genetically that thin. I know a family like that. The mother is 5'11", and was incredibly skinny in her 20s. She has a really high metabolic rate, and spent years as a runner and endurance rider. She eats twice as much as I do. Her daughter is the same, but an inch taller, and, like mom, is a serious jock. Her day job is ocean rescue, her idea of a good swim is to cross Monterey Bay, and a good bike trip is Portugal to Italy. She's had people think she's anorexic.
Working ballet dancers are often like that. They look thin from a distance, but meet one and you realize they're all hard muscle. So are many horse people.
You can buy good lightning protection devices from Square D or Siemens. Here's a background paper from Siemens. and a product guide from Square D.. These go between the meter and the circuit breaker box. They're hulking big metal boxes with big inductors inside and a huge ground wire. You can get various peak current ratings, up to 480,000 amps. That's more power than lightning bolts have.
Similar protection devices are available for phone lines. These attach where the phone line enters the building and, of course, have a big ground wire.
This is a completely solved problem. Antenna towers, power lines, and telegraph lines have been taking direct lightning hits for over a century, and the protection devices are available. They're not even all that expensive. Just big.
I tend to agree. Really, all you can do when forwarding packets is drop packets or reorder them. We need to see the complete details of the rules for doing that.
(You can also ask the sender to slow down, which is what "explicit congestion notification" is about. It may not help all that much when the traffic is dominated by short-lived connections, which is what this paper claims to address.)
It's not clear from the paper whether packet dropping is per-flow, in some fair sense, or per link. There's a brief mention of fairness, but it isn't explored. It sounds like the new approach has no built-in fair queuing.
Without fair queuing, whoever sends the most gets the most data through.
Windows (especially) starts up TCP connections by sending as many packets as it can at connection opening. There used to be a convention in TCP called "slow start", where new connections started up sending only two packets, increasing if the round trip time turned out to be good. That was too pessimistic. But Windows now starts out by blasting out 25 or so packets at once. This hogs the available bandwidth through everything with FIFO queues.
If the routers at choke points (where bandwidth out is much less than bandwidth in, like the entry to a DSL line) do fair queuing by flow, the problem gets dealt with there, as the excessive sending fights with itself, trailing packets on the biggest flows are sent last, and everything works out OK.
"Bufferbloat" is only a problem when a small flow gets stuck behind a big one. A flow getting stuck behind the preceding packets of the same flow is fine; you want those packets delivered. Packet reordering is better than packet dropping, although more computationally expensive. Most CIsco routers offer it on slower links. Currently, this means links below 2Mb/s, which is very slow by modern standards. That's why we still have kludgy solutions like RED. This new thing is a better kludge, though.
I haven't had Java installed on my desktop machines in years, and don't seem to be missing out on anything. Some of the less important OpenOffice functions didn't work, but that was about it.
It's the COBOL conversion guy and academic hanger-on, Vivek Wadhwa, mouthing off again. He just wants to see his name in print. It's sometimes claimed he was on the faculty at Harvard (he's not, he was just an RA) and now he has some vague affiliation with Stanford he's touting.
If this is real, the insulin pump is seriously defective. The FDA needs to be notified and there needs to be a recall. There are lots of little microwave sources around. Some automatic door openers have a millimeter Doppler radar in them. Speed signs have centimeter-band radars. Near an airport, you're likely to be hit by radar beams from the airport's radars. Cell phones and WiFi devices get near the millimeter range. None of these things damage each other or bother non-radio electronics.
If an insulin pump can be permanently damaged by anything short of an EMP attack, it's defective by design.
Disney/Marvel made a big effort to get "Avengers" on almost every available IMAX screen. In 3D, even. With five audio channels and subwoofers the size of a minivan.
A camcorder version, overcompressed for BitTorrent, is no more than a thumbnail of that.
This has been talked up for a while, but it's not taken seriously locally. They want to locate this 12 miles offshore of Half Moon Bay, CA.
They can't locate this off San Francisco, because the Farallon Islands push the US border much further from the mainland.
Montara, a few miles north of Half Moon Bay, has a modest small boat harbor. But they'd need a full-scale ferry dock and a cargo facility to service their offshore operation. They'd also need a U.S. Customs port of entry, which Montara is not. So they'd have to ferry everything up to the Golden Gate. That kills most of the advantages of being only 12 miles offshore. And you can't just helicopter out there; you have to go through an airport port of entry. (There is a big USAF radar station at Pillar Point, overlooking the proposed ship location. All air traffic is monitored.)
What they're talking about is called an "accommodation barge". Those are available. Most are rather basic, and only some are suitable for mooring in open ocean. Some availablebarges. They might also lease a cruise ship, which would be more luxurious, although it would need modifications for solid offshore anchoring.
And what's the point? At great expense, somebody gets to avoid US taxes on a few hundred employees.
There's a whole industry out there spamming "social". At the top are the advertisers who want results and don't ask too many questions. Below them are the SEO firms, advertising things like "Guaranteed first page listings or your money back". Below them are the businesses that sell "bulk Likes", "+1"s, and fake reviews.
But that's not the bottom of the swamp. The people generating fake social rankings need services to help them. So there are outfits which sell fake Google, Facebook, and Yelp accounts in bulk. Software companies which sell tools for creating fake accounts in bulk. ("250,000
+1 votes per day on a fast connection" ) Outsourcing firms which create fake accounts. These operations tend not to advertise openly, but can be found on "black hat" SEO forums.
They, in turn, need support services. They need fake IP addresses and fake phone numbers for verification calls. There are services to provide those. You can rent phone numbers in bulk for 20 minutes. Bulk IP addresses, needed for bulk fake account creation, come from proxies, many of which come from malware on compromised machines. This is down at the organized crime level.
This all started in late 2010, when Google started feeding "local" social data into web search results. There had been social spamming before that, but it was a minor business. Once Google went "social", social spamming took off. Now, social spamming is mainstream SEO. It's cheaper than running a link farm. It's also safer. There's seldom any retaliation from the search engines for social spamming. Even if they detect a fake social account, they can't tie it back to the source. With link farms, the whole farm can be banned, which can shut down a SEO firm.
Take a look at their ratings of major sites. That's a simple feature comparison checklist chart, but hard to read.
Graphically, all the info is conveyed with colors only, which is awful. From a graphical standpoint, the icons are non-obvious. The picture of a human in a circle means "you can view and export your personal data".
From a data collection standpoint, everything is either self-reported or manually set for major web sites, so there's a scaling problem. From an accuracy standpoint, Facebook has "will alert you to material changes" and "you can access all of your data" set to True, which is somewhat questionable given Facebook's history in those areas.
Presenting detailed information with multiple icons creates confusing visual clutter. Here's the chart for the international standard fabric care icons found on clothing labels.A liquid-filled cup with two dots and an underline means "Machine wash, warm, permanent press". A triangle with two diagonal lines means "Bleach with non-chlorine bleach as needed". Did you know that? It's on most garments.
We've struggled with this problem for SiteTruth We collect information about the business behind a web site, and present it to the user through browser add-ons. Doing this both concisely and effectively is tough. Right now, we have red, yellow, and green icons, with "do not enter", question mark, and checkmark graphics. We're about to launch a new system which brings up a small "dog tag" on link mousover, with information about the business. The dog tag uses text, not icons.
What seems to be happening lately is that the "Web" companies are trying to force small phone-screen layouts onto big-screen machines. That's what "Metro" is. Even Mozilla has a similar thing in the works. (The menu bar moves to the bottom of the screen and becomes darker. New!)
The other big trends are slaving everything to the "cloud", whether it needs it or not, an anal-probe level of tracking, and an "app store". The goal seems to be to create closed ecosystems with no escape. It worked for Apple.
Not much in the way of new capabilities comes with this. Before Siri, there was TellMe, which was voice-driven, speaker independent, and useful for movies and driving directions, and Wildfire, which was a very nice voice oriented phone management system. Microsoft bought both and trashed them. TellMe shuts down at the end of this month. Microsoft instead suggests using Bing from your smartphone. While driving?
What we're really getting from smartphones is automation of the banal. Ten years from now, search engines will still be around. There's a market for being able to search through all the publicly available information in the world. The more banal stuff, the "social" stuff, will move to phones.
Tablets are output-mostly devices, and as such, tend to be used more for entertainment than work. Then again, as work moves to "machines should think, people should work", work computing may become more output-only.
Those are just the U.S. Government satellites. They're ignoring WorldView-1, WorldView-2, GeoEye-1, RapidEye 1 through 5, Spot 2,4, and 5, EROS A and B... This is an area in which the private sector is doing quite well.
With some commercial STL machines (not the amateur ones) you can lay down multiple materials with different properties. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford has done this for some flexible robot parts. He's trying for biological-like structures, where everything is flexible but still highly structured.
SMD resistors are pretty small, and if they were embedded it would free up more surface area for larger components and reduce overall size.
It's quite common to have embedded SMD capacitors inside of multi-layer PC boards. This is done to improve the transmission line characteristics of long traces.
Microsoft has historically been very aggressive towards their competitors. They've frequently crushed competitors. Their users, who are their customers and pay them money, they treat reasonably well.
Google, on the other hand, focuses their aggression against their users.. Google's tries to collect as much info about its users as it can, which is a lot. Then they resell that data to advertisers. This has them in trouble with the EU privacy authorities and most of the US state attorneys general.
And no, it wasn't just "Canadian pharmacies". The FBI became involved because some drug dealer they were chasing ran an online pharmacy racket on the side and advertised with Google. The FBI then ran a sting operation against Google, running more and more outrageous ads for illegal drugs. Google execs met with the FBI's con man, who was pretending to be an agent for a Mexican drug lord. They extended him credit for AdWords ads. The U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island says Larry Page knew all about this.
Microsoft has had antitrust problems, but nothing like that.
Japan has essentially no internal oil or natural gas resources. Everything has to be imported. As a result of the nuclear shutdown, imports are up. Way up. So are prices.
As utilities last year met the shortfall of nuclear power, Japanese consumption of LNG rose by 56 per cent, crude oil for direct burning by 27 per cent and fuel oil usage by 20 per cent. The trend, which is helping to keep spot LNG prices in Asia and global oil prices higher, is set to accelerate in the next few months as utilities burn more hydrocarbons to compensate for the lack of nuclear power.
Energy analysts say utilities have maximised LNG-fired electricity output, leaving crude oil and fuel oil to meet additional needs.
Oil traders believe that Japan's nuclear cutback could add between 450,000 and 800,000 barrels a day to world demand for crude and fuel oil.
The figures are significant. The bottom end of the range equals the production of Ecuador and the upper end matches the output of Qatar.
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space.
It occurred to the people with a clue long ago. As Dave Hackworth (US Army infantry, highly decorated, later a writer and war correspondent for Newsweek) wrote right after 9/11, "Don't bunch up".
19 inch racks are the oldest standard in computing. The ENIAC used 19 inch racks.
This is really yet another "blade server" scheme. The whole rack is one chassis. Units are on vertically mounted boards with front faces and handles which look like an extra-deep variation on the old Eurocard form factor. That's reasonable enough. It's a lot like 1980s IBM mainframe or 5ESS packaging. Vertically mounted boards are better for airflow, anyway.
It's not about racks which take horizontal boxes like 19 inch rack components, but are slightly wider.
He's having it built by a government-owned shipyard in China. One that has never built a passenger ship. Jinling builds large single-engine tankers, container ships, and RORO (roll-on, roll-off) vessels. Five shipyards in Finland, France, Italy, Germany, and South Korea build most of the passenger ships in the world, and Jinling isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, the FAA is planning to discontinue VORs and omnirange stations, the non-satellite navigational aids that have run aerial navigation for decades. The Coast Guard discontinued LORAN C in 2010. This was done with the concurrence of the Department of Homeland Security, which said it was "not needed for GPS backup."
GPS is a very weak signal, and easy to jam. Satellites put out only 500 watts, spread over half the surface of the planet. LORAN C was transmitted at power levels from 100KW to 4MW, with huge antenna farms. That kind of power is difficult to jam at any distance. VORs and omnis aren't as powerful, but they're usually located at airports, so that when you're close to an airport and need to find the runway, the signal is at its strongest.
Some people are genetically that thin. I know a family like that. The mother is 5'11", and was incredibly skinny in her 20s. She has a really high metabolic rate, and spent years as a runner and endurance rider. She eats twice as much as I do. Her daughter is the same, but an inch taller, and, like mom, is a serious jock. Her day job is ocean rescue, her idea of a good swim is to cross Monterey Bay, and a good bike trip is Portugal to Italy. She's had people think she's anorexic.
Working ballet dancers are often like that. They look thin from a distance, but meet one and you realize they're all hard muscle. So are many horse people.
Actually, the IBM 402 mentioned was acquired by the Computer Museum, and is on exhibit there.
You can buy good lightning protection devices from Square D or Siemens. Here's a background paper from Siemens. and a product guide from Square D.. These go between the meter and the circuit breaker box. They're hulking big metal boxes with big inductors inside and a huge ground wire. You can get various peak current ratings, up to 480,000 amps. That's more power than lightning bolts have.
Similar protection devices are available for phone lines. These attach where the phone line enters the building and, of course, have a big ground wire.
This is a completely solved problem. Antenna towers, power lines, and telegraph lines have been taking direct lightning hits for over a century, and the protection devices are available. They're not even all that expensive. Just big.
I tend to agree. Really, all you can do when forwarding packets is drop packets or reorder them. We need to see the complete details of the rules for doing that.
(You can also ask the sender to slow down, which is what "explicit congestion notification" is about. It may not help all that much when the traffic is dominated by short-lived connections, which is what this paper claims to address.)
It's not clear from the paper whether packet dropping is per-flow, in some fair sense, or per link. There's a brief mention of fairness, but it isn't explored. It sounds like the new approach has no built-in fair queuing.
Without fair queuing, whoever sends the most gets the most data through. Windows (especially) starts up TCP connections by sending as many packets as it can at connection opening. There used to be a convention in TCP called "slow start", where new connections started up sending only two packets, increasing if the round trip time turned out to be good. That was too pessimistic. But Windows now starts out by blasting out 25 or so packets at once. This hogs the available bandwidth through everything with FIFO queues.
If the routers at choke points (where bandwidth out is much less than bandwidth in, like the entry to a DSL line) do fair queuing by flow, the problem gets dealt with there, as the excessive sending fights with itself, trailing packets on the biggest flows are sent last, and everything works out OK.
"Bufferbloat" is only a problem when a small flow gets stuck behind a big one. A flow getting stuck behind the preceding packets of the same flow is fine; you want those packets delivered. Packet reordering is better than packet dropping, although more computationally expensive. Most CIsco routers offer it on slower links. Currently, this means links below 2Mb/s, which is very slow by modern standards. That's why we still have kludgy solutions like RED. This new thing is a better kludge, though.
I haven't had Java installed on my desktop machines in years, and don't seem to be missing out on anything. Some of the less important OpenOffice functions didn't work, but that was about it.
It's the COBOL conversion guy and academic hanger-on, Vivek Wadhwa, mouthing off again. He just wants to see his name in print. It's sometimes claimed he was on the faculty at Harvard (he's not, he was just an RA) and now he has some vague affiliation with Stanford he's touting.
If this is real, the insulin pump is seriously defective. The FDA needs to be notified and there needs to be a recall. There are lots of little microwave sources around. Some automatic door openers have a millimeter Doppler radar in them. Speed signs have centimeter-band radars. Near an airport, you're likely to be hit by radar beams from the airport's radars. Cell phones and WiFi devices get near the millimeter range. None of these things damage each other or bother non-radio electronics.
If an insulin pump can be permanently damaged by anything short of an EMP attack, it's defective by design.
Disney/Marvel made a big effort to get "Avengers" on almost every available IMAX screen. In 3D, even. With five audio channels and subwoofers the size of a minivan. A camcorder version, overcompressed for BitTorrent, is no more than a thumbnail of that.
This has been talked up for a while, but it's not taken seriously locally. They want to locate this 12 miles offshore of Half Moon Bay, CA. They can't locate this off San Francisco, because the Farallon Islands push the US border much further from the mainland.
Montara, a few miles north of Half Moon Bay, has a modest small boat harbor. But they'd need a full-scale ferry dock and a cargo facility to service their offshore operation. They'd also need a U.S. Customs port of entry, which Montara is not. So they'd have to ferry everything up to the Golden Gate. That kills most of the advantages of being only 12 miles offshore. And you can't just helicopter out there; you have to go through an airport port of entry. (There is a big USAF radar station at Pillar Point, overlooking the proposed ship location. All air traffic is monitored.)
What they're talking about is called an "accommodation barge". Those are available. Most are rather basic, and only some are suitable for mooring in open ocean. Some available barges. They might also lease a cruise ship, which would be more luxurious, although it would need modifications for solid offshore anchoring.
And what's the point? At great expense, somebody gets to avoid US taxes on a few hundred employees.
There's a whole industry out there spamming "social". At the top are the advertisers who want results and don't ask too many questions. Below them are the SEO firms, advertising things like "Guaranteed first page listings or your money back". Below them are the businesses that sell "bulk Likes", "+1"s, and fake reviews.
But that's not the bottom of the swamp. The people generating fake social rankings need services to help them. So there are outfits which sell fake Google, Facebook, and Yelp accounts in bulk. Software companies which sell tools for creating fake accounts in bulk. ("250,000 +1 votes per day on a fast connection" ) Outsourcing firms which create fake accounts. These operations tend not to advertise openly, but can be found on "black hat" SEO forums.
They, in turn, need support services. They need fake IP addresses and fake phone numbers for verification calls. There are services to provide those. You can rent phone numbers in bulk for 20 minutes. Bulk IP addresses, needed for bulk fake account creation, come from proxies, many of which come from malware on compromised machines. This is down at the organized crime level.
See our paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" for the gory details.
This all started in late 2010, when Google started feeding "local" social data into web search results. There had been social spamming before that, but it was a minor business. Once Google went "social", social spamming took off. Now, social spamming is mainstream SEO. It's cheaper than running a link farm. It's also safer. There's seldom any retaliation from the search engines for social spamming. Even if they detect a fake social account, they can't tie it back to the source. With link farms, the whole farm can be banned, which can shut down a SEO firm.
Take a look at their ratings of major sites. That's a simple feature comparison checklist chart, but hard to read. Graphically, all the info is conveyed with colors only, which is awful. From a graphical standpoint, the icons are non-obvious. The picture of a human in a circle means "you can view and export your personal data". From a data collection standpoint, everything is either self-reported or manually set for major web sites, so there's a scaling problem. From an accuracy standpoint, Facebook has "will alert you to material changes" and "you can access all of your data" set to True, which is somewhat questionable given Facebook's history in those areas.
Compare "The evolution of privacy on Facebook" Now that's an excellent, and original, graphical representation of Facebook's privacy issues.
Presenting detailed information with multiple icons creates confusing visual clutter. Here's the chart for the international standard fabric care icons found on clothing labels.A liquid-filled cup with two dots and an underline means "Machine wash, warm, permanent press". A triangle with two diagonal lines means "Bleach with non-chlorine bleach as needed". Did you know that? It's on most garments.
We've struggled with this problem for SiteTruth We collect information about the business behind a web site, and present it to the user through browser add-ons. Doing this both concisely and effectively is tough. Right now, we have red, yellow, and green icons, with "do not enter", question mark, and checkmark graphics. We're about to launch a new system which brings up a small "dog tag" on link mousover, with information about the business. The dog tag uses text, not icons.
What seems to be happening lately is that the "Web" companies are trying to force small phone-screen layouts onto big-screen machines. That's what "Metro" is. Even Mozilla has a similar thing in the works. (The menu bar moves to the bottom of the screen and becomes darker. New!)
The other big trends are slaving everything to the "cloud", whether it needs it or not, an anal-probe level of tracking, and an "app store". The goal seems to be to create closed ecosystems with no escape. It worked for Apple.
Not much in the way of new capabilities comes with this. Before Siri, there was TellMe, which was voice-driven, speaker independent, and useful for movies and driving directions, and Wildfire, which was a very nice voice oriented phone management system. Microsoft bought both and trashed them. TellMe shuts down at the end of this month. Microsoft instead suggests using Bing from your smartphone. While driving?
What we're really getting from smartphones is automation of the banal. Ten years from now, search engines will still be around. There's a market for being able to search through all the publicly available information in the world. The more banal stuff, the "social" stuff, will move to phones.
Tablets are output-mostly devices, and as such, tend to be used more for entertainment than work. Then again, as work moves to "machines should think, people should work", work computing may become more output-only.
Those are just the U.S. Government satellites. They're ignoring WorldView-1, WorldView-2, GeoEye-1, RapidEye 1 through 5, Spot 2,4, and 5, EROS A and B... This is an area in which the private sector is doing quite well.
Air superiority hasn't been remotely in question in any war the US has been involved in since WWII.
Or, as USAF types put it, "American troops have not had to fight under a hostile sky since WWII. This did not happen by accident."
...no such service exists.
The Google Data Empire.
Here's the letter from 38 state attorneys general to Larry Page.
"Google Whores Out Users with False Privacy Claims".
With some commercial STL machines (not the amateur ones) you can lay down multiple materials with different properties. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford has done this for some flexible robot parts. He's trying for biological-like structures, where everything is flexible but still highly structured.
SMD resistors are pretty small, and if they were embedded it would free up more surface area for larger components and reduce overall size.
It's quite common to have embedded SMD capacitors inside of multi-layer PC boards. This is done to improve the transmission line characteristics of long traces.
Microsoft has historically been very aggressive towards their competitors. They've frequently crushed competitors. Their users, who are their customers and pay them money, they treat reasonably well.
Google, on the other hand, focuses their aggression against their users.. Google's tries to collect as much info about its users as it can, which is a lot. Then they resell that data to advertisers. This has them in trouble with the EU privacy authorities and most of the US state attorneys general.
Then there's the drug dealing. Google had to admit guilt to multiple felonies related to advertising drugs. They had to pay a $500,000,000 penalty to avoid felony prosecution.
And no, it wasn't just "Canadian pharmacies". The FBI became involved because some drug dealer they were chasing ran an online pharmacy racket on the side and advertised with Google. The FBI then ran a sting operation against Google, running more and more outrageous ads for illegal drugs. Google execs met with the FBI's con man, who was pretending to be an agent for a Mexican drug lord. They extended him credit for AdWords ads. The U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island says Larry Page knew all about this.
Microsoft has had antitrust problems, but nothing like that.
Japan has essentially no internal oil or natural gas resources. Everything has to be imported. As a result of the nuclear shutdown, imports are up. Way up. So are prices.
From the Financial Times:
As utilities last year met the shortfall of nuclear power, Japanese consumption of LNG rose by 56 per cent, crude oil for direct burning by 27 per cent and fuel oil usage by 20 per cent. The trend, which is helping to keep spot LNG prices in Asia and global oil prices higher, is set to accelerate in the next few months as utilities burn more hydrocarbons to compensate for the lack of nuclear power.
Energy analysts say utilities have maximised LNG-fired electricity output, leaving crude oil and fuel oil to meet additional needs. Oil traders believe that Japan's nuclear cutback could add between 450,000 and 800,000 barrels a day to world demand for crude and fuel oil. The figures are significant. The bottom end of the range equals the production of Ecuador and the upper end matches the output of Qatar.
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space.
It occurred to the people with a clue long ago. As Dave Hackworth (US Army infantry, highly decorated, later a writer and war correspondent for Newsweek) wrote right after 9/11, "Don't bunch up".
19 inch racks are the oldest standard in computing. The ENIAC used 19 inch racks.
This is really yet another "blade server" scheme. The whole rack is one chassis. Units are on vertically mounted boards with front faces and handles which look like an extra-deep variation on the old Eurocard form factor. That's reasonable enough. It's a lot like 1980s IBM mainframe or 5ESS packaging. Vertically mounted boards are better for airflow, anyway.
It's not about racks which take horizontal boxes like 19 inch rack components, but are slightly wider.
If it's not habitable, it's not a building.
That's actually the rule on "tallest building". The Ryungyong Hotel mess is the reason for that.
Of course, Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world, and by a big margin, over 300 meters.
He's having it built by a government-owned shipyard in China. One that has never built a passenger ship. Jinling builds large single-engine tankers, container ships, and RORO (roll-on, roll-off) vessels. Five shipyards in Finland, France, Italy, Germany, and South Korea build most of the passenger ships in the world, and Jinling isn't one of them.