Where I might build a datacenter is a pretty vague question depending on a ton of factors. A much easier question to answer is "where would I not want to build a datacenter?"
1. I would not build a datacenter anywhere that I couldn't get to and physically set foot in the datacenter within a few hours. I don't care how cheap it is, how do I know if I'm getting a good value if I can't drop in unexpectedly and see if it's being run as planned?
2. I would not build a datacenter in a zone known to experience frequent or severe natural disasters. Again, what's the point of saving a few bucks up front if a disaster (tornado, earthquake, hurricane, etc.) can wipe me out? Furthermore, how stupid am I if I put my datacenter in a place known to experience those things? The Earth is quite large, I can just put it somewhere else.
3. I would not build a datacenter anywhere that had a single point of failure on a necessary utility. I am not comfortable having my datacenter services all fail because a single provider failed. Having a more expensive location that allows 2+ providers adds to my overhead, but having a backup provider creates peace of mind that any cost savings due to only one provider will not.
4. Building security is important, but not as important as sourcing trustworthy talent to be inside the datacenter. I would not put a datacenter anywhere that I could not get local, independent sources of talent that all are from a similar cultural background to myself. This is not xenophobia, it's just being able to relate on a direct level with the people in charge of my business' most critical assets. For example, if I insult an admin one day just based on a cultural misunderstanding, then I may inadvertently cause my own security issues.
All other conditions can be summarized like this: take what you think is your ideal location and then take a random warehouse building inside a 50 mile radius of where you are right now. If you can't answer why you should take the ideal location over the random building with all of the reasons above, then you should seriously consider that random building as a candidate. After all, if it doesn't fail at the above, then exactly why would you not use that as a datacenter?
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I have great concerns about whether or not mission-critical applications are having their SLA's met in datacenters, whether they are hosted in-house, third-party supported, or any other form of datacenter-based hosting. First, consider the alternative: the server sits in a room next to your expert developers. Sure, it's probably a SOX violation, but I can tell you this much: that server will not go down often, and if it does, you can be sure that it will be restored as fast as humanly possible. That's the advantage to having an expert babysit your system. If you have two experts in different geographic locations and each babysits a server in case one goes down, then you have about the best support possible. However, for large systems, this may not be convenient, etc.
But how do you know that a datacenter-hosted app has this type of support? First, you need to know for sure what the SLA spells out in terms of support and monitoring. Look for this in your SLA:
"If your app encounters event W, person X will do Y about that specific event within Z amount of time"
I guarantee that anything less specific than that, or anything as specific that's not in writing in the SLA to that effect, will not be honored. Vague responses equal no responses, because why would the datacenter host open themselves up to liabilities by initiating a response that wasn't specified in writing? Specific, measurable responses with noted responsible parties are required to be honored for the SLA or the datacenter host can be held accountable for any failure to respond as specified.
So assume you have an acceptable SLA in place, and you know what they're supposed to do. How can you be sure they'll actually do the things they say they'll do? Well, you obviously need to know before you can count on your apps for something mission-critical, so while the mission-critical app is still running somewhere else (i.e. being babysat by an expert), you set out to prove that the support can respond -- by staging various types of failures. You could tell the host about the staged failure attempts, but then they'll know and will definitely staff and respond appropriately. I would stage failures and not tell the host that the failures are a test. After all, from the host's perspective, any failure is a failure. Be sure to measure closely the response and check if the SLA was honored as expected. Any failure to honor it, for any reason, should be a strong indication that the host is not prepared to honor the SLA, thus potentially costing you your mission-critical app.
Do not allow a complicated roll-over or automated monitoring to imply that the datacenter can respond to any event with seamless mission-critical app coverage. An inexperienced datacenter admin simply hitting the wrong button can send any app to Davy Jones' locker in a big hurry. If you truly want mission-critical backup performance, ask yourself what would happen if the datacenter was completely unresponsive? For example, what if it were hit by a hurricane and completely wiped out? How soon could you be back up and running, and at what capacity? If you can't answer that, you better find an answer before some unpredictable event knocks out your one server running everything.
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costs review (as moore850)
Let's suppose that it costs 6 cents per hour to rent video content. Now let's suppose that everything that's not pay-per-view already on cable is available at this rate. A lot of cable services are in the ballpark of $25-$50 per month. How many hours of video would this get you? 416-833 hours of video per month. That's 13-27 hours PER DAY. Count me in! This would save us all so much on our cable bills... here's to a $10 or less monthly video service bill thanks to this rate someday.
Re: Re: stealing for profit (as moore850)
One more. The very fact that anyone is willing to pay for something proves by virtue of how a money-based economy works that the item is in fact a scarce (valuable) resource, and therefore that its theft is a crime of monetary significance. I am not condoning ridiculous fines on internet file sharing, but I think if you share something for free OR generate money on something that is supposed to be free, you should be liable for that amount of money in damages.
Re: Re: stealing for profit (as moore850)
I completely agree, this article describes something with features similar to racketeering, holding for ransom, etc. And this is legal how?
Re: stealing for profit (as moore850)
Furthermore, all this nonsense about copyright being restrictive is really about taking the rights of the creators away from them. If anything created was automatically in the public domain for anyone to use for anything they want, then all content creators would no longer have any exclusive to their own works. Know this: the only way for that to work would be in a world without money. If we had the "star trek" style no money world, where there were no longer scarce resources with respect to food, shelter, items, etc. then it would be no big deal to call everything created by anyone public domain. However, as long as someone can generate "revenue" as defined by our monetary-based economy from your products, you are legally entitled to a share of that revenue, unless you waive that right. You are able to waive that right, but it is your choice, not someone else's. If someone else wants to take something from me without my permission, that is stealing, end of story.
stealing for profit (as moore850)
Let me explain this one more time. Copyright law and Creative Commons licenses are supposed to specifically protect against this case -- where someone else is profiting directly from your work without giving you the money. This is theft, plain and simple. How in the world would it be ok for someone to charge money for something that you provide for free, and for them to not pay you when it's your product? They're stealing your rights. Just because you elect to give your product away, that doesn't automatically grant the right for any random person to distribute your product. How would it? Unless you say, "here, take this and give it to anyone you want or charge them for it", then you have not waived that right.
Innovation requires the idea (as moore850)
Innovation may not be in the idea itself, but it certainly requires the idea. Hard work alone does not "generate" innovation from nothing. I read through the 5 innovative qualities, and they are correct in the same way that one can say "all it takes to be the greatest baseball player ever is to hit the ball every time". Easier said than done... one thing that they failed to mention is that true innovation comes from knowing when to abandon/revise a crappy idea in order to get a great idea. A great innovator can do this process incredibly fast. By rapidly cranking out good ideas and hooking them together intelligently, the best innovators are like "magic profit engines" to companies that actively support and fund their efforts. That's another thing about innovation, it is very easy to stifle and very hard to support for companies that lack a crystal clear vision and appreciation for the value of innovation. Most companies do not understand its value at all, nor do they care to. It's cheaper for them up front to just slog along; even large companies often choose to buy innovations rather than generate them.
seriously? (as moore850)
Obviously they mean discussions like, "hey guys, get your pirated files at (some specific URL address)." Imagine how hard it is to police that. And no, you can't just take people's stuff that they are selling and post it for your friends to get for free. If you want to give away stuff, make your own stuff and give it away... my guess is after all your own personal hard work, you won't feel so comfortable when people are taking your stuff (unless you intended to give it away, which is your right alone as yes! the copyright holder).
hard work equals success (as moore850)
The RIAA and major labels want success for nothing, and it just doesn't work that way. This guy proves that a lot of really hard work generally equals success in any environment. He made it work through perseverance, not some kind of trick to gyp people out of money.
Zero downtime is inevitable
Consider the size of the Internet, and the amount of unused server capacity in existence today. Assuming that each server farm had a backup of the next one over, and assuming each could replicate the other site's DNS, etc. couldn't the Internet survive intact on a failure of any size at any single datacenter? I think zero downtime will be a unifying concern of enough ISP's, datacenter and farm providers for them to all team up and give each other that backup support at some point in the future.
no moving parts
IMHO, the true savings of solid-state would be in the lack of moving parts that could fail vs. some speed increase. If a robust solid-state HDD, power supply, etc. could be built so that the pc had absolutely no moving parts, that should yield a much longer shelf life, meaning a much lower total cost of ownership if you have 100,000 of them in a datacenter, right?
Patent protection
Google is not stupid, they are going to get patents on whatever they need to in order to offer 'mutual assured destruction' protection for themselves against Microsoft and the other patent heavy hitters. 'Mutual assured destruction' for patents means that in a tough negotiation with a company like Microsoft, one could expect to hear the phrase:
"We have patents on your XYZ technology, so you better agree to our terms or we'll get you."
The other company has to be able to say "well, we have patents on your YZW technology, so agree to meet us in the middle or we'll get you."
They meet in the middle, and everyone's happy. Without patent protection, the bigger of the two can clobber the other one on any sort of deals.
Copyright law
Apparently there's a giant rift that has opened up between "what everyone wants copyright to mean" and "what copyright actually means". If you wrote something yourself, it is automatically copyrighted. A copyright refers to your right to protect something you wrote as your own, meaning someone else cannot just take your work and call it theirs. Moreover, they cannot reproduce the work that you made by taking it from you without your permission. Does this entitle you to royalties? Only if you get them to agree to sign a contract for royalties. If they don't sign and you don't want to give them your work, they do not have the right to take it. Them's the breaks, folks. Of course, they can always come up with their own version of whatever it is (a copyright is not a patent). As long as they didn't take yours, your copyright is protected.
If you sign a work contract or are employed to produce creative works, you will have trouble asserting a separate copyright contract against your employer for works created while "on the clock" and with company resources. However, this doesn't mean that your copyright is not still there. I have signed these types of contracts in order to hand over copyright on certain very specific things, so that implies that without the contract, I could still lay claim to those things. (It almost certainly wouldn't be worth the legal costs unless millions of my money were at stake).
Copyright does not mean that someone can write "select *" (this is not a valid SQL query anyhow) as this would likely fall under the exemption made for titles. Just as you cannot copyright the title to a book, you probably cannot assert a copyright over a single, uncreative sentence. Yes, creativity is objective enough that in any legal case, some "crappy" poem will still hold up as "creative" while "select *" will not. The purpose of copyright is not to prevent anyone from using some phrase (that's a trademark) but foremost copyright is to protect published works that are generating lots of money from being ripped off and stolen from their creators, with no compensation to the creator for their work.
Copyright doesn't apply to creatively "transformed works", especially if attribution is already given and the transformations noted. So, if you take a massive SQL query and have to apply a creative new fix to it for something, your new version qualifies for its own copyright separate from the original copyright. That's right, now there are two copyrights: the one for the original author on the original work, and your new copyright on the "creatively transformed work". Creative transformation only applies in the case of a reasonable-sized transformation, meaning you can't just paraphrase someone, that's still plagiarism.
http://www.copyright.gov/
Re: remember these people usd ot hate rock n roll (as moore850)
I concur, this is all a thinly veiled attempt to shut down the independent for-profit musician.
It's only a matter of time (as moore850)
Any day now, a 100% independent artist will release an album of hit songs and totally circumvent this system. When this happens, the labels will completely freak out and try to steal the music or pull shenanigans, at which point the artist will sue them out of existence. Just keep digging deeper, folks.
By the way, did Elvis write any of his songs? Would he have been turned down at open mic night because of some stupid attitude about singing original songs? What do these folks think of: American Idol, the "Rock Band" game, etc.?
infinite goods are going to be shared eventually (as moore850)
It's not that infinite good should be shared necessarily, but because they are not scarce, there is no physical penalty for sharing them in the way that one loses a physical item when one shares it. Therefore, given an infinite timeline, all infinite goods will be shared between everyone because there's no penalty to society as a whole in terms of haves vs. have-nots for doing so.
Safety first? (as moore850)
How about a bill to increase the direct safety of new cars i.e. requiring disc brakes?
That is actually a crime (as moore850)
Impersonating a police officer is a serious crime under any circumstances. At the very least, it amounts to documented fraud -- the easiest kind to prosecute, once you can positively I.D. the person who posted the fraud (and that's pretty easy with digital forensics).
A detailed explanation (as moore850)
Violent video games are an issue because in the games, the violence is the solution to the game's obstacles. This is behavior you don't want kids to emulate.
Music video games are an issue because in the game, NOT creating music is the solution to the game's obstacles. This (NOT creating music) is behavior you don't want kids to emulate (i.e. you want kids TO create music or at least to value the creation of music).
you cannot copyright a title (as moore850)
To address the article heading, you cannot copyright "titles" of any kind. A phrase or word can be trademarked and used as a title that way for protection, but there does not exist any protection over "titles". Can you copyright homework assignments? Of course, anything uniquely produced by a person has an automatic copyright on it. One could argue that teachers should condone abuse of copyrights of their works, but that doesn't mean the teachers have to condone it. Until copyright is wiped out, it is the law.
End of an Empire (as moore850)
We are witnessing the end of an empire -- I don't think that NewsCorp will survive this attempt to monetize the Internet.