I will believe the Saudis don't see any upcoming problems with Ghawar when they cancel one of their projects due to low oil prices. If they continue to be full steam ahead with increasing their capacity then I think they are aware that Ghawar may not be as robust in 5 years time as they would like us to believe.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 6:10 pm Post subject: Peak Internet
I think true PO will be the immediate incapacitation of the internet as a reliable means to have fancy web sites.
Maybe email will still exist... but not much else. It will be back to the early 1990s with newsgroups, emails that take hours to go around (hoping from server to server based on eletricity availability) and telnet to local servers (when the electric grid is up...).
Exhibit A: hushmail.com which I was a fan of until today, crapped out as the whole downtown Vancouver was put down by a fire. Made me feel like it's 2015 already
If a well known encrypted email provider just disappeared for a whole day due to almost-third world type planning in a so-called modern city, that doesn't bode well for google and al... or this site for that matter.
"Martin Robson of Robson Communications Inc. told The Vancouver Sun in an e-mail that several hundred Internet servers at Harbour Centre have been affected by the power outage, meaning many corporate websites -- including the one for BC Ferries -- are down.
"We have over 200 servers located at Harbour Centre and they're offline as a result of the power outage," Robson wrote in his e-mail. "A huge number of companies [are] offline."
Many of those organizations affected aren't even in Vancouver.
Worldwide Christian Schools, an organization based in Michigan, said its website has been affected by the power outage because its websites are hosted by a Vancouver-based Internet company.
"All three of our websites have been down for hours," Emily Klooster, a spokeswoman with the organization, wrote in an e-mail. "The effects of this power outage have gone far beyond Vancouver!"
Nancy Berton, owner of Gardecor Inc., a Colorado-based outdoor products company, said its websites were also down due to the Vancouver outage.
"This is a major economic loss for the day in sales as we are in our peak season," Berton wrote in an e-mail."
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:22 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Internet
Some Data center locations / designs really surprise me.
Telus, a large telco in Canada has a data center in Victoria, not only is that nicely exposed to the Pacific (hello Tsunami), but also neatly along a fault line.
I am surprised though that someone has put a Datacenter into Harbour Center, that was the last place I would have expected it, but then there was (or is) a Datacenter in the downtown Holiday Inn on King Street in Toronto too.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:34 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Internet
What amazes me is the internet is SUPPOSED to prevent exactly this kind of thing to happen i.e REDUNDANT servers. Not ALL OF THEM IN THE SAME LOCATION!!!!
Once again morons have no clue how to deal with basic design issues. Reminds me of that lab in university I saw once that had top of the lines PC's at the time... all used as dumb terminals for an old server. Basically .01% of the CPU capacity was being exploited.
The terrorists will have a field day if they learn all they need is a few sticks of dynamite in a few energy hubs to bring CIVILIZATION to its knees.
Same apply to the cell grid, always proudly the first thing to fail if there is even a semblance of mass disaster (wildfires in Cali being the latest example). And cells aren't even the bricks they used to be you could at least swing as a weapon on the head of a looter.
We use our last resources to make useless trinkets not even worth their weight in metal if electricity is not spoon fed to them in a perfect sinusoidal wave... Pathetic human brain!!!
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:59 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Internet
neocone wrote:
What amazes me is the internet is SUPPOSED to prevent exactly this kind of thing to happen i.e REDUNDANT servers. Not ALL OF THEM IN THE SAME LOCATION!!!!
Actually the internet didn't go out today when the power failed in Vancouver, so as far as that is concerned it worked. It's just that certain companies have no fail over scenario. And if you think that's bad for something like a website, I have seen way more critical system that could not recover from something like this due to a penny pincher not wanting to spend the necessary money.
Quote:
We use our last resources to make useless trinkets not even worth their weight in metal if electricity is not spoon fed to them in a perfect sinusoidal wave... Pathetic human brain!!!
It's less the human brain and more the Greed reflex. Once up on a time we had engineers that designed something that worked, the people who paid for it were usually the Governments or the handful of large Corporations that basically lived off of the scrabs that the Government left behind.
Then someone went on that hellbender that "Private is better" and suddenly the only thing that mattered was profit. Which isn't bad per-se, but it quickly turned into: What's the biggest profit now? With nobody looking at the long term implications.
This is sympthomatic and quite evident in pretty much ALL the problems we are currently facing, be it peak oil or what is going on in the financial markets right now or even Climate Change (be it man made or not, the fact that we do nothing to prepare society for the changes ahead is telling).
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:41 am Post subject: Re: Peak Internet
Profit is good and Darwinian selection will prevail... for example after today I won't rely on hushmail ever.
If I have to create my own distributed mailing system... well, I guess some things you gotta do yourself, then charge by the gazoo for it cause you can.
Peak Oil doesn't mean the rules of LIFE won't continue to apply. Wanna a slice of bread? It's gonna be $10 dude!
There will be haves and have nots... and the haves will also have all the guns and live pretty good.
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