jankeymeulen

You can have an amount of tapes as large as you wish to a single drive, meaning the cost of the tape drive becomes irrelevant after a certain amount of tapes.

Without knowing any details (and too lazy too look it up) it might be just the case that this was built on some old framework/technology that now has been deprecated and the effort to bring it up to date was not worth it.

Those long-term solved projects can be sold to other companies as part of GSuite.

Supposedly you went to business school then? :-)

HVDC has losses at about 3% per 1000km, from Saudi Arabia to the center of Europe is less than 5000 km as the crow flies. Doesn't seem too bad to me.

At 3% loss per 1000 km (625 miles) HVDC is already good enough I'd say.

> Google has announced plans to do the same.

Citation needed? IMHO putting a datacentre under water is a horrible idea, why not pump the water 10 meters higher and cool a DC near the shoreline?

No, doesn't seem different to me. Of course, when logged in with the corp Google account / on the corp network you can see some debugging info and there will be likely some experiments running, but pretty much the same.

Pedantically this could be a "0.085k" image then.

One of the bigger issues I have with this that Google is only doing this kind of work for the US military, which for me as a non-US Googler makes me a bit uncomfortable. Because some relatives have been fighting the US military not even that long ago.

You've got any proof, indication or even slight hint for this? Aggregate data is indeed used for all kinds of analytics, but individual IP addresses aren't tracked nor kept for more than 48 hours - to combat abuse.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google corporate shill)

We (finally) changed that: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat-overview...

But what good is tracking e.g. a tomato with a tamper proof database when the label on the tomato is easily tampered with?

> I'm not sure if you're a Google PR drone or just naive, but people have been talking about this for years...

Do you really believe Google has PR people that are paid to reply on posts on HN? It could be, but I find this quite incredible.

(Saying this as an Eng Googler, I have absolutely no insight on how the whole "business" side of the organisation works.)

Charles Verhoeven, afaik the lead attorney for Waymo is definitely not on Alphabet payroll.

2016 had $90B revenues and 1.5B 30d active users (for YouTube) so $60 per year would be a good guess.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I just got these numbers from public statements. No way I'm well paid enough to be able to see more detailed numbers. :-D )

Doesn't make a sense to include Grimbergen and Affligem there, these are both owned by the same multinational (Heineken) and neither is still being brewed on site in the abbey.

Can't say for sure but I'd doubt it.

(Disclaimer: I work there but have absolutely no knowledge about how Drive stores data)