Slashdot Mirror
New York Times Takes Aim At Data Center
Nerval's Lobster writes "The New York Times' latest expose takes on data centers, but the Gray Lady's investigation has prompted its own criticism. While the paper correctly noted that there's a backend cost attached to the storage of photos, cat videos, and old shopping lists, many critics are taking issue with how the Times addresses the issue of those data centers' power consumption. While the Times' contention that the majority of data-center operators prefer secrecy is probably accurate, this industry is public enough that the paper's approach to the article exposes a few puzzling choices. Here are five trouble areas."
Hmmm...where have I seen this before?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Please put your accent back on, Mr. Exposé...
Here is a link to the New York Times article in question.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And at the NYT the presses sit idle most of the day.
I would feign outrage and harshly criticize the submitter and /. editors, but it would be futile because this isn't the first same-24hr-period dupe I've seen here.
What I would like to see is some editors that actually read the site they edit for. You know, one of those "eat your own dog food" approaches. That way, maybe they might actually notice that it's the same damn thing we already read 24 hours ago.
Actually, knowing this site, even that's a bit much to ask for.
This is actually absurd out of context.
Someone builds a web-based tool that millions use, and consumes X amount of energy.
Meanwhile, thanks to this tool, those millions no longer drive around window shopping, or purchasing the wrong product/service, or the not purchasing the product/service they need, etc etc, saving 50X the amount of energy.
Some people will not be happy until everyone (except them) goes back to living in the stone age, logic be damned.
You can't take anything a news source like NYT, CNN, or any of groups take seriously.
Reporting about everything is bad these days, but it is especially true in tech. Reporters are some of the most arrogant people on the planet and they are *sure* that they know more than the techs do. They're to arrogant to let someone with real knowledge look over their work and say whether it makes any sense.
The fact that they would get a good percentage of it wrong comes to no surprise. CNN, for instance, has mentioned Linux on air maybe two times in the last decade. Meanwhile, they can't go two minutes without mentioning Apple.
Then there was the Fox news story last week that has the phrase "so-called patch" in it. Yeah... patches are so new and mysterious.
New York Times is a newspaper. Data centers host websites. The rumour mill on various social websites and in-depth analysis on various Wiki projects doesn't really leave newspapers with much living space. It's only natural that they'd try to tar a competitor that's pretty much obsoleted them.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Nerds in Denial re: they are destroying the planet
I thought the original NYT article was pretty useless when I got to:
A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data.
And now we get a new slashdot article to recap 5 ways about how lame the NYT article is, for those who didn't read any of the comments on the original slashdot post.
"While the Times' contention that the majority of data-center operators prefer secrecy is probably accurate"
with respect to energy and the environment this is a load of crap. i've toured 3 dozen datacenters in my day and power capacity planning, sourcing, and procurement is open book to even medium sized customers. i've reviewed service level agreement contracts, diagrams and schematics, diesel generator statistics, emergency fuel delivery plans, trending data, etc for large core datacenters (there are not that many). As a result of passively absorbing this data, I have made contributions to academic textbooks on physical and facility security. All as an architect/engineer employee of a large customer with no special pull.
LOL@NYT.FAIL. nice try lamers. GFY.
Data Center Warming: A global crisis...
It's kind of hard to hide massive power consumption and air conditioning boxes the size of garbage trucks on the roof or sides of the building. It's stupid to think you can hide a data center anymore than you can hide a power substation. They might not be on the map, but it's all right there in public records, and building plans are required to be filed with the local city its built in. Those are also public records.
Also, greenies have been complaining about anyone doing more than banging rocks together. Remember, 50 years ago, these same people were moving into communes and trying to live off-grid. Of course, as quick as they moved into the communes, they moved back out. Whenever I read someone complaining about electricity use, nuclear power, plastics, e-waste, etc., unless it's in the context of scientific research or a business analysis, I shit can it -- to me, they're no better than anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, alternative medicine freaks, and those people that crash boats into the sides of other boats while chanting "save the whales". I care about the environment, I recycle, but I'm not going to advocate we abandon modern conveniences and run off to the communes to satisfy some sense of ideological purity regarding the environment. Data centers cost a lot of money -- the electricity and air conditioning often cost more than the computers. I trust that if there are ways to reduce those costs (instead of just offsetting them), businesses that own them are going to migrate to those technologies. It's just good business. It doesn't need a New York Times op-ed piece to shame them into doing it...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Well, obviously, the NYT started with the conclusion, and worked backwards from there. The conclusion: we are bad people, we waste electricity and hurt baby duckies and puppies. The topic really doesn't matter, this conclusion works for every story. They're so insular and out-of-touch at the NYT, no diversity of thought, everyone thinks the same. Thus, it's a surprise when reactions like this happen.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I recall the fire at the Fisher Plaza Colo in Seattle July 2009. They got power up using rented generators they placed on the street.
They were getting fined for have those generators there, but what you gonna do, those customers in your colo need power. But costs like the fine are rolled into the cost of doing business. More like a fee rather than a fine.
The article fails to compare the use of data center to the alternatives. People would generally have to get a small home server to get equivalent functionality to what they now get through data centers, and that would be much worse in terms of energy. Furthermore, since energy costs are significant for data centers, the contention that they just let it go to waste is silly; data centers optimize energy usage in a way that makes economic sense. Lots of public policy debates unfortunately focus on supposed negatives of something, instead of focusing on tradeoffs between viable alternatives. The NYT is frequently guilty of this kind of economic and scientific illiteracy.
Its the responsibility of the local community to design regulations that will appeal to amoral actors such as Microsoft. It doesn't matter if the proper action is intrinsically good-- if it doesn't make economic sense to choose that action, it won't be chosen.
Where's Krugman's Blog Post about this thing?
I would have at least expected a damning post about the evils of large corporations wasting money on the backs of the underpaid working man even if it was the New York Times!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It's the servers and appliances that use too much power and generate too much heat per square foot. Data centers merely attempt to accommodate that.
I would support the NYT's flicking off all their own servers though, to save the planet.
I read the article criticizing the NYT article and noticed that none of the counter-arguments addressed the NYT's main point: that most of the power goes to idle systems.
... how mad the NY Times will be when they discover that they're printing "the news" on dead trees, and shipping it out in a fleet of fossil-fuel-burning trucks.
How about the NYT comparing efficiency gains of data centers vs. New York state govt spending over the last 10 years?
Where would my bird shit?
No brain, no pain.
The basic reason for data centers is to host many companies sites and servers in a single location so that the individual smaller companies don't have to run their own servers and networking equipment. There is a lot of energy used up in maintaining and operating your own servers as opposed to the marginal increase you get by hosting your servers or sites at a large data center. There are considerable energy, money, and manpower savings gained by using Data Centers.
http://interserver.net/
The internet is a part of life now, and large data centers are part of the modern world. They use energy. That is not a problem. Like everything else, it would be good to develop more energy-efficient servers, but it's not the end of the world, or a 'dirty little secret'.
This seems to be just another case of someone who doesn't want real work being done in the U.S. First they chase out all the factories, because they're too 'icky' and low-class, now guys like this want to eliminate all the data centers, and live in a world where all industrial facilities are off-shore in the third-world, and someone else's problem.
If you think this article isn't terrible, front page lul is the following: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2012/09/23/us/jp-data-5.html Apparently Corning now makes diskless, powerless servers built on nothing but fiber. This article is a damn joke. The internet industry is one of the best on power consumptions. Why? Mainly because all companies are aware of the trouble that other industries have already endured and they are intelligent enough to plan around those issues.