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Facebook Letting Everyone See How Much Data-Center Power It Consumes
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has added real-time dashboards for measuring the efficiency of its data centers' internal power and water use. Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here), measuring both the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness of those facilities, in addition to the ambient temperature and humidity. So far, visitors to the Prineville and Forest City dashboards only see a limited snapshot of the Facebook data: the display only covers 24 hours, and is delayed by 2.5 hours on both sites. Facebook also hasn't disclosed how many servers the data represents, which could conceivably be used by competitors to get a sense of the social network's total computing power. The company said that once its data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, Facebook will begin adding data from that location, as well. Although Facebook said it provided the information out of a sense of openness, the data—showing PUEs of about 1.09 for both facilities as of press time—is a bit of a boast, as well; as recently as 2011, Uptime Institute said that the average data center's PUE was approximately 1.8. So far, Facebook hasn't said whether it will provide access to the dashboards via an API, so third parties can get a better sense of how Facebook is managing power and water use over time, and through various seasons of the year."
Makes perfect sense they don't wanna disclose the number of servers. They like their privacy
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- what data nuggets have been collected about me over the past 24 hours, week, month
- what third party entities my data has been shared with
I am sure that this community can suggest other items that would be useful on a Facebook Privacy Dashboard.
In the background, I cannot shake the thought that Facebook is putting up this energy consumption dashboard for the purpose to divert attention away from Facebook's ongoing privacy issues.
Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
The dashboard is not actually in real-time, but carries a 2.5 hour delay.
...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Delete your account, stop worrying, and get some sleep.
Its off topic (but a more interesting topic) Although having read about it you have to *delete* the account which allegedly will remove it, but deactivate your account and messages you sent, may still be visible to others. they also save your timeline information (ex: friends, photos, interests, etc.)
But even then you have companies like http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence like this one who mine data...and create links. Not sure how you delete their data, or even find out who has it.
Deleting you account is the tip of the iceberg...an illusion of privacy at best.
I take an extremely accepting view of what might qualify as "news for nerds," but this absolutely fails the "stuff that matters" test. Honestly, who the hell cares about this? It's a cheap stunt, and nothing more.
Write failed: Broken pipe
This doesn't show power consumption. It only shows ratios that are considered a sort of measure of efficiency.
It's like showing "miles per gallon" instead of "gallons used". In the case of facebook, they may be driving at 40 MPG, but they drive a million miles a day and that's a lot of fuel!
I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.
On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.
Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.
Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?