Google is pretty innovative about stuff like this. They use their own in-house version of Linux on commodity hardware, thousands upon thousands of PCs in each data center. But they still use air cooling and air conditioning because, at the end of the day, it's the best bang for the buck.
Not any more. In the early days, as I understand it, Google bought the cheapest desktop PCs they could find, made them netboot, and filled warehouses with them. Their software would deal with hardware failures by routing around the broken server. It worked out cheaper to leave a broken server where it was, than to locate it and repair it or dispose of it. This made sense when Google was a certain size -- big enough to need a big cloud of servers, but too small to invest in custom hardware.
Nowadays, however, they have boards made in bulk to their own design, which slot into racks of their own design, and they take cooling very seriously -- because to Google, a 1% saving in energy costs represents millions of dollars. As an example, here's a story about Google patenting a novel approach to water cooling.
I would be *very* surprised if Google hasn't got someone investigating oil-submersion cooling, even if it's not in their production toolkit yet.
But if you're going to have HDD storage anywhere, that's going to be generating heat too. Possibly most of it, if you're doing non-CPU-intensive file serving. So the bean counters would probably *like* their fancy new cooling technology to work with HDDs.
My guess about the contacts is that once things are plugged together, they're touching and oil won't break that contact.
I seriously suspect that the expectation is that a system won't ever be repaired -- if it breaks, it's binned. This is likely to be justifiable based on some sums to do with MTBF, depreciation etc. Of course that kind of thing only really works if your operation scales to hundreds or thousands of machines -- or, I suppose, if an insurance company takes on the spread of that risk.
I would imagine -- and someone else has surely done the sums -- that the oil would have enough heat capacity, and be kept at a low enough standard temperature, that it could absorb enough heat without the pump running that a controlled shutdown could be done.
But it's not beyond the wit of man to have a standby pump.
It's simple. Pick a component that emits heat. The CPU is a good example. Of course people are working on more efficient CPUs, but they will always generate heat.... and if that heat stays near the CPU, the temperature will increase until the CPU stops working -- or melts -- or a safety cutoff kicks in.
So, you have to move that heat away from the CPU, and that in itself takes energy -- powering a fan; powering an air-con unit to keep the room cool enough for the fan to be any use, etc.
What we have here is a method to move the heat away from the CPU, that uses less energy than the conventional method of blowing air around.... and if it doesn't work, it's going to have some pretty dissatisfied customers, because the results will show up directly on their energy bill.
I wonder what the cost savings would be overall. TFA says it pays for itself in 1-3 years, but that's marketing and it's vague.
If it really saves a load of energy, I can imagine datacentre ops whining about the hassle and the greasy fingers and so forth, saying it's not been worthwhile -- while the suits who commissioned it look at the bottom line of their electricity bill, and deem it well worth a few inconvenienced staff.
It seems pretty trivial to replace the fans with mock fans, that either always reports an OK fan speed, or does something with the measured oil temperature.
True enough about the horizontal mounting and the weight. I don't fancy dealing with a heavy unit dripping with baby oil -- but surely, since they have an installation, they've addressed these practicalities?
TFA says the hard drives have to be sprayed with a coating, presumably to make the housing oil-tight as well as airtight.
Blowing air around is a tremendously inefficient way of cooling, and this replaces that with pumping the oil through a heat exchanger / cooling tower.
Things with unsealed moving parts obviously are vulnerable, but not everything needs to be submerged. If you really want a DVD drive, have it outside the oil.
There may be some things that don't react well with mineral oil: avoid having these in your system!
Your link doesn't work, but I imagine it was a hobbyist. It looks as if this lot have built an industrial-strength product. It's clearly not practical in the home.
The entire computer is submerged in a bath of oil, and the oil is circulated through a cooling tower. I doubt there are any holes for IO below the oil level of the bath, so leakage isn't a concern.
I don't fancy the messy job of making hardware changes though.
This is the first time since the N900 that there will be a handheld platform you can make stuff with. For it to be Microsoft is somewhat surprising. It's not going to make Windows Phone 7 number one, but I really don't care what's number one.
You've been able to program on an Android phone for quite a while now. Android Script Engine (ASE) is an official Google project that binds Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell to the Android API, and if you're a masochist, you can edit scripts right there on the phone.
I think I'd prefer to have a real keyboard, and a big screen, though.
If that were the aim, surely it would make more sense to teach formal logic and critical thinking, instead of maths.
Formal logic *is* maths. Maybe it should be introduced to the curriculum for younger students, yes -- but what would you sacrifice to make room for it?
It did make his pronouncements worthy of comment and analysis though. Same as the Sun. Since it has so much power over what a huge slice of British people think, we shouldn't just ignore it.
"Just another" tabloid -- except that it's hugely influential as the biggest selling British newspaper, having almost 50% greater circulation than its nearest competitor, The Mail, and more than 4 times the circulation of the bestselling "proper" paper, the Telegraph.
As well as the Kermit protocol, Kermit has included support for FTP/TLS for a while now. It's the most scriptable FTP/TLS I know, so I hope its new life as an Open Source project keeps it healthy.
There's nothing in TFA about the size of the tablet.
I'm told that one of the nicest iPad games is an implementation of the Small World board game, designed to be played by two players facing each other with the iPad on a table.
That said, with the iPad existing, and a slew of Android tablets on their way, what can Gamestop bring to the table?
The only thing I can imagine is a DRM-laden platform which they sell below cost price, so they can make money on the games. Risky, in that it's bound to get hacked, and you might as well get an iPhone "free" on a cellphone contract.
They may be unable to halt things, but they're trying, and they're slowing things down and wasting everyone's time and money in the process.
The thing is, they're right about one thing: Internet music sharing *is* damaging their business model. What they're wrong about, is that anyone other than themselves should care.
Music is healthier than it's ever been [citation needed, admittedly]. But the RIAA's share of that business is shrinking. Good.
It's a great quote, but it predates New Labour. We had a 14 year period when the Guardian was read by people who think they run the country and the Telegraph was read by the people who thought they ought to run the country. I'm not sure things are *quite* back to the way they were in Yes, Prime Minister in terms of press alignments.
Well, I heard interviews with Japanese people who won't be choosing to return to live where their old home was swept away from. Whole towns have been wiped off the map, in the sense that nobody will want to rebuild there.
However, historically at least, the benefits of living by the sea have outweighed the risks. It's no coincidence that the greatest cities in the world are mostly built around ports (and almost every city has a river flowing through it). For transport, for fishing. And it's pretty, of course.
I think land by the sea will be cheap in Japan for a while, though.
I don't know which way it would push the swingometer, but I think factors other than death should be taken into account.
Serious illness Economic effects worldwide (for example, fallout from Chernobyl affected sheep farming in Wales! CO2 buildup seems to have a global effect...)
I'm not arguing one way or the other (in this post) but just counting deaths isn't enough.
And people in apartments or high-rises wouldn't have even that option.
I don't see why not. Certainly, if you're renting a flat in a high-rise, you can't unilaterally slap a solar panel on the outside of "your" building.
But, what if the owner of the building decides to put panels on the roof and walls, and uses it to supplement the tenants' electrical supply (or just their hot water!). There are all sorts of ways the finances could be arranged so that it's a win for all concerned. It would be on a scale that would justify corporate investment, so the fact that it took a long time to break even could be managed OK.
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Google is pretty innovative about stuff like this. They use their own in-house version of Linux on commodity hardware, thousands upon thousands of PCs in each data center. But they still use air cooling and air conditioning because, at the end of the day, it's the best bang for the buck.
Not any more. In the early days, as I understand it, Google bought the cheapest desktop PCs they could find, made them netboot, and filled warehouses with them. Their software would deal with hardware failures by routing around the broken server. It worked out cheaper to leave a broken server where it was, than to locate it and repair it or dispose of it. This made sense when Google was a certain size -- big enough to need a big cloud of servers, but too small to invest in custom hardware.
Nowadays, however, they have boards made in bulk to their own design, which slot into racks of their own design, and they take cooling very seriously -- because to Google, a 1% saving in energy costs represents millions of dollars. As an example, here's a story about Google patenting a novel approach to water cooling.
I would be *very* surprised if Google hasn't got someone investigating oil-submersion cooling, even if it's not in their production toolkit yet.
... or use SSD.
But if you're going to have HDD storage anywhere, that's going to be generating heat too. Possibly most of it, if you're doing non-CPU-intensive file serving. So the bean counters would probably *like* their fancy new cooling technology to work with HDDs.
My guess about the contacts is that once things are plugged together, they're touching and oil won't break that contact.
I seriously suspect that the expectation is that a system won't ever be repaired -- if it breaks, it's binned. This is likely to be justifiable based on some sums to do with MTBF, depreciation etc. Of course that kind of thing only really works if your operation scales to hundreds or thousands of machines -- or, I suppose, if an insurance company takes on the spread of that risk.
I would imagine -- and someone else has surely done the sums -- that the oil would have enough heat capacity, and be kept at a low enough standard temperature, that it could absorb enough heat without the pump running that a controlled shutdown could be done.
But it's not beyond the wit of man to have a standby pump.
(I feel a bit patronising spelling this out)
It's simple. Pick a component that emits heat. The CPU is a good example. Of course people are working on more efficient CPUs, but they will always generate heat. ... and if that heat stays near the CPU, the temperature will increase until the CPU stops working -- or melts -- or a safety cutoff kicks in.
So, you have to move that heat away from the CPU, and that in itself takes energy -- powering a fan; powering an air-con unit to keep the room cool enough for the fan to be any use, etc.
What we have here is a method to move the heat away from the CPU, that uses less energy than the conventional method of blowing air around. ... and if it doesn't work, it's going to have some pretty dissatisfied customers, because the results will show up directly on their energy bill.
I wonder what the cost savings would be overall. TFA says it pays for itself in 1-3 years, but that's marketing and it's vague.
If it really saves a load of energy, I can imagine datacentre ops whining about the hassle and the greasy fingers and so forth, saying it's not been worthwhile -- while the suits who commissioned it look at the bottom line of their electricity bill, and deem it well worth a few inconvenienced staff.
Yes, fans are removed. RTFA.
It seems pretty trivial to replace the fans with mock fans, that either always reports an OK fan speed, or does something with the measured oil temperature.
True enough about the horizontal mounting and the weight. I don't fancy dealing with a heavy unit dripping with baby oil -- but surely, since they have an installation, they've addressed these practicalities?
TFA says the hard drives have to be sprayed with a coating, presumably to make the housing oil-tight as well as airtight.
Blowing air around is a tremendously inefficient way of cooling, and this replaces that with pumping the oil through a heat exchanger / cooling tower.
Things with unsealed moving parts obviously are vulnerable, but not everything needs to be submerged. If you really want a DVD drive, have it outside the oil.
There may be some things that don't react well with mineral oil: avoid having these in your system!
Your link doesn't work, but I imagine it was a hobbyist. It looks as if this lot have built an industrial-strength product. It's clearly not practical in the home.
The entire computer is submerged in a bath of oil, and the oil is circulated through a cooling tower. I doubt there are any holes for IO below the oil level of the bath, so leakage isn't a concern.
I don't fancy the messy job of making hardware changes though.
I'm not on AT&T, so I'm going to treat this as a non-issue for everyone ;)
Oh, and if I lived in the US, I wouldn't buy my Android phone from AT&T, or any other carrier who disables the "unknown sources" option.
This is the first time since the N900 that there will be a handheld platform you can make stuff with. For it to be Microsoft is somewhat surprising. It's not going to make Windows Phone 7 number one, but I really don't care what's number one.
You've been able to program on an Android phone for quite a while now. Android Script Engine (ASE) is an official Google project that binds Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell to the Android API, and if you're a masochist, you can edit scripts right there on the phone.
I think I'd prefer to have a real keyboard, and a big screen, though.
If that were the aim, surely it would make more sense to teach formal logic and critical thinking, instead of maths.
Formal logic *is* maths. Maybe it should be introduced to the curriculum for younger students, yes -- but what would you sacrifice to make room for it?
It did make his pronouncements worthy of comment and analysis though. Same as the Sun. Since it has so much power over what a huge slice of British people think, we shouldn't just ignore it.
"Just another" tabloid -- except that it's hugely influential as the biggest selling British newspaper, having almost 50% greater circulation than its nearest competitor, The Mail, and more than 4 times the circulation of the bestselling "proper" paper, the Telegraph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation
So, as crappy as it is, it's an opinion-former in the UK, which is why the parties Murdoch likes tend to do well in elections...
As well as the Kermit protocol, Kermit has included support for FTP/TLS for a while now. It's the most scriptable FTP/TLS I know, so I hope its new life as an Open Source project keeps it healthy.
The summary sort of misses the point about "current builds identifying themselves as CrOS".
The pertinent bit of the article is:
The browser now reports itself as "CrOS Touch" for sites that have specific touchscreen elements.
... meaning that a web site can know that it's dealing with a browser with a touch interface, and present a UI to suit.
There's nothing in TFA about the size of the tablet.
I'm told that one of the nicest iPad games is an implementation of the Small World board game, designed to be played by two players facing each other with the iPad on a table.
That said, with the iPad existing, and a slew of Android tablets on their way, what can Gamestop bring to the table?
The only thing I can imagine is a DRM-laden platform which they sell below cost price, so they can make money on the games. Risky, in that it's bound to get hacked, and you might as well get an iPhone "free" on a cellphone contract.
They may be unable to halt things, but they're trying, and they're slowing things down and wasting everyone's time and money in the process.
The thing is, they're right about one thing: Internet music sharing *is* damaging their business model. What they're wrong about, is that anyone other than themselves should care.
Music is healthier than it's ever been [citation needed, admittedly]. But the RIAA's share of that business is shrinking. Good.
Famously, the British government sacked an advisor on drugs, because he publicly stated that taking Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding. And he wasn't saying Ecstasy was safe, necessarily.
It's a great quote, but it predates New Labour. We had a 14 year period when the Guardian was read by people who think they run the country and the Telegraph was read by the people who thought they ought to run the country. I'm not sure things are *quite* back to the way they were in Yes, Prime Minister in terms of press alignments.
Well, I heard interviews with Japanese people who won't be choosing to return to live where their old home was swept away from. Whole towns have been wiped off the map, in the sense that nobody will want to rebuild there.
However, historically at least, the benefits of living by the sea have outweighed the risks. It's no coincidence that the greatest cities in the world are mostly built around ports (and almost every city has a river flowing through it). For transport, for fishing. And it's pretty, of course.
I think land by the sea will be cheap in Japan for a while, though.
I don't know which way it would push the swingometer, but I think factors other than death should be taken into account.
Serious illness
Economic effects worldwide (for example, fallout from Chernobyl affected sheep farming in Wales! CO2 buildup seems to have a global effect...)
I'm not arguing one way or the other (in this post) but just counting deaths isn't enough.
FYI: NIMBY = "not in my back yard".
That is, people who don't object to the benefits of some big ugly installation, but not if it's sited somewhere they have to look at it daily.
So, for example, country-dwellers who are opposed to wind farms in their area.
(although, there are lots of wind farms where I grew up in Wales, and I happen to find them rather beautiful)
And people in apartments or high-rises wouldn't have even that option.
I don't see why not. Certainly, if you're renting a flat in a high-rise, you can't unilaterally slap a solar panel on the outside of "your" building.
But, what if the owner of the building decides to put panels on the roof and walls, and uses it to supplement the tenants' electrical supply (or just their hot water!). There are all sorts of ways the finances could be arranged so that it's a win for all concerned. It would be on a scale that would justify corporate investment, so the fact that it took a long time to break even could be managed OK.