If the goal is energy conservation, the server count might be not be reduceable -- # required for memory, network ports, disk seekers, or other things.
However, it is _certainly_ possible to reduce power and cooling requirements somewhat with less inefficient code. So you can install slower/lowerV/lowerW CPUs, or fewer cores (unless you are already at min). Or at least the CPUs spend more time in powersavings states.
The power reduction may not be all that great, ~20W per server, but over 25,000 , that is still 5 MW -- 4.4 M$/yr
Beware of false economies -- LoC does not matter if those lines are rarely executed. What runs often matters. What doesn't might not be worth the power investment of compilation.
Yes, C-- (or even FORTRAN) is less CPU in-efficient than PHP (or most any interpreted langauge). Why do you think CPU is limiting performance and causing the high server count?
GOOG has so many servers to be _fast_ (keep their DB in RAM). Facebook may be doing the same, or for disk.
Can we _please_ moderate stories? This one is -1 {TROLL}.
Those emails were made under certain expectations of privacy and confidentiality -- that they would be read by the recepients and authorized corporate officers/audit. To dump them to the public is a gross violation of those employees rights and shareholder rights -- the minority shareholders _do_ have rights.
Look at what happens in criminal searches and civil discovery -- anything that does not make it into evidence (much is disputed and requires judge's rulings) remains confidential. Investigators are granted extraordinary [search] powers, but also have consequent responsibilities.
This is data rape, and can have nothing but a chilling effect on legal communications (the badguys don't care). Prior restraint writ large.
As others have said, low volume of thin-client sales keep the price high -- high fixed costs per unit outweigh the savings in electronics & licences in a full PC. Note the unsharp competition.
What you are missing is that first-cost (equipment purchase) is a very small part of TCO. The biggest cost is for user time doing maintenence/downtime. This has always been MS-Windows achilles heel, requiring ~10% user time for stability/security. At $10+/hr, it doesn't take too many hours to pay any differential in HW cost. This (and paranoiac security) have been the drivers for TC.
Personally, I'm intrigued by the underlying concept of stateless computing. Of course an oxymoron, the idea of minimizing or focussing state is attractive. The anti-indirection. Starting with/etc and progressing (or regressing to.REG), others have also found the idea compelling. Very low state made IBM mainframes relatively unattractive compared to PCs, excessive state makes MS-Windows (and some perversions of Linux) hard to maintain. An optimum is still to be found -- on a clear disk [no goals] you can seek forever.
Marketing does not care who buys -- one buyer is as good as any other. Chasing after niches is how products and campaigns fail. Tracking refusniks is a dangerous distraction unless they are numerous.
Hassling people does backfire on some -- "all publicity is good publicity" is a bulk assessment, it obviously does not hold for every individual.
Paranoia is egotism -- why are you worth tracking? Who (names) are your enemies, and why would they spend that much effort/money on you?
Yes, GOOG could look at various block lists to find out Dynamic IPs (not all or always residential). A bigger question is whether it would be worth their effort -- how many people will not have an old ID cookie? It is uneconomic to track 1%. Why track someone who does not want to be?
GOOG is not law enforcement nor corporate security. A bigger question is how far these entities can pressure GOOG into keeping logs "their way", rather than aggregated in ways that help sell ads.
Tracking HTTP by IP is extremely unreliable for Google and everyone else -- many corporations and other firewalled institutions run big proxy servers and funnel all their requests from that machine.
OK, OK, FIS pravda. The UEA CRU emails were hosted on a server in Tomsk known to be used by the Russian intelligence services. Could the crack have been from them too? In what level of chess does this benefit the Rodina? They're still going to export the same at the same prices. Energy is less priced in the old or new worlds and more in the third, where more marginal volume sits. Or have they been listening to known capitalist running dogs like GoldmanSachs (vampire squid) and JPMorgan?
Maybe some siloviki is just mad some Carbon credits might expire worthless? Hammer everyone.
Whether you like megacorps or not (I guess WalMart is considered the heavy here), why complain of competition? "Inventing in mkt.size" does not work -- the marginal customers you attract are the most fickle.
I have long though Amazon was milking their market and have a dated UI. Not that WalMart doesn't shoot themselves in the foot. Reliably.
OK, lets do the calcs a different way -- it takes 2500 J/g to heat water from 37'C and vaporize it at atm pressure (100'C). So the 703 J will flash 0.275 g of water (about 5 drops) which will occupy about 440 mL as steam. Hardly explosive on a macroscale. Still, very nasty on the retinas.
OK, so 702 joules sounds impressive. It is, but only for mechanical energy. Those same 702 joules only heat 10 mL of water 17'C (30'F). Not even enough for a burn! But maybe enough to blind.
Two problems: for many of the larger sites, one million USD is just not that much money. Bought loyalty is very fickle.
Second, while it escaped punishment, Microsoft is still a adjudged (conviced) monopolist. It has to be careful how it does all business dealings, especially any that might be seen as extending its monopoly. This move would be very clearly anti-competitive, and even though it is not dominant in the search market, it is in the nearby browser market. One of these days, MS will slip and they'll go the way of Standard Oil.
Of course some will: Everything that is not physically impossible, _must_ happen given enough opportunity. And with the internet and starved, rabid media (incl/.), we will hear about it.
My point is this is unlikely to be come a dominant marketing mode.
Yes, I understand your point about publicity being generally good, particularly in an under-informed world. However, creating user annoyance without countervailing user benefit (low price) is not likely to endure past "flash in the pan".
Yes, this can be done. Technically quite easily (perhaps circumventable by a few). The real question is whether a seller/advertiser would _want_ to. The purpose behind advertising to to attract customers and stimulate sales. This requires creating a positive buzz (feelgood) about the product or service. Locking a machine is unlikely to do this.
OTOH, this technology could easily be used in cases where goodwill is less desired (less user choice) like corporate computed-based training requirements.
No! I see very little difference between govts (just another group with monopoly of initiating violence) and individuals. I would not hold people responsible for the actions of their govt unless they supported or agreed with them. Likewise the actions of private individuals.
I suspect there is a great deal of private German support (or even clandestinely within their govt) for the suit. Such as do are responsible.
Correct! I cling to the outdated notion of govt "for the people and by the people". In particular, that no govt has more rights nor powers than the people have delegated it. And certainly no greater legitimacy.
If you consider a government somehow "greater" [justified, moral] than individuals, you have therby circumstribed and limited freedom to some "allowed" territory.
This is fascinating -- when the United States [frequently] seeks to have its laws apply beyond its borders [extraterritoriality], everyone particularly the EU objects reflexively: "How dare they? We're a separate society."
Now some in the EU think its laws should apply to the US. And not just about this, also other issues. Why should anyone in the US, and particularly elements of the [deservedly] much-abused US government give a rats @$$ for such blatant hypocrisy? Surely no-one denies the US is a distinct society!
16,000 lb/ft is the _differential_ considering cold air is denser and warm air wants to rise. It matters a small amount which 20'F -- I used 20'F to 40'F. There are other minor factor like baromatric pressure (affecting density) but I assumed zero pressure differential. Any there is would have to be added to the anchoring load.
This is a good example of the "elephant ants": many common problems change with scale because weight [mass or force] grows as the cube of length., while strength is at best the square and often only 3/2 [beams].
Alongside other problems (air exchange, summer disassembly, wind loads) Bucky's problem is real -- think hot air balloons.
Back of the envelope, if there's a 20'F difference on a 1 mi dia hemisphere, there's 16,000 lb lift per peripheral foot. That's not easy to anchor (10 x 10 ft foundation cross section.) And you definitely will need lots of steel or kevlar if you want the bottom wall be be under 1/4 inch.
Precisely! This is _corruption_ : prosecutors abusing their powers to make their lives easier and get look better (higher conviction rates). If this is really "to reduce costs", then the voters are corrupt. Plea bargains should be outlawed.
Sometimes interesting varients play, like overcharging the cops with attempted murder in the Rodney King beating so they get off scott-free (intent unproveable).
Advanced corruption does not use bags of cash or anything tangible.
Slashdot Mirror
If the goal is energy conservation, the server count might be not be reduceable -- # required for memory, network ports, disk seekers, or other things.
However, it is _certainly_ possible to reduce power and cooling requirements somewhat with less inefficient code. So you can install slower/lowerV/lowerW CPUs, or fewer cores (unless you are already at min). Or at least the CPUs spend more time in powersavings states.
The power reduction may not be all that great, ~20W per server, but over 25,000 , that is still 5 MW -- 4.4 M$/yr
Beware of false economies -- LoC does not matter if those lines are rarely executed. What runs often matters. What doesn't might not be worth the power investment of compilation.
Yes, C-- (or even FORTRAN) is less CPU in-efficient than PHP (or most any interpreted langauge). Why do you think CPU is limiting performance and causing the high server count?
GOOG has so many servers to be _fast_ (keep their DB in RAM). Facebook may be doing the same, or for disk.
Can we _please_ moderate stories? This one is -1 {TROLL}.
Those emails were made under certain expectations of privacy and confidentiality -- that they would be read by the recepients and authorized corporate officers/audit. To dump them to the public is a gross violation of those employees rights and shareholder rights -- the minority shareholders _do_ have rights.
Look at what happens in criminal searches and civil discovery -- anything that does not make it into evidence (much is disputed and requires judge's rulings) remains confidential. Investigators are granted extraordinary [search] powers, but also have consequent responsibilities.
This is data rape, and can have nothing but a chilling effect on legal communications (the badguys don't care). Prior restraint writ large.
As others have said, low volume of thin-client sales keep the price high -- high fixed costs per unit outweigh the savings in electronics & licences in a full PC. Note the unsharp competition.
What you are missing is that first-cost (equipment purchase) is a very small part of TCO. The biggest cost is for user time doing maintenence/downtime. This has always been MS-Windows achilles heel, requiring ~10% user time for stability/security.
At $10+/hr, it doesn't take too many hours to pay any differential in HW cost. This (and paranoiac security) have been the drivers for TC.
Personally, I'm intrigued by the underlying concept of stateless computing. Of course an oxymoron, the idea of minimizing or focussing state is attractive. The anti-indirection. Starting with /etc and progressing (or regressing to .REG), others have also found the idea compelling. Very low state made IBM mainframes relatively unattractive compared to PCs, excessive state makes MS-Windows (and some perversions of Linux) hard to maintain. An optimum is still to be found -- on a clear disk [no goals] you can seek forever.
Hassling people does backfire on some -- "all publicity is good publicity" is a bulk assessment, it obviously does not hold for every individual.
Paranoia is egotism -- why are you worth tracking? Who (names) are your enemies, and why would they spend that much effort/money on you?
Nope -- IPv6 has 128!bit addresses. Some of these are very likely to be your MAC or otherwise persistant. Very traceable, especially in logs.
GOOG is not law enforcement nor corporate security. A bigger question is how far these entities can pressure GOOG into keeping logs "their way", rather than aggregated in ways that help sell ads.
Tracking HTTP by IP is extremely unreliable for Google and everyone else -- many corporations and other firewalled institutions run big proxy servers and funnel all their requests from that machine.
Maybe some siloviki is just mad some Carbon credits might expire worthless? Hammer everyone.
... and just maybe: on-topic is off topic ?!?
Whether you like megacorps or not (I guess WalMart is considered the heavy here), why complain of competition? "Inventing in mkt.size" does not work -- the marginal customers you attract are the most fickle.
I have long though Amazon was milking their market and have a dated UI. Not that WalMart doesn't shoot themselves in the foot. Reliably.
OK, lets do the calcs a different way -- it takes 2500 J/g to heat water from 37'C and vaporize it at atm pressure (100'C). So the 703 J will flash 0.275 g of water (about 5 drops) which will occupy about 440 mL as steam. Hardly explosive on a macroscale. Still, very nasty on the retinas.
OK, so 702 joules sounds impressive. It is, but only for mechanical energy. Those same 702 joules only heat 10 mL of water 17'C (30'F). Not even enough for a burn! But maybe enough to blind.
Two problems: for many of the larger sites, one million USD is just not that much money. Bought loyalty is very fickle.
Second, while it escaped punishment, Microsoft is still a adjudged (conviced) monopolist. It has to be careful how it does all business dealings, especially any that might be seen as extending its monopoly. This move would be very clearly anti-competitive, and even though it is not dominant in the search market, it is in the nearby browser market. One of these days, MS will slip and they'll go the way of Standard Oil.
My point is this is unlikely to be come a dominant marketing mode.
Yes, I understand your point about publicity being generally good, particularly in an under-informed world. However, creating user annoyance without countervailing user benefit (low price) is not likely to endure past "flash in the pan".
Yes, this can be done. Technically quite easily (perhaps circumventable by a few). The real question is whether a seller/advertiser would _want_ to. The purpose behind advertising to to attract customers and stimulate sales. This requires creating a positive buzz (feelgood) about the product or service. Locking a machine is unlikely to do this.
OTOH, this technology could easily be used in cases where goodwill is less desired (less user choice) like corporate computed-based training requirements.
I suspect there is a great deal of private German support (or even clandestinely within their govt) for the suit. Such as do are responsible.
If you consider a government somehow "greater" [justified, moral] than individuals, you have therby circumstribed and limited freedom to some "allowed" territory.
What difference? The govt ususually are wor _wort_ nutcases!
This is fascinating -- when the United States [frequently] seeks to have its laws apply beyond its borders [extraterritoriality], everyone particularly the EU objects reflexively: "How dare they? We're a separate society."
Now some in the EU think its laws should apply to the US. And not just about this, also other issues. Why should anyone in the US, and particularly elements of the [deservedly] much-abused US government give a rats @$$ for such blatant hypocrisy? Surely no-one denies the US is a distinct society!
This is a good example of the "elephant ants": many common problems change with scale because weight [mass or force] grows as the cube of length., while strength is at best the square and often only 3/2 [beams].
Alongside other problems (air exchange, summer disassembly, wind loads) Bucky's problem is real -- think hot air balloons.
Back of the envelope, if there's a 20'F difference on a 1 mi dia hemisphere, there's 16,000 lb lift per peripheral foot. That's not easy to anchor (10 x 10 ft foundation cross section.) And you definitely will need lots of steel or kevlar if you want the bottom wall be be under 1/4 inch.
Precisely! This is _corruption_ : prosecutors abusing their powers to make their lives easier and get look better (higher conviction rates). If this is really "to reduce costs", then the voters are corrupt. Plea bargains should be outlawed.
Sometimes interesting varients play, like overcharging the cops with attempted murder in the Rodney King beating so they get off scott-free (intent unproveable).
Advanced corruption does not use bags of cash or anything tangible.
... er, I was not picked on. Or at least, never noticed anything significant.