For people who like tech porn....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

drool

2

drool indeed. Wow.

3

I read somewhere recently that 5 or 10 percent of all the electricity in the world is basically used to run the Internet. I think I see why now.

4

… It appears to run on some form of electricity…

5

Many of those pictures look like Ted Stevens’ idea of what the internet looks like.

6

It’s true! The Internet IS a series of tubes!

7

Well, you’re not wrong.

8

And it all appears to involve a lot of noise, judging by how many people in those pictures were wearing hearing protection.

This is actually a problem that seems to have gotten worse as servers shrank. They went from something like a 3" diameter cooling fan running at 1800 RPM to four 1" fans at 3600 RPM. A full rack of 1U (a standard size, not quite 2 inches high) servers shrieks like a box full of banshees. I can’t imagine how horrible a room full of those would be.

9

my write head is about to spew data.

10

I’ve seen this somewhere before.

11

golf clap

12

Okay… I hate to admit it… but some of those pictures were… well, porn is a good term for it. If the zombies attack, I want to be trapped in those rooms.

13

Remember when hard drives were like 3x5 and 4 or 6 platters and you could hear the write heads beating away like some insane band? We used to set up data transfers trying to see who could make them “sing” the best. Some of the backups against the RAIDS were amazing to listen to. Then headbanger* came out and our managers weren’t so fond of our musical efforts and made us quit.

  • A virus that physically rammed the heads back and forth until the write head broke free and the system crashed.
14

On an environmental note, couldn’t we save a lot of power if servers were made to run 10C hotter and we just cooled them with surrounding air? Or nearby bodies of water?

15

I’m not sure about the ‘10C hotter’ part, but they do use environmental cooling, at least in some cases. See this picture

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/13

The caption: “An overhead view of one of our cooling plants, where seawater from the Gulf of Finland entirely cools the data center there.”

16

They could also use waste heat to run their sauna in Finland.

17

Oh ya, I should read pages before posting. But at least the higher temp part is new.