As described, after looking at their materials, I don't see an advantage to the radial design over a grid design. There is nothing to that which would improve airflow, and it leaves huge underutilized areas.

On the other hand, a traditional grid design optimizes the space, and it would still allow for the same airflow.

It's not a matter of being round, or having dead space, it's simple things we teach children. Square boxes don't fit through round holes. Round objects don't stack optimally.

One of the Equinix datacenters in Los Angeles (previously Pihana Pacific) has all of it's cooling on one side of the room, and returns on the other side. Each row is basically a wind tunnel. There is no appreciable temperature difference between the two sides. Both the front and back of the cabinets have the same airflow, and maintain roughly the same temperature.

As far as the total power load, they could keep the load the same, and have almost half of the building for just storage.

Of course, a square building that the industry uses as a standard for this kind of work, would not make the news. No one would be talking about it.

I guess if they have money to burn and real estate to waste, it doesn't matter what shape they make it or how much space is underutilized.

Did you notice that he talked about the doors to the warm side? Controlled and logged access. And just a couple seconds later he says the top of the pods are all open to the common upper area. I'd hope they'll have something in the way, but I doubt it would be anything that bolt cutters (or just tin snips) and a few minutes would have a problem with.

Particle filtration does not mean it dehumidifies.

You can take a look at their official page. http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/about/initiatives/data-center-west.cfm

The tour video and text talk about plants outside filtering. The video around 3 minutes, shows additional filtering inside.

I suspect prevailing winds will really screw with the site cooling.

The "Virtual tour" has more details than the rest. Nothing about humidity.

Their security seems odd. They talk about the security being very strict. The video shows the inside of each "pod" to be open to the common hot air area in the upper part of the roof. So they have security, but you can get around it by not going through the doors. {sigh}

I never got the idea of sticking square boxes in a round hole. They're wasting a lot of good real estate by leaving all that extra space between the servers.

It seems like it was drawn up with an ideal world in mind, which usually doesn't translate well to the real world.

Oh, come on; everything's more futuristic in a geodesic dome.

chaotic_evil supersedes the evil bit, being chaos and all. :)

You need to buy a dictionary.

I didn't know nuclear plants were powered by the elderly. They told me grandma passed, and was in a better place. No one said that was inside a reactor.

echo "chaotic_evil" > /proc/morality

That's why it hasn't been working for you.

There's also a kernel patch on evil.org to change the default setting. With the standard kernel, it is set to "lawful_neutral". In that mode, it will honk and swerve for a little old lady crossing the street.

lawful_good would stop, and offer her a ride.

chaotic_evil will run her over, back up and do it again, and the lower loot collection hook will deploy to take her purse.

I think you're mixing up programs. The mobile command center is probably not military surplus, it was likely purchased and customized under a homeland security grant.

These things aren't unreasonable purchases for a medium-sized city like Milford. They aren't military vehicles, the're basically mobile office space.

No they are not supposed to, nor is that what they are paid for. Sometimes they *have* to shoot people, but that is and should be regarded as a failure, albeit sometimes an avoidable one.

Modern policing is governed by the "Peelian Principles" (for Sir Robert Peel). The very first principle: "To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to repression by military force and severity of legal punishment." Furthermore, the principles state that policing is only effective if it can secure the respect and cooperation of the public and "the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives." (principle 4)

So the idea that it's part of a cop's job description to shoot people is rubbish. It's a cop's job to keep the peace, and if a good cop shoots someone it's because it's the lesser of two failures.

On the other hand, an idea that can explain anything isn't really scientific. There's no question that evolution by natural selection is a scientific idea, but somehow it gets garbled in translation into an "organism trying to find a variation". In other cases (visible in this discussion) it's seen as benign intelligent force that will compensate for our mistakes. You can purge the white-bearded sky god from your iconography, but it's harder to get him out of your thinking.

So is death.

You have great management potential. :)

We could run that idea up the flagpole, to the cloud, to have a meeting of the minds. Then we could do lunch. Have your people call my people, and we'll set up a thing.

I think I just made myself nauseous writing that.