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.

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

What will happen is that the manufacturers will lobby for a statutory "safe harbor." The legislature will make the ethical decisions in advance, or provide a menu of "safe" ethical options. And the manufacturer will be statutorily immune from lawsuits as long as they have followed those safe harbor guidelines. This is a good thing in theory, as it permits the technology to progress, where lawsuits would otherwise eliminate it. So don't worry about the manufacturers. What you should worry about is that those clowns in Washington, D.C.* will be selling off their "ethics" decisions under the table in exchange for cushy corner-office jobs with AIM, Inc. after they retire from public office.

*Yes, it will inevitably be a federal law, though just as inevitably, California will have some granola-munching variant that requires autonomous cars operating in California to place a super-premium on the lives of endangered salamanders or something.

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.

"Internet of things" is basically a polite euphemism for "Consumer electronics SCADA". How could anyone even entertain the theory that it might go well?

Walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe failed because they had to compete with everyone else. In the early '90s, there was a lot of content that was exclusive to AOL or CompuServe. There were a load of small BBS that had their own unique content. And then there was the Internet. Anyone could put something on the Internet and when web browsers started to be easy to install anyone could put up a web page. Individuals would put things up on their ISPs' web space or somewhere like Geocities, big companies would buy their own servers. Small individual ISPs started to spring up, because the cost of entry was low: a rack of modems, a leased line, and a load of phone lines and you could be an ISP. Local ISPs competed by differentiating themselves in various ways (free email, free web space, static IPs, whatever).

Meanwhile, AOL and CompuServe (OSPs - Online Service Providers) were trying to sell access but also be responsible for all of the content. The parallel with Facebook isn't quite there, because they're only selling the content. The problem is that, while there is some content on Facebook, anyone who can access Facebook can also access the whole of the web. They need to somehow justify putting content on Facebook (where only Facebook users can see it) rather than just putting it on a web site. Their argument for this is that they can collect lots of data about potential customers if you do, but it's not clear that this is a good long-term alternative.

That was more true a year ago than it is now. Modern smartphones and data plans mean that email is becoming as easy as SMS for a lot of people who would previously only check it when they actively went to their computer. This is also true of the older generation, who previously might have turned on the computer once every day or two for email, but now increasingly have tablets that can do email, thanks to companies like Amazon selling appliances that are mainly there for videos and ebooks..

The useful gadget to sell would be something cheap (under $50) that has a small array of microphones and listens to a predefined set of tones, then produces calibration data telling your audio source what it needs to do to compensate for the poor acoustics and speaker placement in the owner's living room.

You have great management potential. :)

Three anonymous racists trolls in one JE. Brown probably had a slashdot account, the kid was a nerd. He'd just graduated high school and was enrolled in college to study engineering. He'd never been in any trouble with the police, and those who knew him said he was a peaceful young man with a good sense of humor.

Now heartless racists, like the Ferguson police chief, are trying to demonize him.

This hits close to home for me, I have family and friends in the St Louis area and grew up in Cahokia. And yes, there are a lot of racists there. Idiots, if you ask me. The Ferguson government was the stupidest of all, they were begging for riots and still are.