341–350 of 397 posts
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None of them have intrinsic value. At least gold & diamonds are useful
useful + scarce == intrinsic value, no?
For example - over history gold has been mostly considered pretty, but not exactly high value. It was only through trade it became representative of value (of the goods).
How much is that in Library of Congress units? This trend of not giving out data but appearing to do so is strange.
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HDD spindles????
Spinning hard drives have a decent gryoscopic effect. Hold one while it's powered up and try rotating it in a manner that would change the plane of the platters and you will feel the resistance. Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive on a boat or barge in the open water would experience. I can imagine t…
> Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?
I had a PC I built and moved to a bungalow near the beach. Within the year it's power supply had rusted. My last PC in a relatively arid environment lasted 4 years. It's probably the "sea" environment that would pose corrosion issues.
I'm now close to the Pacific. No issues whatsoever.
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Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.
The only reason anyone cares is because it's relatively easy to compute this inefficiency compared to the vast sea of inefficient products that would require signifigant effort to even approximate.
Without the full data such a statement is vacuous.
> It will not be possible to repair the computers if they fail This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple 24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.
In that model, hardware failing is just a factor in total overhead cost. If the hardware doesn’t fail immediately it might be cheaper to leave a dead node in the rack than to pay a human to touch it, especially if they’ve already recouped a significant percentage of the purchase cost by the time it fails. Over the life of a server the cost of cooling is enough that a substantial savings will push that breakeven point earlier.
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Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired. In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop a…
My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him. I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?" Turns out it was literally the drive.
I've been very wary of SSDs since then.
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But that isn't an inherent fact of a diamond. Mining them doesn't require that people lose their lives it's a fact of shitty people. And most diamonds consumers will encounter aren't from that stream.
Yep. Human nature is a different problem set altogether from being intentionally designed to waste electricity.
I strongly doubt the intention was to waste electricity, more likely it was incidentally designed that way, as it's difficult to conceive how you could create such a decentralized cryptocurrency without proof-of-work (at least at the time).
> Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?
A trend in energy-efficient data centers is to maintain temperatures and humidity at near the maximum acceptable levels to reduce energy use for cooling and dehumidification. Data centers used to be like walk-in refrigerators. Now the air is borderline uncomfortably warm and slightly "heavy" with humidity.
Failure rate is a bit higher, but they are confident that their architecture is HA/redundant and of what they told me, it's cheaper to replace hardware (they got some DELLs "fresh-air" servers) than to cool the DC.
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If my calculation is correct, the total annual electricity production in the world (I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) by 0,0129°C. It's rather easy to calculate because one calorie is the energy required to heat up one gramme of water by one degree Celsius, the rest is just unit conversions, but I could have messed up anywhere of course. Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnit…
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... , total electricity production is about 24816400 GWh/year (~25 PWh/year, so you were 3 orders of magnitude off). $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / (1 kg/dm^3) / (4200 J/kg/K)' 1.5908368e-05 K
$ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / waterdensity / water_specificheat'
1.5851925e-05 K