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Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

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Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#151

Post by breakyerself »

rndgermandude wrote: post #99
jonas21 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's datacenters are already carbon neutral. This is about going one step further and using locally-generated renewable energy to power the datacenters.

No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet. On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either. Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental…

Renewablea aren't carbon neutral "yet" is how I would put it.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#152

Post by auslander »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #104
amos19870630 wrote: post #15

These data centers will collect large amounts of personal data. I believe that the future of personal privacy protection issues needs to receive greater attention.

This is not on topic.

Why not? Ad company wasting energy to run ad business. Nothing "clean" about it.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#153

Post by stordoff »

ineedasername wrote: post #134
davedx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.

I remember being able to mine on a single Nvidia GPU on my laptop, significantly less efficient than an AMD one (at least at the time) and giving it up as pointless when it only generated a single bitcoin in a week. And then a year or so later being thrilled when I read an article that the price skyrocketed to $200 and I remembered that one coin, and sold it. Oh well!

I looked up a few days ago that I had about 23 mined BTC, and sold them for about $1-2. Not going to lie, it stings a little (each one is now worth more than a year's income).

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#155

Post by spc476 »

satanspastaroll wrote: post #35
dantheman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly that keeps prices artificially low for years, drives everyone out of business, and then raises prices to make up for the years of lost profit -- I'd like to hear one example - it's never happened as far as i know. Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.

I believe the Rockefeller's General Oil was dissolved as an illegal monopoly. It used it's massive, over 90% share of the market (and it's vertical supply chain) to deter competition, and made deals with other suppliers to make the inertia of competing a herculean task

While a company that controls the majority of a market may be the text book definition of a monopoly, it's the the legal definition in the US. The US law recognizes that a company may naturally (and legally) gain a majority market share (even 100%) and be left alone. It's only when a company with such control over a market uses that to leverage control over another market that it becomes illegal under US law.

Standard Oil owned 90%+ of the oil refineries in the US (they never did drill for oil) yet that wasn't why Standard Oil was broken up. They were broken up because they were using their influence with oil to control the train industry, specifically, train transport of oil. [1]

Microsoft wasn't threatened with breakup over their operating system monopoly on desktop computers, but because they were using that influence with at attempt to control the web browser industry.

[1] And ironically, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that made John. D. Rockefeller the richest man in the world. He was also responsible for saving the world's population of whales. [2]

[2] Half-serious here. Whale oil was big business, until Rockefeller made petroleum products cheap enough to supplant whale oil as a product.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#156

Post by rndgermandude »

breakyerself wrote: post #151
rndgermandude wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet. On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either. Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental…

Renewablea aren't carbon neutral "yet" is how I would put it.

Indeed, but the point is, it isn't carbon neutral yet.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#158

Post by bboreham »

ineedasername wrote: post #132
cheez wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.

Do they openly share these advances & techniques? I know, it's a competitive advantage so I wouldn't fault them too much if they don't, I'm just curious.

There’s a book: “The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines” (free to download).

https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y...

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#159

Post by icebraining »

wongarsu wrote: post #39
dantheman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly that keeps prices artificially low for years, drives everyone out of business, and then raises prices to make up for the years of lost profit -- I'd like to hear one example - it's never happened as far as i know. Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.

You could argue about Microsoft. They started out by offering MSDos as a low cost option and now own close to the entire OS market. Google is undercutting everyone in the mobile OS market. What once was a varied market died completely because nobody could compete with Android's "it's free if you agree to preload a bunch of Google apps" (iOS isn't really on the market since its Apple exclusive, LG can only reasonably…

Microsoft certainly drove almost everyone out of business, but I don't think you can accuse them of raising prices to cover for lost profits - a OEM Windows license is pretty cheap compared to other paid software, particularly before they started adding ads to it.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#160

Post by icebraining »

shmageggy wrote: post #27
M2Ys4U wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I hate Oath's awful privacy modal.

Anyone got a source that doesn't require an afternoon's worth of work to set your privacy options? I clicked through a bunch of menus to try to opt out of personalization and got nowhere and gave up

Just disable JavaScript - to TC's credit, the page layout is great without JS.
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