Please, nobody comment here, we are wasting water.
UK government advises deleting emails to save water
41–50 of 158 posts
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.
How? When I use water to cook rice, the rice absorbs that water. That's kind of how you know it's done. How much water are you using when cooking rice that there's some left over to use in the plants?
The "standard" method used by East Asians is to wash the rice several times until water is clear before cooking. This waste water is said to be good to water plants with and accounts for most of the water needed.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#43Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#44Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
Something is always more than nothing
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#45Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered? "Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
Email has a specific carve out on the online safety act
So you just get adult materials in your inbox like grandad did, except this time, the inbox is digital and easier to hide from the missus.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#46The UK government is a punchline.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#47Serious question. Is there any technology to capture the excess thermal energy from data centers and run some of it back into the grid? Or drive some kind of desalination process? Or do anything else useful with this “surplus” heat energy?
Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#48I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…
Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#49Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes.
It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#50This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource