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UK government advises deleting emails to save water

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Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#51

Post by dylan604 »

reedf1 wrote: post #43
sour-taste wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#52

Post by regularfry »

arkensaw wrote: post #2

Ok 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

Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient.

Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#53

Post by bhaney »

benjojo12 wrote: post #40
lenerdenator wrote: post #37

Given 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

HTTPS-over-SMTP soon?

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#54

Post by arkensaw »

bee_rider wrote: post #48
dylan604 wrote: post #31

I 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.

Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#58

Post by aldous »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #7

Not a single mention of the lack of reservoir capacity, with the last major reservoir built in 1992. Population has grown by 12 million / 21% since. So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.

Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050 apparently. But as general point reservoirs are...

a) only part of the solution (water reuse schemes can be much cheaper and more effective) b) really difficult to build! Finding an appropriate location (google the Tryweryn reservoir in Wales for an example of the consequences of building one in a problematic location), planning constraints, environmental impact and subsequent pushback from locals and environment groups etc etc.

I don't disagree the UK needs more of reservoirs but they ain't trivial things to build. A good overview in this news article here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k147dkgx8o

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#59

Post by dylan604 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #42
dylan604 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. I was unaware of that being a thing. Is there any point/benefit to that?
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