green-technology posts

Ahh, the data center's heart and brain, the server room. Dim, cavernous, off-limits to most of our coworkers, and bathed in the soothing dual ambiences of CPU fans and high-powered air-conditioning, they're the perfect place to take a moment to cool off after a tough call or a sprint across a plague-wracked parking lot. All those boxen, miles of Cat6 just the way we want it, chilled to a component-friendly sixty-something degrees.

Well, so much for that particular workplace fantasy. We've spoken previously about the positive aspects of greener, more energy-efficient computing, but now they've gone too far. Folks have finally noticed that facilities cooling is one of the biggest costs for server rooms and data centers, and the thermostat is being kicked up to save money. Way up.

Akela got our dander up a bit last week, with his shot across the bow of hardware fiends everywhere. BI could go on at exhaustive, tedious, and utterly facetious length about how someone can be somewhere other than the bleeding edge, but why bother being that guy? As was once pointed out by some dude with my byline at Massively, Max/Min is an @$$hole.

For instance, look at the tremendous popularity of PopCap and Big Fish and their ilk -- simple, flash-based clicky games that make next to no hardware demands at all -- legions of addicts (BI's Substantially Better Half included) must see something in them. BI will admit to killing an occasional hour with Peggle or something high-concept like Dyson -- when we need a break from something that puts the screws to our six-month old build, or don't feel like being social in World of Warcraft.

New hardware ain't cheap. Well, it's almost always getting less expensive, but that's because something newer and shinier and bad-assier (and more expensive, natch) displaces it. But Akela brings up half of an interesting point -- killer graphics (and their attendant wattage draws) do not a killer app make.