Microsoft Heats the Ocean To Save Cash on Their Electricity Bills

Nothing wrong with cheaper data storage....the cheaper the better...

I note the high cost given for paper storage, on the basis of little information being stored on an A4 page. Coincidentally I have been reflecting on this for some time. A laser printer can print at 300 dots per inch. Even assuming that you don't print the whole page at least 88 square inches are available. That represents 7,920,000 dots (990,000 bytes). There is an obvious difficulty in reading back a dot position with sufficient accuracy from that fine spacing, but interpreting a character from an 8x5 grid should still be practical (198000 bytes). Could one perhaps work with an even finer grid with 4 colours of ink to augment definition?

You can get scanners that will scan at 1,000 DPI, so you can get the 'oversampling' required to read a 300 DPI image with a high degree of confidence.

Did the cloud move to the ocean?

It will when Microsoft 'rains' supreme.

Like Bill would care.

He'd better tell Paul Allen not to park his yacht near it...

paul-allen-yacht-tatoosh-damages-cayman-coral-reef/

Do you think the extra money Microsoft saves is making their products on the shelf cheaper? I don't think so!

I never even mentioned it because it is a completely separate issue (regardless of what one particular politician says, Bill doesn't run the internet or the data centres that make the internet possible), but if he is working on a technology concept that benefits the environment in general I don't mind if he gets paid for it.

Getting paid for it is one thing. Making billions from the average people I regard as legal theft.

I'm only looking at water cooled data centres here, not Bill's history and what people think of him personally or his other software products or business models as it detracts from the main discussion.

Ok. He still has more personal wealth that he could spend. Why would he need to get paid for his endeavors now? It is a rhetorical question. If I were as well off I wouldn't be charging for services rendered unless it was for a charity of some sort.

Microsoft is a publicly owned company, any excess profits are paid to the shareholders(div 2.79%) in one way or another....that benefits all of us....and the cheaper storage fee's also benefit all of us....Bill Gates' money is largely controlled by the foundation he and his wife founded....

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Financials/Foundation-Trust

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/msft

Headline- JE in Chicago cools home by running heat exchanging hose into Lake Michigan!

..of course I don't own the Lake.

On topic.. (putting the gear at the bottom of the drink? It seems the deployment and serviceable needs would be as costly as the savings if not more. How does this look good on paper)?

I think a deep water heat exchanger piped to a waterside data center would be more feasible.

Barnacles will probably love it, reducing the heat transfer over the coming years.

Here is a link to his house

I don't know if it is still in service, but the UL-508 shop I worked for ~1990 built the control panel for an evaporative cooler/condenser for Paul Allen's Mercer Island residence.

What happens when there's a leak?

They call Wikki!

Do you not have a cost saving on electricity from off shore wind farms or tidal nacelles providing electricity? Or all those HV cables running below the streets and fields? you Of course you do and all those transmission cables produce heat which is dissipated via the ground or sea water.

That heat does not warm the surrounding oceans? Of course not!!

I do not hear people raising this as an issue in any global warming scenarios, so why should Microsoft not produce a small cell and cool it with sea water. After all, the fibre will produce zero heat, only the power supply cable will produce limited heating and the magnetic field will of course attract fish to the area and in all probability, disallow people to be within a certain radius of the cell. Just as with any off shore wind farm, the public sea becomes owned, by the owner of the equipment.

But it will put a different slant on the phrase, 'Phishing' on the Internet.

So perhaps rather lay complaint and Microsoft will not make billions off poor slobs such as yourself. I am quite sure a petition of 500 000 signatures will be a good starting point. If it works in the UK on Trump, I am sure it will work here in the USA on Bill Gates.

always gotta have a beef with someone dontcha?

Heat is going to go to the environment in any cooling application, just there is going to be a lot less here as there is no energy being used to generate the cooling effect.

his house is pretty energy efficient too.

"lights blue touchpaper and walks away"

With this technological age whom all seem to need these days, and all the electrically driven gadgets that makes ones life so important and valuable, (sarcasm). The electrical heating effect on the earth is just going to get worse and not better. The more the utilities make electric available and the more each household consumes, the hotter things will be.

But, I agree, start a petition and exercise your rights. I am happy to sign up. Bill Gates just took away your ocean and he owns it now. He probably has a deed now to confirm this.

1% Of the populations has more money than 99% of the population. You are pretty much owned!!!

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/20/264241052/oxfam-worlds-richest-1-percent-control-half-of-global-wealth

Alternate reading:

http://www.onthecommons.org/who-owns-beach

So, instead of complaining that there are 1%'ers who have made a lot of money, why dismiss their success financially and denigrate that success? The problem isn't with those who are in the 1% bracket of finances, the problem is with people don't think like business owners and innovators. Most people still follow the old Industrial Age thinking of "get a good education, get a good job and you'll be set".

Figure out a way to move to that dimension. Hint, it won't be through being an employee working for someone else. It will only happen through business ownership and entrepreneurism. It is the business owners and innovators who have long-term vision, delayed gratification and figure out a way to leverage knowledge, time and money to bring them the payoff.

The following quote from the bottom of the page is appropos: "You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is. It's how we use it that makes things possible." -- Henry Ford

I am not complaining at all. Frankly I don't give a flying monkey and I do not dismiss their success. The post was to provide possible thinking of a silly pointless discussion.

If the point is valid I agree, start a petitions and do something about it and be heard. Microsoft does not hear anyone on this site.

It is all mind over matter. Microsoft does not mind, and the public (CR4) opinion does not matter.

Off to make tea and emit heat to the atmosphere. Enjoyed the craic. Cheers!

Heat released to the ocean, a stream, the ground, or the atmosphere - does it really matter which one is used as a heat sink?

It still has been generated and must be released to the environment.

The only positive use I can think of for waste heat, is if it could be stored in the ground and recaptured for home/business heating in the cooler months. But that is quite inefficient and much would still be lost to the environment.

A friend on mine runs his gaming computer on a water cooled hard drive as his previous air cooled hard drive runs too hot. So the heat is still vented into the atmosphere by a computer so what difference in reality is using the sea to cool a server in a steel tank, painted with possible toxic paints and resins, when only more people will use heat producing computers on land.

The fun will be when a boat drops an anchor on it or an anchor gets caught up in the power cables/fibre cables and all that heating stops, instantly in the sea, and the heating gets worse on land, when the system goes down.

Your scale is too small to really appreciate the problem (and personal computer cooling produces huge amounts of heat with only a small amount of liquid to dissipate it, hence making it really inefficient in comparison to large data centre cooling).

Large Data centres are numerous and use hundreds of kW or more of power EACH just for cooling, now imagine most of this energy usage disappears with water cooling where the ocean sucks away the excess heat in a massive ocean sized heat sink.

Is this beginning to sound like a potentially really green alternative yet to building more coal fired power stations just to power conventional data centre's cooling systems?

No system is perfect (and the water cooled system has some technological and environmental hurdles to overcome yet) but if you compare the environmental impact of the two it seems like a no brainer for the water cooled data centre.

Uh, we heat the air 'cooling' our ICE engines, and we breathe the air; however, we don't breathe the water, but we DO drink & swim in it (once de-salted)!

Just about everything man does is bad for the environment to some small extent. A few thousand years ago the population was so small that the environment could heal faster than we could pollute. Today is a different matter as our population has grown so large that our pollution is out of control and we are running out of places to dump our garbage. Dumping it in the ocean does not seem to be a pollution free solution. So what do we do?