Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before - and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be - I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own - an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have of how the Internet works. We know that an image in a search result might be linked to a site that has nothing to do with the image. We know that just because a reader of a blog comments on a post and links to a picture, it doesn’t mean the blog owner has endorsed or in any way taken ‘control’ of that picture.

We know this.

Some people though, aren’t quite as smart as us. They think that you have more control over how Google sees you than you do. They think that if you link to a picture you are ‘trying to take it over’. They don’t understand hypertext, they don’t understand indexing algorithms and they certainly don’t understand how this all applies in terms of copyright. Don’t believe me?

TechCrunch is currently dealing with perhaps the most technically inept man on Earth representing a photographer in an argument over online copyright and image distribution.

The problem is that he has a little knowledge - pictures can drive traffic, and that drives revenue - but not enough knowledge to understand what TechCrunch’s role is in this instance.

Even worse, he’s decided to act in a way I would consider unethical by phoning advertisers and threatening to name them in a lawsuit explaining he “just wanted to let [them] know”, in that I’m-doing-you-a-favour-don’t-look-at-me-like-I’m-a-leech kind of way.

This makes me come to the following conclusions:

1. If I ever need to hire a photographer, I’m never going to hire Beth Boldt as she clearly hires idiots to represent her legally (although he doesn’t appear to be a lawyer), and I really don’t want to deal with idiots working on her behalf
2. If you’re ever going to threaten to sue somebody, maybe you shouldn’t threaten Mike Arrington who is, you know, a lawyer, and knows what he’s doing… (top tip Mike learned at law school: use spell check before hitting ‘send’).
3. All of us have a responsibility to make sure the people acting on our behalf - personally, or within our companies - understand the issues as they really are.

If you’re working in a corporate environment in the UK, you should make sure at least some of your directors or somebody over at legal checks out Out-Law.com once in a while, and if you’re freelancing or a SME, its RSS feed should be part of your morning coffee ritual.

Whilst some may ask what could you do with infinite bandwidth, others are actually trying to get there. Internet2 - a research project that is surprisingly low-profile outside of those directly involved - has recently reached 100Gbps and there are, as ever, plans to go faster.

We’re at an odd period in the history of the Internet when it comes to bandwidth. We’re at speeds fast enough to provision most people’s textual and audio requirements just fine, and a few years away from being able to provide enough space for everybody’s HD video requirements. The question is, what next? What uses can we put higher speeds to? We’re quickly reaching the point where we can send data around between nodes faster than the nodes can do something useful with the data.

Once we’re at the point where data can consistently be transferred quicker than it can be processed - either by a computer or a human - we’re at a new point in the history of the network. Suddenly the big powerful boxes stitched together with string become mere silos for the data. And we, the users, reach a point where there is true saturation. At what point will the capacity for data transfer outreach the collective human capacity for making use of it?