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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: axial who wrote (2021)2/11/2001 4:44:19 PM
From: ftth  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 46821
 
re: "I wonder if engineers are calculating the effect of say, 1000 PCs and their associated equipment, in an office building? "

I'd tend to think it's less a factor than all the light bulbs throughout the building and at desks.

On that article, it's a hefty dose of poorly-researched fear mongering. The statement "As a result, a crushing economic depression will follow, and all of the economic gains made over the last two centuries will be summarily reversed." says it all. Give me a break!

Simply putting monitors into a sleep mode would go a long way towards putting a huge dent in the power consumption. But that requires people to kiss their beloved screen-savers good bye. Power consumption of monitors is generally larger than the rest of the PC**, even if all resources of the rest of the PC are running at max (which seldom happens during normal use by typical office workers doing word processing and checking stock quotes). Yes, I know, people have to run their silly screen savers that also consume 90% of the processor power, for the benefit of no one.

I think it is a screen saver crisis (and screen saver is a misnomer since they are purely for entertainment of passers-by. The problems with permanent scars to the tube from persistent display of the same information has been solved for years)

**And to this I add the same holds for notebook computers. The unbelievable hype of Transmeta's 1/2 watt CPU, compared to 1 watt of competitors (regardless of whether their original claims have been refuted or not and regardless of whether competitors have matched or beat the half watt number), pales in comparison to the other 50 watts being burned by all the other components of the notebook computer. It's kind of like saying my house is now energy efficient because I replaced the bathroom lightbulbs with energy-miser bulbs.



To: axial who wrote (2021)2/11/2001 4:44:45 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 46821
 
Uncanny. I just read your afterthought in the uplink, which I think is addressed in large part in my previous post of five or ten minutes ago.

re: ".. but I wonder if that's so: I wonder if engineers are calculating the effect of say, 1000 PCs and their associated equipment, in an office building?"

Yes, they do, and they add a contingency factor for growth to that amount, too. Power calculating and BTU conversions are now parts of the software that is routinely used by the larger (and some not so large) MEP firms, i.e., the mechanical, environmental and power engineers, to compute such metrics.

The automated facilities management systems used for this usually contain libraries of all popular (customizable, as well) hardware devices and platforms, which makes automated lookups and computations feasible, on the fly. For all three: power, temperature and footprint requirements. We've even used such systems (which also track real estate square footage) on the cost side of P&L systems associated with commisions for trading desks for several of our clients, since the number of "machines" and the power they consume (as well as the real estate occupied, and the entitlements exercised for market data feeds such as Reuters, ADP, etc.) are directly related to the end-of-day bottom line.