"John Hearns" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news
[email protected]...
> On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:24:47 +0000, Ambrose Nankivell wrote:
>> That said, despite the fact that I benefit from 4kW of heating all to
>> myself, I'm normally working in an ambient temperature of about 10
>> celsius.
> Get round the back, and start running something CPU intensive. Toasty warm
> then. And wear those ear plugs. I SAID WEAR THOSE EAR PLUGS.
Much as I'd love to be a full time techy, due to recent health problems, and
all kinds of other ****, the information repository that I work in produces
no heat, and stores the information mainly by a highly redundant (c.
100kilobits/character) 2d matrix of carbon on cellulose. To compact the
storage, these matrices are parallelised and layered in sets of around 150,
cut to a size of 150mm x 200mm, glued along one edge and encapsulated in
thicker cellulose layers, which are normally covered in pigments which
encode visual representations.
People pay us about 10 pounds for each of these 1 megacharacter
repositories, which cannot be easily copied in an equivalently convenient or
comfortable format for ocular conversion to semantic representation, and
must be produced in systems as many as a billion times larger than a common
or garden optical or magnetic drive, but apparently there's enough people
who like their information in this format to make it worth it.
(All figures may vary by up to 2 orders of magnitude, except the
dimensionality of the matrices)
Anyway, this storage format produces no heat in use, and even my manually
acting as a conduit for it, with the help of Royal Mail and Parcelforce,
produces insufficient heat. I have yet to enquire about means of obtaining
heat from the stored information, but I understand it's not generally
condoned, and considered 'Stalinist'.
So, no, no servers in the cold bit of work. And no dedicated servers in the
office, either.
--
Ambrose