Microsoft to build energy efficient, heat-producing data centre in Finland
yle.fi
yle.fi
No argument from me on Teams though. That is a dumpster fire.
Its pain point with Office products since 90s, a classic example from that era (and 2000s) is doing a single newline in Word and reformatting whole 100 page document into useless mess. If they would make a clear easy option to just turn it off with 1 button, same for grammar corrections, it would make life easier for everybody. But no, MS knows better...
I tend to use org-mode's table feature and if I need to export stuff to common formats, pandoc.
When people are hating on Excel, they typically hate the latter two, not the former three.
For what it's worth, I just moved a dataset out of Excel in to a pg database because what we were asking of it was just a hair more than a spreadsheet should be used for. It is great for collecting and viewing data, but as soon as the first complex filter came in, it fell apart. Something that was doable but challenging for me as a tech guy was not possible for my user, a parent. But a data grid with some simple filters and an export will get the job done, and thanks to tools like postgrest (not just postgres) and a React data grid, I was able to make something infinitely more usable than just a spreadsheet.
We can all agree, Teams is awful.
At the end of the day, Excel is spreadsheet software. This is a class of product that is very old and there are few major innovations really left, which is also why Excel remains the leader. When you have a technology that has matured to such an extent, you are now chasing the margins in terms of improvement and that is where the largest and most well funded companies hold the advantage.
However the next step beyond a simple spreadsheet, the desktop database is still a sector that is quite nascent, especially in terms of products catered towards lay people. As you mentioned, currently databases are not particularly user friendly to the non-technical crowd but products like Notion are making such things more accessible. That is the area where I can envision something emerging that makes Excel or the very notion of spreadsheet software itself obsolete.
In Helsinki, I'm already buying my certified zero-emission heat from a big 100MW heat pump station that uses waste water among its inputs. In June, they are also adding heat from a Telia data center as an input to the district heating system. They give some numbers too: "Using a heat pump, the data centre can produce at least 1.3 times the heat that it consumes as electricity." https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2021/konesalien-hukkal%C3%A4mm%...
Power train manufacturers have, by necessity, something they called test cells. They're rooms where an engine can be attached to a dummy shaft and run to evaluate changes to design, or test assumptions, or any of a million other things.
In Maryland, no attempt was made to capture the work done by these engines, nor was any attempt made to get value from the (hot!) exhaust.
At a similar facility in Sweden, though, the test cell engine output was tied to a power generation and storage setup, and the exhaust was captured to heat the building.
They were built at the same time. It's always baffled me.
One would have accounted for the pollution and costs and the other wouldn't basically instructing the corporation to be wasteful and pollute unless it wanted to lose money by doing so.
I would have been interested to hear "Swedish regulation of waste heat is highly stringent and nearly every spare joule is used for generation or directly for heating. This is due in part to their climate" or whatever. Your comment was like answering "why are M1 chips faster than Intel at some very specific task" by saying "they come from a different manufacturer".
It may still be worth doing but it may not be considered because it's a "hassle".
Heating is one of the bigger challenges regarding the energy transition, and a big user of fossil gas (and sometimes oil, coal and talking about Finland even peat, which is really one of the dirtiest energy sources imaginable). Datacenters generate lots of "waste" heat.
It requires some planning, e.g. datacenters need to be built with connections to heat grids. But given how many new datacenters get built basically everywhere, this should be a no-brainer.
For new data centers, being carbon neutral or negative is pretty much a standard goal at this point for quite some time. Not only is it good for the environment but it also lowers cost and high energy costs are of course a problem if you are using lots of energy. The cheapest energy happens to be also the cleanest; hence a lot of data centers would be enthusiastic adopters of anything related to cheaper and cleaner energy. Additionally, a lot of energy is transformed into heat in the process of using it, so cooling solutions are also in scope for this.
Most data center operators are working towards carbon neutrality and have been for years. Many actually have web pages advertising their goals and current status for this. It's mainly their older data centers that are a problem on this front as those still rely on energy from the grid in places where that arguably isn't very green (like Virginia for example).
IMHO given how rich Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are, they could spend more to speed that process up and should maybe be coerced into doing so by the countries that host them under very charitable tax conditions (like my home country the Netherlands). MS seems very pleased with themselves with this data center. But of course they are still happily burning fossil fuels elsewhere.
https://www.edn.com/made-in-ibm-labs-ibm-hot-water-cooled-su...
And if something similar being done in Iceland?
The heat is moved into the already existing district heating system. So basically Fortum can burn less coal or gas during the winter with this.
Correct me if I am wrong.