New York Times Takes Aim At Data Center

Nerval's Lobster writes "The New York Times' latest expose takes on data centers, but the Gray Lady's investigation has prompted its own criticism. While the paper correctly noted that there's a backend cost attached to the storage of photos, cat videos, and old shopping lists, many critics are taking issue with how the Times addresses the issue of those data centers' power consumption. While the Times' contention that the majority of data-center operators prefer secrecy is probably accurate, this industry is public enough that the paper's approach to the article exposes a few puzzling choices. Here are five trouble areas."

Link to Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a link to the New York Times article in question.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]

This again?

[Revotron]

I would feign outrage and harshly criticize the submitter and /. editors, but it would be futile because this isn't the first same-24hr-period dupe I've seen here.

What I would like to see is some editors that actually read the site they edit for. You know, one of those "eat your own dog food" approaches. That way, maybe they might actually notice that it's the same damn thing we already read 24 hours ago.

Actually, knowing this site, even that's a bit much to ask for.

Re:Stop the presses

[vlm]

And at the NYT the presses sit idle most of the day.

I worked at two printing companies in the past, doing IT type stuff. The local newspaper prints spam when they're not printing newspapers, and quite a bit of it. Low quality, however, the "real" printing company had much nicer output. I'm sure that in the mail you periodically get some type of "coupon shopper" printed on newspaper which is pure spam. To be honest, I think that deal might be the only thing keeping the newspaper company afloat. Also maintenance requirements are disturbingly high for a press... lots of moving parts, and they tend to be old moving parts. "Not printing" does not mean press operators are not crawling all over it. Finally, if you think about the content, most of a sunday newspaper can be printed up in advance.... so it is. Presses are a big capital expense, so humorously they probably do a better job than data center operators at keeping the machinery in production. If a press is collecting dust, competition means they're going out of business, and soon.