They were serious backing muso’s
1 Like
I’ve only ever had a CD copy of the album and it has a really shitty cover so I’ve never been able to make out any info from it.
Fair cheered me up when I found out.
2 Likes
And labi too I read
Should have been a meatman #*******
1 Like
That these days, all you need to jump start a 6L diesel or 8L petrol engine is something around the same size as one of my early mobile phones…
3 Likes
I so want to marry this woman! 
2 Likes
Socks out, subs in.
I wonder whether there will be a VR version of @BobC included.
2 Likes
That someone either in the Environment Agency or the BBC can’t divide
A regular full-sized wheelie bin is 240 litres (it’s bin day here today) so it takes 20 million of them, not 2 million, to make 5 billion litres. Don’t ask me why that isn’t expressed in the standard unit of liquid volume, which is the Olympic Swimming Pool of course.
3 Likes
And the standard unit of area which is the Size of Wales
I’d be more worried about the amount of potable water that the new data centres are using. Why the fuck Government allows them to run cooling systems that rely on throughput of potable water rather than seconday cooling using sea water or cooling plants, of a primary loop of cooling fluid, is beyond me.
Not really, its just about the money, As always we will pay the price and the tech billionaires will reap a fuck ton of profit. More cuntz.
1 Like
We’ve just got a relatively small one (I think) on the site of the old Didcot A power station. Obvious place really - high-capacity connection to grid power, cooling water pipes to the Thames and quite close to where the demand is, although they are still digging the roads (again) to put a fuck ton (wheelie bins, swimming pools …) of high-speed fibre in. There’s still loads of space and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more. If they really put the effort in they could use the waste heat to warm the thousands and thousands and thousands of new houses they’re building.
1 Like
Are they taking water from the Thames to run heat exchangers or are they just dumping potable water into the Thames once it has run through the equipment coolers. The latter would be wasteful, the former not, but more expensive.
I thought the general practice these days is ‘closed loop’ so they use a fixed amount of cooling liquid and don’t cool the data rooms/halls but instead just the racks or even more efficiently just the chips.
I did a tour of the Crown Hosting (Ark) data centres in Corsham about 5yrs ago and they were in the process of switching over to closed loop. The majority of hosting costs are electricity and cooling so it makes sense for the companies to reduce those overheads with investment in new tech.
I thought that would be the way to go. Yet it is still reported that these centres are going to be demanding billions of litres of water for cooling, adding to the demand on water companies etc. probably just piss poor reporting.
The other one they’ve been doing is using ambient air temp to cool. So when it’s cold out just use the external air to cool them.
The Coastguard did this by accident, the data centre in Aberdeen is right in the middle of the port and to reduce costs they installed a basic AC system that went into bypass when the outside temp was lower than 12c.
The only problem was they forgot to install filters on the bypass inlet so when we went to upgrade the compute platform in 2021 all the insides of the blade servers were covered in 10mm of black diesel soot and ruined 
I don’t know I’m afraid. I think the one that we already have might actually be closed-loop, but it’s not very large. Here’s a pic courtesy of StreetView
ISTR that during construction you could see inside those four bits of plant in the centre of the pic, with the stubby vertical rectangular towers. They looked to me (man on the double-decker bus) like fluid-to-air heat exchangers. But I could be wrong.
EDIT: A quick Google brings this up Didcot £1.9bn data centre campus confirmed - BBC News. I’m not sure I want the place I live to become “truly an extension of Slough” but given the rumours that Slough council has bought up a fair number of Didcot’s new houses and is using them to house homeless people that it can’t find space for in Slough, maybe it’s happening anyway ?
Activate the Bull
Speaking of which, the hospice and I are inviting well-wishers to suggest a short name for him. I thought donations might come in around two quid a go, but people have sometimes been (a lot) more generous Help us find a pet name for OxTrail's Northern Lights ox - JustGiving.
2 Likes
Has Oxy MacOx Face already been suggested?