GRcade

Ad7 wrote:

Moggy wrote:A story to cheer Ad7 up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48512697

I saw that this morning. Utterly gooseberry fool road summed up by a motorway needing a relief road to save it from itself. banana split of a road. They should blast those tunnels out and make it an actual 3 lane motorway rather than a jumped up dual carriageway with long off and on ramps.

That stretch of the M4 really is dreadful, the relief road was desperately needed.

It reminds me a bit of what has happened at Stonehenge over the years, plans being put forward only to be scrapped over and over again, which means no improvements are made, and the queues just get worse.

Maybe people should use more public transport or at least smaller, more fuel efficient cars.

Green Gecko wrote:Maybe people should use more public transport or at least smaller, more fuel efficient cars.

But that's the problem, this is a problem that cannot reasonably be solved by public transport. There is a portion of "local" traffic that could be taken up by improvements to public transport within Newport and the immediate surrounding areas and yes that would help alleviate matters, but beyond that there are thousands of people travelling E<->W on that stretch daily for whom there is no valid public transport option. Similarly this stretch sees a high level of freight traffic daily as well, all of which is being funnelled through a ridiculous two lane bottleneck.

Public transport can help but the core road infrastructure is simply not fit for purpose.

I accept that, but what I rather should say is better infrastructure of all types, not only fitting more cars on the road. And you can alleviate the impact of new motorways by having more fuel efficient, smaller cars on the road that aren't physically filling the road with 75% unoccupied vessels, with enormous carbon footprints just to get from a to b.

Maybe it will get approved in the future when the emissions aren't so bad, yes it's obviously impactful to carve through the environment but it's the noise and fuel pollution that drives the wildlife away the most as well as having a substantial impact on air quality for neighbouring communities, which reduces QoL and increases disease.

Green Gecko wrote:I accept that, but what I rather should say is better infrastructure of all types, not only fitting more cars on the road.

Which is a perfectly fair point and attention is desperately needed across so many areas where transport is concerned - the quality and layout of roads, the availability and affordability of bus and rail links, improving accessibility to services for those with differing needs etc. It's just another area that seems to have been largely ignored by successive governments sadly.

But this is the ANN.OY thread, don't come in here with reasonable suggestions and deny us our right to yell at the clouds!

Oh yeah sorry, may the ranting continue. Personally reading that article it was good to see some environmental stonewalling in the right direction but I can also see how massively frustrating that is for commuters and road users. My stance in general is that road use should not be so necessary in this century! And car manufacturers need to get their gooseberry fool together with regards to emissions and dependency on fossil fuels.

I like cars, but I dislike their size, prevalence and pollution.

Even if all cars were electric and thus creating zero emissions, there'd still be horrendous traffic jams on the M4 because it's a major bottleneck on the main route between London/Southern England and Ireland.

That's why we need it to be 2015 already.
Bring on the flying cars!

Vermilion wrote:Even if all cars were electric and thus creating zero emissions, there'd still be horrendous traffic jams on the M4 because it's a major bottleneck on the main route between London/Southern England and Ireland.

What if the cars were all automated/self-driving, would that improve things?

Green Gecko wrote:Maybe people should use more public transport or at least smaller, more fuel efficient cars.

I ride a push bike every day, but the occasion I do need to use that banana split road is when the car comes out. There's nothing more I can do, there's rarely buses on it.

I basically cycled everywhere for the first 31 years of my life so y'know I've done my bit now.

Jenuall wrote:I basically cycled everywhere for the first 31 years of my life so y'know I've done my bit now.

I don't have kids, I don't smoke and I barely drive. My carbon footprint is so low I might treat myself to a lorry to drive about in 1st gear everywhere

Ad7 wrote:

Jenuall wrote:I basically cycled everywhere for the first 31 years of my life so y'know I've done my bit now.

I don't have kids, I don't smoke and I barely drive. My carbon footprint is so low I might treat myself to a lorry to drive about in 1st gear everywhere

Go for it, once you get something that is recording your efficiency in gallons per mile rather than the other way around then you know you are on to a winner.

I did that personal carbon check thing the WWF put out, and I'm something like 30% my "allowed" footprint and several years ahead of the target.

But that's only really because I stay at home all day every day posting on GRcade.

Green Gecko wrote:I did that personal carbon check thing the WWF put out, and I'm something like 30% my "allowed" footprint and several years ahead of the target.

But that's only really because I stay at home all day every day posting on GRcade.

Semi serious point on that note - do we have any info on how "green" the hosting alternatives are for this place and is that something we are taking into account when looking at a move? I know we are but a tiny spec on the internet when it comes down to it but every little helps and all that. We don't want to be hosted by Amazon or whoever if it turns out they are powering their servers from individual diesel generators or something!

Jenuall wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:I did that personal carbon check thing the WWF put out, and I'm something like 30% my "allowed" footprint and several years ahead of the target.

But that's only really because I stay at home all day every day posting on GRcade.

Semi serious point on that note - do we have any info on how "green" the hosting alternatives are for this place and is that something we are taking into account when looking at a move? I know we are but a tiny spec on the internet when it comes down to it but every little helps and all that. We don't want to be hosted by Amazon or whoever if it turns out they are powering their servers from individual diesel generators or something!

Our server is actually pretty clean at the moment, take a look here: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/datacentres.xml

GRcade is green. 70% of heat emitted is dispersed by water cooling and redundancy of air condition reduces power consumption by 50% compared to other datacentres.

I'm not sure about the power source, but it is based in France so almost certainly about 80% nuclear.

PUE is 1.1. The average is 1.8, "industry leading" is 1.07 to 1.2 (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/arc ... pue-is-1-8)

PUE is the ratio of total amount of energy used by a computer data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment. PUE is the inverse of data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE). PUE was originally developed by a consortium called The Green Grid.

NB: Amazon servers are pretty efficient (it reduces cost and so is a win-win for them), they generally report a PUE of 1.1 according to that source.

It's something I'll consider when looking at the hosting options more specifically, but hosting is one of those industries that has low power consumption in its best interests because by the far the most expensive part of running a datacentre besides infrastructure, staff and hardware is energy consumption. If we end up using a virtualised instance instead of the dedicated machine we're currently on then our footprint would be absolutely miniscule; barely detectable, and that's the way most hosting solutions are headed at the moment.

However it does appear that metric doesn't take account of the entire facility so that might be some positive number games going on; lighting and other electric use is still going to be a factor in overheads. They probably use LEDs and automatic light timers for walking through the facility and it almost certainly runs in the dark because there's no point paying for the power use. Most of the jobs will be remote rather than on-site which reduces the need for offices, cafeterias and the like.

Green Gecko wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:I did that personal carbon check thing the WWF put out, and I'm something like 30% my "allowed" footprint and several years ahead of the target.

But that's only really because I stay at home all day every day posting on GRcade.

Semi serious point on that note - do we have any info on how "green" the hosting alternatives are for this place and is that something we are taking into account when looking at a move? I know we are but a tiny spec on the internet when it comes down to it but every little helps and all that. We don't want to be hosted by Amazon or whoever if it turns out they are powering their servers from individual diesel generators or something!

Our server is actually pretty clean at the moment, take a look here: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/datacentres.xml

GRcade is green. 70% of heat emitted is dispersed by water cooling and redundancy of air condition reduces power consumption by 50% compared to other datacentres.

I'm not sure about the power source, but it is based in France so almost certainly about 80% nuclear.

PUE is 1.1. The average is 1.8, "industry leading" is 1.07 to 1.2 (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/arc ... pue-is-1-8)

PUE is the ratio of total amount of energy used by a computer data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment. PUE is the inverse of data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE). PUE was originally developed by a consortium called The Green Grid.

NB: Amazon servers are pretty efficient (it reduces cost and so is a win-win for them), they generally report a PUE of 1.1 according to that source.

It's something I'll consider when looking at the hosting options more specifically, but hosting is one of those industries that has low power consumption in its best interests because by the far the most expensive part of running a datacentre besides infrastructure, staff and hardware is energy consumption. If we end up using a virtualised instance instead of the dedicated machine we're currently on then our footprint would be absolutely miniscule; barely detectable, and that's the way most hosting solutions are headed at the moment.

However it does appear that metric doesn't take account of the entire facility so that might be some positive number games going on; lighting and other electric use is still going to be a factor in overheads. They probably use LEDs and automatic light timers for walking through the facility and it almost certainly runs in the dark because there's no point paying for the power use. Most of the jobs will be remote rather than on-site which reduces the need for offices, cafeterias and the like.

Cool, thanks for the info GG.

We should rebrand ourselves as GReencade

Preezy wrote:

Vermilion wrote:Even if all cars were electric and thus creating zero emissions, there'd still be horrendous traffic jams on the M4 because it's a major bottleneck on the main route between London/Southern England and Ireland.

What if the cars were all automated/self-driving, would that improve things?

Not if you have more vehicles than the capacity of the road, which is the situation that exists there at the moment.

Just took that WWF calculator, seems like a useful way to get a high level view of things but there were some very dubiously structured questions and it can't be all that accurate based on the level of detail they are capturing. For example why ask me what type of house and how many bedrooms, but no other details about age or size of property, construction materials etc. A newer modest sized 4 bed detached will probably be more economical than a 1940s 2 bed terrace but I bet this calculator ramps up the value for the former rather than the latter.

I came out at 131% which is insane and I imagine is mostly down to the large amount of commuting I do (~350 miles per week), despite the fact that my fuel burn rate is barely higher than it was when I did less than half the number of miles due to the difference in driving conditions, not being in so much stop/start traffic etc.

Fake edit: Just spotted there is a breakdown section - and as expected the big two are home and car Re-ran the test putting in my old mileage and house details and it has dropped my overall percentage to 64% - less than half of the previous value. But in reality my fuel consumption has only gone up by 60% by the additional miles and my household bills have stayed constant so there's no way it should have jumped up to 131%

The tips it gives are also pointless. "Try switching to energy saving lightbulbs!" I literally just told you that I already use these!

I appreciate the goal of what it is trying to do but they really need to work with better data and look at how they are modelling things.

Try energy saving bulbs m8