121 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
  2. Feb 2024
  3. May 2023
    1. Gmail does something similar. You can register an email address with a . in it and Gmail just ignores that for its internal email address. So you can get Firstname.Surname@gmail.com and that's effectively the same email address as FirstnameSurname@gmail.com. Back in 2004 when Gmail launched, I found this to be an especially user friendly feature of their email service
  4. Mar 2023
    1. In addition, at least two justices have ties to the oil industry writ large. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a Shell attorney for nearly three decades and served in leadership positions with the American Petroleum Institute, and Justice Samuel Alito owns stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 (Alito recused himself from the Baltimore case but Barrett did not).
      • The supreme court is tilted in favor of the fossil fuel industry through these appointments.
      • The battle to keep fossil fuel litigation away from state courts and in federal court is big oil's attempt to leverage their conservative allies
  5. Jan 2023
  6. May 2022
  7. Apr 2022
  8. Mar 2022
  9. Apr 2021
    1. We will dispatch rewards from our factory to our FOUR 3rd party fulfillment centers, to keep things as friendly* as possible worldwide in accordance with all worldwide laws. *"Friendly" to us means: We will collect and pay VAT/Taxes upon importing to our  fulfilment centers on everyone's behalf so we can send your rewards DDP vs DAP.  If we were not "Friendly" - we would send games direct (DAP) and you would have to pay VAT and admin fees as well as a postal fee to "pick up" your reward locally - vs DDP where that is all done for you and the reward is delivered to your doorstep, "friendly".  It costs lots of money to ship 4 containers to 4 different fulfilment centers - but we do that in an effort to help our backers and to be *friendly.
  10. Mar 2021
  11. Feb 2021
  12. Jan 2021
  13. Oct 2020
  14. Sep 2020
    1. Mais il ne songe pas aux causes

      C’est ce que font les interfaces dites «user-friendly»: elles nous dispensent de penser, elles nous font oublier de penser.

      La transparence de la technologie, sa présence normalisée, voire imperceptible dans la vie quotidienne est aussi une bonne chose – c’est la tâche du design de faire bénéficier une technologie de pointe au plus grand nombre.

      Seulement, le numérique dissimule des enjeux de vie privée que nous ne pouvons percevoir directement par les sens: les enjeux sont invisibilisés, et les technologies «user-friendly» étendent leur pouvoir abusent du fait que les mécanismes échappent à notre perception, à notre entendement.

  15. Aug 2020
    1. Our company is remote-first and will always be open to employees to work anywhere in the U.S. (or the occasional trip abroad). We made this decision with a great deal of intention because we believe creating and nurturing a remote culture is a key to inclusion.

      As we've been adjusting to the pandemic and going remote, I have been thinking about the differences between

      • [[remote only]]
      • [[remote first]]
      • [[remote friendly]]
  16. Jul 2020
  17. May 2020
    1. What I think we're lacking is proper tooling, or at least the knowledge of it. I don't know what most people use to write Git commits, but concepts like interactive staging, rebasing, squashing, and fixup commits are very daunting with Git on the CLI, unless you know really well what you're doing. We should do a better job at learning people how to use tools like Git Tower (to give just one example) to rewrite Git history, and to produce nice Git commits.
    1. A "tag" is a snippet of code that allows digital marketing teams to collect data, set cookies or integrate third-party content like social media widgets into a site.

      This is a bad re-purposing of the word "tag", which already has specific meanings in computing.

      Why do we need a new word for this? Why not just call it a "script" or "code snippet"?

  18. Apr 2020
    1. Did you expect the temp directory to get printed? In the last example, we saw the directories ./temp and ./C/temp got printed, but not now. This is the effect of the -print option. By default, the find command prints all the files matching the criteria. However, once the -print option is specified, it will print files only on explicit print instructions. In this find command, -print is associated in the other side of the OR condition, and hence nothing will get printed from the 1st part of the condition.
    1. One mistake that we made when creating the import/export experience for Blogger was relying on one HTTP transaction for an import or an export. HTTP connections become fragile when the size of the data that you're transferring becomes large. Any interruption in that connection voids the action and can lead to incomplete exports or missing data upon import. These are extremely frustrating scenarios for users and, unfortunately, much more prevalent for power users with lots of blog data.
  19. Feb 2020
    1. The Internet's share of the global electricity consumption was 10% in 2014 (Mills, 2013): As a reference, the entire global residential space heating in 2014 consumed the same amount (International Energy Agency, 2017a).

      Heating ALL the homes in all the world is about the same as the internet's carbon footprint according to this paper

  20. Jan 2020
  21. Dec 2019
  22. Nov 2019
    1. As educational technologies, instructional design and online learning/content delivery platforms keep evolving, more learners with more needs and motives will be drawn to taking online courses – a growing demand that in turn will spur further improvements in technology and delivery.

      Educational Technology offers free articles with sources.

      Rating: 5/10

  23. Oct 2019
    1. While Shehabi et al. assume that maximum power consumptionis constant[4], the Borderstep model assumes an increase in maximum power consumption due to a significant increase in the average amount of RAMs and multiprocessor systems.

      Ah! That makes sense - a big load out in a server, with loads of cores and RAM is deffo gonna make it need more juice.

    2. According to a Borderstep Instituteestimate, worldwide energy consumption of server data centers increased by about 30% to 287 billion kWh between 2010 and 2015 [9]. This in-crease accelerated once again in the last two years. A current TEMPRO project estimate concludes that between 2015 and 2017 theenergy consumption of data centers worldwide in-creased by approx. 20% to 350 billion kWh

      By comparison, the IEA figures generally say energy use has stayed around 200 kWh in 2020.

    3. The analyses and results presented in this article were pro-duced as part of the project TEMPRO –"Total Energy Man-agement for professional data centers." TEMPRO is supported through the 6th Energy Research Programme of the German FederalGovernment.

      Are there similar studies in other countries?

    Tags

    Annotators

  24. Sep 2019
    1. Our approach to quantifying our carbon footprint reflects the complexity of our business. Our team of researchers and scientists have combined cutting-edge life cycle assessment (LCA) science and Amazon Web Services (AWS) big data technology to develop a robust software solution that processes billions of operational and financial records from Amazon’s operations across the world to calculate our carbon footprint. The software estimates carbon emissions for all activities within our system boundary using a dollar-based environmental assessment model, then enhances the accuracy of carbon-intensive activities with detailed, process-based LCA models.

      This sounds a lot like a top down approach as outlined by systems like Ecocost or Trucost, then supplemented with bottom up modelling of specific processes

    1. Purchase green power certificates. In July 2017, China launched a pilot program that permits voluntary trade of green power certificates from solar and wind power. Each certificate represents 1 MGh of electricity. Buying green power certificates allows companies to claim environmental benefits associated with renewable energy generation, even if electricity from a renewable power plant does not feed directly into a data center facility.

      Oh, wow, they do RECS too now? I wonder if they publish them too

  25. Aug 2019
    1. If you’re part of an existing climate campaigning group, think of how you can participate in or help organise around September 20 to keep the momentum going. Link your action explicitly to the school strikes (“We’re doing this because we’re answering the call of the striking students, and taking action”).
  26. Jul 2019
    1. If you are an individual working, or planning to work, in this industry, then by signing your declare you won’t work on fossil fuel clients. No one is policing you or checking up, this is a promise to yourself.

      Explicit about the monitoring here.

    2. If you lead an agency, by signing you promise to disclose your turnover by sector, and highlight any climate conflicts. Check the Client Disclosure Reports on this site to see what we mean. Your deadline is end 2019 to disclose.

      Simple, explicit. Disclose turnover by sector, they have an example.

    1. The backend data repository is based on MySQL. Therepository contains 16 tables that captures the varioussource information described above. The current size of therepository (excluding the real-time data) is 92 MB.

      100mb for all the data, mapping all that infra?

    2. Provider maps often contain additional information aboutnetwork node resources. This information can range from lo-cation (potentially down to Lat/Lon coordinates), to IP ad-dresses, to resource or service types. Our ability to extractnetwork node information from the discovered resources isdependent on an assembly of scripts that include Flash-based extraction and parsing tools [3], optical characterrecognition parsing tools [7], PDF-based parsing tools [8],in addition to standard text manipulation tools. This li-brary of parsing scripts can extract information and enterit into database automatically. For instances where none ofthe tools or scripts are successful on the provider data, wemanually parse and enter the data.

      This sounds like an meaningful thing you could use OSM to augment, and the argument for doing it makes sense - "you like the internet right? So help map it, before you lose it"

    3. Visualization-centric representations often reveal no in-formation about link paths other than connectivity (e.g.,line-of-sight abstractions are common). For these we en-ter the network adjacency graph by hand into Atlas. How-ever, some maps provide highly detailed geographic layoutsof fiber conduit connectivity (e.g.,Level3 [5]). We transcribethese, maintaining geographic accuracy, into the Atlas us-ing a process and scripts that(i)capture high resolutionsub-images,(ii)patch sub-images into a composite image,(iii)extract a network link image using color masking tech-niques,(iv)project the link-only image into ArcGIS usinggeographic reference points (e.g.,cities), and(v)use linkvectorization in ArcGIS to enable analysis (e.g.,distanceestimation) of the links.

      So, it sounds like they're using some kind of computer viz to pull compare a set of tiles to some other image showing the infrastructure, to work out the rough coords to project onto a map

    4. In addition to Internet search, we appeal to the largenumber of existing Internet systems and publicly availabledata they provide. This includes PeeringDB [9], NetworkTime Protocol (NTP) servers, Domain Name System servers(DNS), listings of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), Look-ing Glass servers, traceroute servers, Network Access Points,etc.Beyond their intrinsic interest, it is important to rec-ognize that NTP servers [6] often publish their Lat/Lon co-ordinates and are typically co-located with other network-ing/computing equipment. Similarly, DNS servers routinelypublish their location via the LOC record [18]. In total, over4,700 network resources of various types are annotated inthe Internet Atlas database.

      Okay, this is properly smart, and use pretty much all the data sources I would have thought to look at.

    5. Third, the de facto useof IP addresses gathered from TTL-limited probing cam-paigns as the basis for inferring structure has inherent diffi-culties. These include the well known interface disambigua-tion problem [26], widely varying policies on probe blockingamong providers, and difficulties in managing large scalemeasurement infrastructures [24]. We believe that a differ-ent approach to building and maintaining a repository ofInternet maps is required.

      So, this basically says traceroute by itself isn't enough

    1. To localize overlap we develop a Coastal Infrastructure Risk(CIR) metric that highlights the concentration of Internetinfrastructure per geographic location (e.g., city). The CIRmetric will be used to elucidate the impact of sea level riseon Internet assets temporally. Using CIR, we identify the top10 major geographic locations most at risk, and thus in needof action by municipalities and service providers to secureexisting deployments and plan for new deployments.

      Wow, this is equal parts fascinating and horrifying

    2. In this paper we consider the risks to Internet infrastructurein the US due to sea level rise. Our study is based on sealevel incursion projections from the National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration (NOAA) [12] and Internet in-frastructure deployment data from Internet Atlas [24]. Wealign the data formats and assess risks in terms of the amountand type of infrastructure that will be under water in dif-ferent time intervals over the next 100 years. We find that4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101nodes (e.g.,points of presence and colocation centers) willbe surrounded by water in the next 15 years.
    1. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, said the amount of CO2 emitted by Arctic wildfires between 1 June and 21 July 2019 is around 100 megatonnes and is approaching the entire 2017 fossil fuel CO2 emissions of Belgium.

      Fuuuuuuuucking hell. The last 20 days of Arctic wildfires is the same as all the fossil fuel emissions from Belgium last year.

    1. provide a regularly refreshed set of minimum ICT sustainability provisions (including energy/carbon reporting)

      OK. Here's what I would ask to see in an FoI. I imagine any other organisation thinking about the emissions from digital services would also benefit from seeing these, as

      a) they're likely covered by the binding legal targets set for the UK b) I've spoken to a few asking me for some myself

    2. quantify and report on its e-waste and energy and carbon footprint of the digital and technology services used and their sustainability impacts

      So, this looks like a pretty explicit commitment to measure the carbon footprint of digital services to me.

      It seems like it might be FOI-able, as Paul suggested. Anyone?

  27. Jun 2019
  28. May 2019
  29. Apr 2019
    1. Air pollution contributed to nearly one in every 10 deaths in 2017, making it a bigger killer than malaria and road accidents and comparable to smoking, according to the State of Global Air (SOGA) 2019 study published on Wednesday. In south Asia, children can expect to have their lives cut short by 30 months, and in sub-Saharan Africa by 24 months, because of a combination of outdoor air pollution caused by traffic and industry, and dirty air indoors, largely from cooking fires. In east Asia, air pollution will shorten children’s lives by an estimated 23 months. However, the life expectancy burden is forecast to be less than five months for children in the developed world.

      And we still SUBSIDISE fossil fuels

  30. Mar 2019
    1. Despite the existence of these two contradictory trends, even the most optimistic studies express concerns regarding the capacity of technological progress to counter the growth in volumes by 2020.For example, this report from the American Department of Energy and the University of California on the energy consumption of data centers in 2016 in the United States, states:"The key levers for optimizing theenergy efficiency [of data centers] identified in this report, better PUE, better rate of use of servers and more linear consumption all have theoretical and practical limits and the amount of progress already achieved suggests that these limits will be reached in the relatively near future."(Shehabi, A. et al., 2016)

      Okay it was that same paper they referred to.

    2. India plans to launch a massive program to deploy commercial 5G networks in 2020 to boost the performance and capacity of existing mobile networks, taking into account that the 4G networks (which only took off in 2017 due to a price war over data started by the telecommunications operator Reliance Jio)are making big advances towards general coverage.

      Hello, so they do reference the massive increase in data and data plans

  31. Feb 2019
    1. Last year, Google quietly started an oil, gas, and energy division. It hired Darryl Willis, a 25-year veteran of BP, to head up what the Wall Street Journal described as “part of a new group Google has created to court the oil and gas industry.” As the VP of Google Cloud Oil, Gas, and Energy, Willis spent the year pitching energy companies on partnerships and lucrative deals. “If it has to do with heating, lighting or mobility for human beings on this planet, we’re interested in it,” Mr. Willis told the Journal. “Our plan is to be the partner of choice for the energy industry.”

      Jeez. At what point do we grow a spine and take climate change seriously?

    1. Salesforce was the first major internet company that exclusively leased data center space to adopt a 100 percent renewable energy commitment in 2013. Salesforce has multiple data center leases in Data Center Alley, totaling 46 megawatts, including a massive new lease with QTS in its new Manassas data center.[

      How to do green DCs when you don't own DCs

    2. But despite recent creative claims of being “100 Percent Renewable Globally” from surplus supply of renewable credits in other markets,[66] Google has not yet taken steps to add renewable energy to meet the demand of its data centers in Virginia

      Ah! So they do the "RECs in other markets" too!

    3. In 2018, five major IT brands with long-term commitments to renewable energy[52] and who operate data centers or have significant colocation leases in Virginia sent a letter to the Virginia State Corporation Commision (SCC) asking that they not be used by Dominion to justify new fossil fuel growth, asking instead for a greater supply of renewable energy.[53] The SCC ultimately rejected Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan for the first time in December 2018, providing an important opportunity for additional large corporate customers to tell regulators they need a greater supply of renewables, not more investment in fossil fuel generation assets or pipelines like the ACP.[54]

      Wait, so these things two things are related? The letter forced the SCC to respond?

    4. The rapid deployment of renewable energy and the stagnation of mandatory renewable energy targets in many states has created a large surplus of “naked” or unbundled renewable credits available at the national level for purchase by the voluntary market, driving their price to record lows, less than $1/megawatt hour.

      So, if you're a huge buyer of electricity, and you are opaque about your offsets, it's easy to imagine that you're just loading up on these.

    5. AWS customers seeking to immediately reduce carbon emissions related to their cloud hosting could request to be hosted in Amazon’s California cloud, which is connected to a grid that is 50[33] to 70[34] percent powered by clean sources of electricity

      Not oregon?

    6. Dominion’s projected demand for the pipeline ignores the fact that six of its 20 largest customers, five of which are data center operators, have made commitments to run on 100 percent renewable energy.[

      How can you publicly audit a commitment like this?

    7. However, neither of these options improves the energy mix of Virginia or influences future direction and is therefore not ideal for those companies concerned with meaningfully reducing their operational carbon emissions. Of the 15 companies measured in this report, only Apple has invested in enough renewable energy procurement to match its demand in the region

      Ok, this makes me think that companies are relying on RECs everywhere else, and crediting Apple with specifically investing directly in RE in Virginia.

    8. If Amazon and other internet companies continue their rapid expansion of data centers in Virginia, but allow Dominion to continue with its strategy to use rising data center demand to justify significant new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure, they will be responsible for driving a massive new investment in fossil fuels that the planet cannot afford.

      So this is interesting. This report seems to be more about Dominion than anything, else, and basically pressuring amazon to get Dominion to step away from fossil fuels

    9. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electricity provider and the primary electric utility for Data Center Alley, has strongly resisted any meaningful transition to renewable sources of electricity, currently representing only 4 percent of its generation mix, with plans to increase to only slightly over 10 percent by 2030.[1]

      Wow, 10% by 2030? That it?

    1. pite the coal-friendly policies of the central government. A study showed that Australia is currently installing 250 watts of PV or wind for each inhabitant per year. The EU and US are about one fifth of this. If this rate of growth continues, Australia will reach 50% renewables by 2024 and 100% of electricity demand by 2032. Costs of new large scale PV and wind are now around US35/MWh, lower than the running costs of older coal stations.

      Wow, go Australia

    1. Williams and Tang (2013)8performed a rigorous and detailed energy consumption analysis of three cloud-based office productivity applications. They analyzed the power consumption ofthe data center, network, and user devices that access the cloud service. The study also performed an energy consumption analysis on “traditional” noncloud versions of the software to understand the overall impact of cloud services.

      Are the findings accessible publicly?

    2. Average power consumption can be estimated from single points, although this results in increasing uncertainty. Manufacturers publish the maximum measured electricity (MME)value, which is the maximum observed power consumption by a server model. The MME can often be calculated with online tools, which may allow the specification of individual components for a particular server configuration. Based on these estimations of maximum power consumption, the average power consumption is commonly assumed to be 60 percent of MME for high-end servers and 40 percent for volume and mid-range servers.

      okay, this is a useful stat. I think

    3. In most cases, the “embodied emissions” (all stages excluding the use stage) of software are not significant compared with the overall emissions of the ICT system, particularly when the embodied emissions caused by development of the software are amortized over a large number of copies. In these cases, it is not necessary to carry out a detailed life cycle assessment of the software as part of a wider system. An exception is where bespoke software has very high emissions associated with its development, and these emissions are all allocated to a small number of software copies.

      Smaller, internal software might count

    4. Currently, input-output(IO)tables are published every five years, a long time in IT product evolution. Consequently, EEIO is good at representing basic commodities / materials industries like plastics or metals manufacturing, but not high-tech industries like microprocessors and fiber optic lasers manufacturing.

      Every 5 years. So, when the iPhone 6 was the brand new hotness, compared to today.

    5. rapidly with the onset of innovations, but lag in being included in EEIO databases available to the practitioner. More detail on EEIO data is provided in the calculation sections below

      Useful point. Because the top-down data is lagging, it'll give worse than expecred figures for hardware

    6. It is interesting to note that the figures from GSMA and GeSI show that energy intensity per gigabyte is improving at about 24% per year for mobile networks, and at about 22% per year for fixed line networks.(The study by Aslan et al calculates a figure of 50% reduction in energy intensity every two years for fixed line networks, equivalent to 29% reduction per year).Also the data shows that the energy intensity per gigabyte for mobile networks is about 50 times that for fixed line networks.

      Okay, this isn't that far from the 45x figure before

    7. Assuming that the reduction in energy efficiency can be fitted to an exponentially decreasing curve (i.e. because it is more and more difficult to achieve the same reductions), then the data points can be extrapolated to give energy intensity factors for 2015 of 0.15 for fixed linenetworks, and 6.5 for mobile networks, with both factors measured in kWh/GB (kilowatt-hours per gigabyte).

      FORTY FIVE TIMES MORE ENERGY INTENSIVE THAN WIRED

    8. A simple energy intensity factor for the use of the internet would make calculating the emissions resulting from ICT simpler and more widely accessible. Whilst this has been attempted in the past, resulting estimates show huge disparities. Coroama and Hilty6review 10 studies that have attempted to estimate the average energy intensity of the internet where estimates varied from 0.0064 kWh/GB to 136 kWh/GB, a difference factor of more than 20,000.

      TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES DIFFERENCE.

      Did I drive across London? Or did I drive to the moon?

    9. For example, these measurements might involve running a series of traffic traces16over a period of time to build up statistics on network parameters. The measurements also need to include the energy consumption for the network’s ancillary equipment such as cooling, power conditioning, and back-up power. If this latter data is not attainable, then techniques described in Section 2.8.2“Calculating GHG emissions for the customer domain use stage,” (TPCF and PUE factors), can be used to provide an estimated value for this equipment.

      Validation!

    10. Equipment manufacturers may have estimates of TPCFs for their equipment based on defined operating conditions. In all cases, if a TPCF approach is selected, then the basis for selecting the factor should be fullynoted and documented in the GHG inventory report

      How much do these figures fluctuate for cloud boxen?

    11. Allocation of emissions among independent products that share the same process: for example, multiple products sharing the same transport process (vehicle); multiple telecommunication services sharing the same network; multiple cloud services (email, data storage, database applications) sharing the same data center

      k8s makes this a pain, if its designed to co-mingle services on the same boxen

    12. This chapter provides software developers and architects guidance to benchmark and report the GHG emissions from software use in a consistent manner and make informed choices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter is in two parts. Part A provides guidance on the full life cycle assessment of software, while Part B relates specifically to the energy use of software, and covers the three categories of software: operating systems (OS), applications, and virtualization.

      actual formal guidance!

    13. 2015 GeSI published the SMARTer 20308report, extending the analysis out to 2030. This study predicted that the global emissions of the ICT sector will be 1.25 Gt CO2e in 2030 (or 1.97% of global emissions), and emissions avoided through the use of ICT will be 12 Gt CO2e,which is nearly 10 times higher than ICT’s own emissions.

      theres a 2030 report now. I did not know

    14. The Product Standarddefines products to be both goods and services, thus for the ICT sector it covers both physical ICT equipment and delivered ICT services. This Sector Guidance, however, focuses more on the assessment of ICT services. In this Sector Guidance the definition of products includes both networks and software as ICT services.

      this makes me think that services like e-commerce or ride sharing might not count on he first read thru

  32. Dec 2018
    1. In the growing trade war between China and the US, it seems the world is unwilling even to think about the entirely legitimate use of consumption-based or border carbon pricing either to encourage cleaner production in China, or to deter the Trump administration from using discriminatory trade measures to re-industrialize drawing partly on older and more carbon-intensive technologies.

      How would border carbon pricing work? You pay a tax on the CO2 emissions 'imported'?

    2. Averaged over the full 35 years, a constant percentage reduction would require c = - 10%/yr to reach the same end-point – almost impossible at the starting point, but entirely feasible and easily observed in the latter stages of sunset industries.

      Okay, so the argument as I see it so far is that, change, while averaged out might be 3.68 per year, but assuming it's a straight line, is a mistake, as substition of high carbon energy to low carbon looks more like an S shaped curve

    3. their analysis leads both teams to the – only slightly caveated - conclusion that the emission reductions required to the deliver the Paris Aims (“well below 2 deg.C”) are implausible, by almost any standard of macroeconomic evidence – and still more so for the most ambitious “1.5 deg.C” end of the spectrum.

      Ah, so this is a response to the we're doomed papers from before

  33. Oct 2018
  34. Sep 2018
  35. Dec 2017
    1. direct observations of our own and others

      I has caught my attention because i think it is better for students to make their own observations before they delve into others work. Make it easier to approach it from this stand point.

  36. Nov 2017