>I have to ask, though: have you seen a government datacenter? >What about one that spanned acres? :)
i have. the 'compound' was acres in size, but the actual floor space was measured in 1000's of square feet, just like a commercial data center. really amazing super computers and storage facilities - but to be honest, the most impressive thing about the whole place was that the entire grounds of the facility was draped with a net. that's right - imagine a small business park that spanned 10 acres or so, and then imagine the entire place with a net 'ceiling' about 40 feet in the air. i asked them what was up with the net and they said it's to stop people from infiltration from the air. i guess that would work. but i guess my original question about the 95% guesstimate relates to the absurdity of that particular way of measuring things in this context. in terms of computational power, the difference of 5% is meaningless (not to mention a completely arbitrary, made up number.) eg. 95 THz of processing power vs 100 THz of processing power is not a significant difference when applied to problem solving. so, unless you want to blow the credibility of your well crafted views on civilian computational power vs. the governments power, i suggest you come up with a difference way of expressing this value. but yeah, after seeing several government labs, i tend to agree that generally speaking, the governmental computational power is *not significantly* disimilar to commercially available power. but then again, i don't really know, it's just my guess based on what i've seen at government labs and my low opinion of the ability of our government to innovate *independently* of the private sector. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
