Wouldn't the panels themselves need cooling too? The ones on earth generate heat while being in the sun.
There are commercial systems that can use open loop cooling (i.e. spray water) to improve efficiency of the panel by keeping the panel at a optimal temp of ~25C and the more expensive closed loop systems with active cooling recovers additional energy from the heat by circulating water like a solar heater in the panel back.
My understanding was that access to very large body of cold water was a core feature for the project. The water was to be used for cooling relatively efficiently or cheaply.
My point was that they are both quite hostile environments for different reasons. In the same way space has abundant power supply, subsea has an abundant heat sink.
OP is not clear , but it looks like GCP suspension not Google one (I.e email android etc)
All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension .
I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)
i was thinking more in terms of tort law or contract law. They probably have a disclaimer and Tos that addresses all that, but given enough plaintiffs and their market dominance, it might amount to possible deliberate/calculated financial harm. It might be enough to not get thrown out of court at least. They can reject business for any reason, but once someone relies on their services for their business, there is always a certain expectation of continued service, and in the event of service termination, they may not need to explain themselves, but they must accommodate reasonable requests to transfer data, customers,etc.. elsewhere. Otherwise it sounds like tortiuous interference.
> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
In this case, people who use GCP have customers and other contractual relationships. Google's termination of service interfered with that. Google also doing this as a matter of standard business practice indicates that they are aware that their action will interfere with people's contractual obligations (well common sense should tell them that anyways).
You can't force someone to sign a contract with you that says "if I interfere with your future contracts with arbitrary third parties on purpose, you can't sue me". The deliberate part is crucial from what I understand. If their decision making couldn't have accounted for the interference, and the interference wasn't calculated as an acceptable risk, there is no issue. But the plaintiffs can claim that repeated social media posts and acknowledgements of said interference by Google over the years means it's enough grounds for a suit. and a suit will mean discovery, google will have go hand over internal documents, depose employees,etc...
In the end, this might be more costly to companies like Google than just giving customers a grace period to move elsewhere before termination.
Obligatory: IANAL, I'm just a guy using big words I barely understand.
if you want best support (while staying with big cloud) then Microsoft is the best .
Azure has its flaws but Microsoft puts a lot of people and effort behind it . We are not that large but there are so many instances where Microsoft reps will come in call with our customers or their people working with common customers will help out etc.
AWS has a done a decent job of taking enterprise business seriously last 10 years. you can get human support but generally they will charge you , I.e if better support you want you have to pay for premium support plans .
They are constrained unlike MS they don’t have non-cloud large enterprise business relationships for decades M365 or AD etc that helps with building the enterprise DNA.
In all three clouds it works best if you don’t buy directly, buy through a partner reseller , who both have the relationships to the CSP and have the people to work with you .
MS is the same network were even their lead engineers answer "well, uhh create a new account and hope you're not banned", when it comes to fixing a illegitimate ban issue.
None of the biggies are good. None of them.
You're better off building your own data enter. Can't believe I'm saying that, but I am. And it doesnt have to be acres and MW and water cooled. It can be a 42U rack.
Hell, I'm a homeowner and have 27U rack with 10U full, battery backup, solar, fiber and a backup internet connection, and stuff.
A small business could easy do this and own the hardware and software to their enterprise. In fact, they probably should. Helps prevent rug pulls!
Now I am curious what is the realistic price a business would expect to put down for a full rack. Say UPS, switch, 4-8U storage, and the rest CPU compute. Without entertaining GPUs, I bet you can get very respectably speced 1-2U servers for $5k a pop. So few hundred thousand probably gets you just an unbelievable amount of horsepower.
You can get a petabyte for like $14k now. Make a massive SAN. Even 10G networking is reasonable.
Compute? You can run stuff like Proxmox in commercial mode and get tons of features for really reasonable price.
Ram is now the big nasty, but I'm thinking with the 500 billion USD dropped on this circlejerk economy, ram will come back down.
You can also get a few graphics cards for AI stuff, but I'd constrain it to actual dedicated reasons, rather than some "AI everywhere".
Backups can be tricky. Run tape, but also run encrypted S3 backups remote, for 'holyshiteverythingsgone' reasons.
I used to be syseng for a small dev company. They had 3 racks by a local MSP, and was grossly mismanaged. Could have did everything in 1.5 racks. I have pictures, and you'd be aghast.
On one hand OAI sell coding agents and constantly hype how easy it will replace developers and most of the code written is by agents, on the other hand they claim it will take years to refactor
I'm pretty sure both Azure and AWS are merely reselling the same HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 chassis with some variations. Azure seems to have only the 16-socket model, but AWS has the 32-socket model.
To anyone wondering about these huge memory systems: avoid them if at all possible! Only ever use these if you absolutely must.
For one, these systems have specialised parts that are more expensive per unit compute: $283 per CPU core instead of something like $85 for a current-gen AMD EPYC, which are also about 2x as fast as the older Intel Scalable Xeons that need to go into this chassis! So the cost efficiency ratio is something like 6:1 in favour of AMD processors. (The cost of the single large host system vs multiple smaller ones can get complicated.)
The second effect is that 32-way systems have huge inter-processor cache synchronisation overheads. Only very carefully coded software can scale to use thousands of cores without absolutely drowning in cache line invalidations.
At these scales you're almost always better off scaling out "medium" sized boxes. A single writer and multiple read-only secondary replicas will take you very far, up to hundreds of gigabits of aggregate database traffic.
There are liquidity preferences, nobody took a haircut, they may not made a lot of money as long as the sale price($5.1B) is greater than funds raised($1.2B) everyone made some money not as much as they thought, but nevertheless some.
The reason may be different than you think, Capital One is known for its aggressive marketing campaigns and physical mail spam, it is more likely they didn't want to upset the customers and end users on what Capital One will mean
It is quite likely Capitial one will mine the data, monetize the brand, sell other products and target high value users the typical Brex user.
Liquidation preferences may have multiples. A 3x liquidation preference would have erased most gains for anyone who didn’t raise in the last round, employees and founders included.
> as the sale price($5.1B) is greater than funds raised($1.2B) everyone made some money
Absolutely not true. It means someone made money, but it very much does not mean that "everyone" made some money.
In deals like this, common stock often is valued at $0, and employees are instead given a 4-year grant of RSUs in the new company. In other words, their time at Brex was worthless, and they have to last 4 years to get anything. The schedule is often back loaded (eg $0 in the first 2 years, 50% at year 3 and 4). Since most folks won't make it to 3 years, the company knows they won't be paying out almost any of these grants.
Is it though? It feels so better than Google results[1], while being still built partly with Google results.
In the last 3 years as a Kagi customer i have rarely if ever felt the need to use bangs !g and on few occasions i did use them, it was with instant regret.
In the previous decade or so using DDG, using bangs !g Google would be 30-50% of searches, i would have to consciously try the results first instead of starting with !g and then think to myself DDG was at least getting the query data to improve their results.
[1] While the de-cluttered UI is a relief, on just the results list comparison, Google search is so bad that less time saved in not redrafting the queries constantly, filtering out the spam, the AI summaries, sponsored content, all the "cards" , recommended search listicles on is worth more than the $10/month.
DDG's results are primarily Bing results while Kagi's results are primarily Google results. It makes sense that you feel the need to escape from Bing to Google more often than from Google to Google.
Perhaps, but each time I do go to Google the results are painfully bad. I don't think Kagi is just proxying Google- while they do use it as a core source, they rerank much better
The blog post talks about that specifically - Bing unlike Google does have Index licensing program but their terms forbid reordering that is key reason Kagi is not also using Bing in their index mix.
My point is Kagi is similar to a car tuning company like Hennessey, Brabus they take a base product and make it much better for a premium, they are not selling knock-offs.
Market share is based on factual consumption numbers however subsidized or regulated by a government not free will.
Choice/Free will is an arbitrary line in the sand, one could argue how much choice we have about consuming google search when it is "85-90"% monopolistic business with well documented anti-competitive practices.
Chinese consumers perhaps have more choice than we do, Baidu is only about 60% market share. They do get to choose, it more that Google is not one of the options available to them, it is not like if not Baidu then it is a Phone Book.
There are commercial systems that can use open loop cooling (i.e. spray water) to improve efficiency of the panel by keeping the panel at a optimal temp of ~25C and the more expensive closed loop systems with active cooling recovers additional energy from the heat by circulating water like a solar heater in the panel back.
reply