MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

On Friday Microsoft took the covers off a new data center in Boulder, Colorado.  There's a few things that are cool other than it's in Colorado.  For starters, it's Wind Powered using wind-generated power.  This new center houses processing servers for Virtual Earth's photorealistic 3-D.  Read the full article in the Boulder Daily Camera here.  There's also a  good picture of the lab on the VE Gov Blog here.  The new center houses servers totaling more than 5000 cores and more than 10 petabytes of data!

There's another article on the Wind Powered Container data centers here.  I wonder if one day you will just be able to order one of these to use for a few weeks of processing and a truck would just drop it off and pick it up when your done!'

In addition to wind, there's lots of action happening in the solar area as well - here's a link to an article about 13 biggest solar projects.

Denver is one of the 4 cities that now have "Enhanced 3D City Models"  (Details here)  The enhanced models are to improve accuracy, resolution and details.  The models are now denser by 10x or 1000%!  Apparently the Denver Model has 300k trees now.  I didn't go count trees but did zoom around the city for a while and it is looking really good.

If you read the article on the upgrade it has a couple of before and after pictures that show how the new camera technology from the UltraCamX helped.  I did a talk a couple years ago on the VE technology with one of the Vexcel guys and we talked about their digital aerial camera technology - The 14,430 x 9,420 pixels makes my Nikon D200 look like a throw away camera!

If you go check out the sites, don't blame me if you find your self zooming around the city - remember all this technology stuff is suppose to make you more productive!