Info 202 F12

Recently in class, Bob mentioned the Ambient Orb, a glass lamp which changed colour to indicate the current status of stock market trends, weather forecasts, or traffic levels. 

The wireless Ambient Orb was available for the low, low price of $150, and provided both free and premium channels (this would allow you to create custom channels). Currently it cannot be purchase, and has been replaced with the company's newer device, the Ambient Energy Orb. This orb functions in the exact same manner, using colours to describe its resources, except in this case the data is current energy cost. The Orb provides "All the information you need, with just a glance," and glows blue for very low costs per kWh, green for low costs, yellow for higher costs, and red for peak costs. 

In Google's public photographs of some of its data centres, there are other examples of using colour to label resources. Water cooling systems are effective at keeping servers from overheating, ensuring smooth day-to-day operation, and at Google's Oregon data centre, the pipes delivering water are coded by colour: "blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled." At their Georgia data centre, white pipes carry cleaned and filtered water in high-pressure pipes, ready to put out fires without contaminating equipment. A view of their servers also shows that they use LEDs to indicate the status of their equipment--presumably if a server is having problems, a red LED would turn on instead of the blue ones shown.

These are just a few of many examples showing how basic colours can be used to categorize resource classes and types.