Posts by Rik

Another demonstration

of Poe's Law?

@yogi

"i.e. a chemical rocket cannot go faster than the speed of it's propellant (or something like that...I'm no rocket scientist!)."

Indeed, it's clear you're not. Powering rockets is about impulse, and the law of conservation thereof applies. If you're sitting in a space craft, you wind down the window and flick a piece of chewing gum out, backwards, your craft will go faster (an infintesimally tiny bit, but still) even though you can't seriously expect to be able to flick it faster (backwards) than the craft is going (forwards).

APART FROM THAT, THE POSSESSIVE ITS HAS NO APOSTROPHE.

Good work, lads

Congrats to The Reg for getting DARPA to work on this project as if it was their own.

@scottboy

There's a 50% chance you're joking (decreasing to 0% if you're American); if not, there's a 100% chance you don't understand probability calculations.

@AC2:

"Hold on, your allows to run a company from prison in the netherlands???"

Don't know what you've been smoking, but you need to change to something better. The PB guys aren't even in prison at the moment, let alone in a Dutch one.

And your spelling sucks too.

"reach out to the city of Bozeman"

... grab them around the neck and wring the fuck out of it.

Well,

given the pyrotechnical aspirations of Li-Ion batteries, as demonstrated by a number of Dell and Sony laptops, some batteries will indeed come out toasted.

@Mike Flugennock

The experiment you propose, while having merit, will cause the release of massive quantities of Bogons and Stupons. Failure to contain these will have pretty disastrous effects.

Second flaw

GPS devices tend to use power.

So the first thing you do after 'finding' a laptop is to take the battery out, after which you can leisurely figure out how to disconnect the GPS antenna before powering it back on. You can also keep the machine off and just move the harddisk to another system to copy those umpteen million personal records that's bound to be on it.

an exabyte of archival storage

I hope they do actually mean a million* GB, and not those video players with delusions of being a backup device.

ExaByte: for people who don't know their system has a /dev/null already.

*it's storage, so not 1024*1024

"Presumably, PacketTrap's solution boasts an emergency "Debollux" button"

Buttons? I want the kit to provide three commandline tools: bolluxfind, unbollux and bolluxmon. GUIs just get in the way of efficiently debolluxing what needs to be debolluxed, and furthermore, the leaner and meaner the tools themselves are, the less chance of a programmer bolluxing the unbolluxer.

@And getting a HP is bad, because?

Because HP needs to die. Slowly and painfully for maximum satisfaction, but plain bog-standard dying will do. Including specifically Capellas and Fiorina, who've gone elsewhere.

You know their slogan? "HP - Invent". They stopped after inventing how to make money from pigments, and they wouldn't know excellent tech if it did the full-blown extended hardcore dancing on the piano act, with a strobe-lit fluo-hot-pink tutu and accompanied by several dozen Klaxons and a couple of air-raid sirens.

@AC

> but does anybody know anybody who actually paid SCO money last year?

And. at least as important a question: WHY?

@Nice try, but you evidently don't know the first thing about security...

My firewall blocklists serve more than just that one purpose you tried to infer from their name, dear twat. And rather than have all sorts of config files here and there I put some effort in allowing me to be lazy.

I also reserve the right to deal with known threats differently than I would deal with the Internet at large.

@Keith

Locksmiths have a handicap, as it were, in having to be physically present at the door they're working on, and therefore tend to be within the jurisdiction the law on locksmithing applies to when you want to invoke that to keep your door closed.

The script kiddie trying to get into your computer systems can be in the Ukraine, Sri Lanka or Argentina, and do they care about whether there's some British law prohibiting their activities?

@Steven Hewitt

"Vista uses as much RAM as it can instead of just the bare minimum. Once an application requires RAM, the less used components of Vista are taken out of RAM so there's enough free for applications."

So tell me, if it doesn't *NEED* it, what business does it have grabbing all that RAM in the first place?

The big(ish) gain can be in the UPS

Couple of points:

Almost all PSUs you'll find in a datacenter are of the switching type; exceptions may be the odd wallwart supply for a modem. Guess what? The very first thing a SPSU does is rectify and smooth the incoming AC. Next step is a chopper at several tens of kHz, then a smallish transformer (the power a transformer can handle is tied to the cross-section of its core, times the frequency at which it operates. Frequency goes up, required core cross-section goes down for a given power rating. If your PC's power supply was using a transformer at 50/60Hz it alone would weigh at least a Jub, and it would require several capacitors the size of a Bulgarian Airbag). Basically a DC-DC converter. I haven't tried feeding DC at the appropriate voltage to a bogstandard PC PSU (mainly because I'm lacking the required DC source), but theoretically it should just work.

If you're going about feeding DC power into your data centre you wouldn't want to run your distribution system at the voltages the systems require (12V, 5V and 3.3V) as that would require three buses (+ground), at several tens of amps per bus, per system. Meaning humongous busbars and connectors if you want to keep voltage drop at acceptable levels. So you choose 48V, which is a Telco standard already. Or 42V, an automotive standard, if you dislike Telco standards. Or 36V if you dislike both. Now what? You need a DC-DC converter, making the PSU exactly like it is now, save the rectifier and smoothing caps, and designed to work from 48V instead of 150..300 VDC (rectified 110V or 230V AC).

So, basically, no gain here so far. But 48V DC is much easier to make uninterruptable as apart from the right bunch of batteries and their charger (as with UPSes now) you just need a beefy diode, saving the DC-AC conversion step.

UPSes can generate a lot of heat too, as I noticed at a previous gig where the power requirements for the computer room was more than adequately met by the UPSes, but *their* cooling was, ah, somewhat lacking. Pulling more than 20% of the rated power tripped the UPS room temp sensor until we got some serious cooling in...

@Robert Ramsay

"challenged the creature to take back what it had said about his mother."

"Do you stand by the assertion that she is a member of the Mesocricetus Auratus family, and that her spouse disperses the fragrance of Sambucus Nigra?"

Notice it didn't so much fly as plummet.

No noticeable improvement over sheep.