Sandia's Smart Heat Pipe

An anonymous reader writes "Science Blog is reporting a story from Sandia National Laboratory, best known for its nuclear weapons research. "Evacuating heat is one of the great problems facing engineers as they design faster laptops by downsizing circuit sizes and stacking chips one above the other. The heat from more circuits and chips increase the likelihood of circuit failures as well as overly heated laps. "Space, military, and consumer applications, are all bumping up against a thermal barrier," says Sandia researcher Mike Rightley, whose newly patented "smart" heat pipe seems to solve the problem. The simple, self-powered mechanism transfers heat to the side edge of the computer, where air fins or a tiny fan can dissipate the unwanted energy into air."

Comments

FIRST FISH!

[Anonymous Coward]

I AM A FISH!

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

this page is in memory of Timothy McVeigh, who died for America.

Re:fp

[CastrTroy]

I remember something else happening on September 11th 2001, But I can't recall what it was....

First

[zcollier]

Bwahahahahaha

Re:Don't sit on your laptop while using it.

[Anonymous Coward]

warning parent is goatse link

Sandia National Labs.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a horse named Sandhia. Heh. Weird.

Also From theregister

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently doing some new media projects in an emerging market country. As one of the reasons I was sent there was that I care about cost, I decided to develop the projects based on Open Source.

The main reason for choosing Open Source software was:
- Licensing Cost for Server Software
- Openness, i.e. the ability to change software to fit our purpose
- Security & Reliability and (last not least)
- Low hardware requirements.

The fourth reason was very important as I didn't want to buy any new hardware for the servers and instead reuse existing old hardware and extend its lifetime by using Open Source Server software. We decided to Use FreeBSD, Apache, mySQL+PostgreSQL, Perl+PHP

The company I am working with is a pure-Microsoft company, i.e. they only used to use Microsoft software, and they even didn't know anything about Open Source.

It was a painful but successful transition. But this is not the reason I am writing.

The reason is Microsoft itself. When the local Microsoft rep "heard" (someone inside the company tipped them off), they asked to meet my team(!) and discuss the reasons for our Open Source use.

In fact, it was a meeting of 2 1/2 hours with 3 Microsoft sales/ consulting reps trying to persuade us not to use Open Source (mainy they talked about "Linux" until we told them that we don't use Linux and that we don't understand what they are talking about :-) because "it is inherently insecure, unreliable" and, what was their biggest argument, "there is nobody in this country who could give you any support for Open Source", etc.

Also, they wanted(!) (actually they "required") us to tell them the reasons why we are using Open Source instead of the already introduced and long-time proven Microsoft Software in this company.

Then I started explaining the four reasons above, and when we came to the point of "Licensing Costs", they offered us TO give the Windows server licences for free.

I am not kidding. When I told them that I'd need at least ten licenses and at $400/each, this would be too much for me for the beginning, they offered to give us the license for free - and not only for now, but also for the future when we kept working on Microsoft.

Of course, they knew that if we implement succesful projects based on Open Source in the New Media Group, this might extend to other areas, too, e.g. data servers (we are in fact planning to create a print archive fully based on Open Source now that the technicians in the company see that Open Source can be successfully implemented).

I just wanted to let you know about this fact. The meeting was very funny as they were trying to explain us that Microsoft software is more reliable, secure and cheaper than Linux and I was trying to explain to them that a) we are not using Linux, and b) that they have wrong numbers about TCO and c) that I could prove that Open Source is cheaper and lastly d) that any survey trying to figure out the TCO is definitely wrong as they try to please the company who ordered the survey, etc. etc.

Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

[The Ape With No Name]

"a story from Sandia National Laboratory, best known for its nuclear weapons research."

And some pretty fly blotter as well....