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  1. Re:What about other options on Wide-Scale US Wind Power Could Cause Significant Warming, Study Says (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    I Google'd "deaths per terawatt" and found this: https://www.statista.com/stati...

    But that's paywalled...

    Non-paywalled data is at https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

    I would have pasted it here, but:
    Filter error: Please use less whitespace.

    Go filter!

  2. Re:ISIS much? on All Belgians To Be Given Iodine Pills In Case Of Nuclear Accident (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    Being afraid of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant is an unreasonable fear. A nuclear reactor isn't a nuclear bomb. Suppose they actually access the plant, how are they suppose to turn it into an actual cataclysmic event? The amount of logistic, knowledge and luck required to turn it into an actual threat is higher than many other alternatives.

    Are you so sure?
    What if someone blew up the primary loop pumps and emptied or blew up the cooling pools?
    That's 2 bombs and then you have an uncooled pressure cooker full of fissile material and other nasty fission byproducts in a place that's become out of reach because of the massive radioactivity from the uncovered used fuel.
    It may not go full Tchernobyl, but it definitely may go Fukushima-style.

    This fear of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant is again largely exagerrated and fed by the anti-nuclear activists. They want the mass to perceive the nuclear plants as a perpetual, constant and actual threat against the human kind.

    Agreeing with you here.

  3. They got it all wrong... on TEPCO Readies Plan To Bring Reactor Under Control · · Score: 1
    Page 9 of the linked PDF, on the Mr Obvious decision diagram, the conclusion if there's too much radioactivity inside the reactor building is:

    Feed&Breed / [*] Cooling the reactor core by feeding and breeding

    I certainly hope they're talking about feed and bleed.... There no need breeding any more isotopes at this point.

    Wow, Slashdot is lame, I pasted some japanese characters and slashdot does not render them properly. They are where the [*] is.

  4. Re:Laser Filters? on Laser Incidents With Aircraft On the Rise · · Score: 1

    They *TRY* to emit a specific wavelength, but after time and use, that wavelength shifts, and that specific filter becomes useless.

    I was about to call bullshit on this one, but you are in fact right.

    Diode Laser Frequency Stabilisation, courtesy of UTK & Google.

  5. Re:Stop serving nuts on Air Canada Ordered To Provide Nut-Free Zone · · Score: 1

    in an enclosed space with recirculated air?

    Air in airplanes is not recirculated. That's a myth.

    There are compressors taking fresh (and warmed up) air from the engines air flow and send it to the cabin. The excess air is bled of a relief valve.

  6. Easy as pie in 3 firefox extensions on How Do I Keep My Privacy While Using Google? · · Score: 2, Informative
    Install the following:

    Then configure CookieSafe to "Deny Cookies Globally" (you can easily make exceptions for some sites). BetterPrivacy and TrackMeNot come with suitable defaults.

    With this set-up, no cookies will be created. DOM Storage (super-cookies) and flash cookies will be wiped whenever you close your browser. And you will gently spam Google and other search engines with random searches, just in case they do tracking by IP addresses.

    You may also want to throw in:

    • FlashBlock and AdBlockPlus, to make the web more... uh... readable.
    • NoScript, if you're paranoid.
  7. No Fujitsu laptops? on Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops · · Score: 1

    These are in my experience the most reliable laptops I've ever owned.
    These things never break.

  8. CGS WTF? on Workable Fusion Starship Proposed · · Score: 1
    He must be setting NASA up for an other "Mars Climate Orbiter" kind of disaster.

    Whatever may be the reason, on most of the paper, his calculations and figures are in the obsolete CGS system (Centimeter, Grams, Seconds). Forces are in dynes, pressures in g/cm^2, etc.

    And then you see later in the paper Amperes and Watts (which are SI units).

    CGS and SI (or MKS) don't mix.

  9. Re:But... on Wireless Power Consortium Pushes For Standard · · Score: 1

    8< snip >8
    if it could cover my whole couch
    8< snip >8

    ...then you would fry your balls. Not that it matters here on /., but still, you could also fry your brains if you were to lie down on your couch.

    Not a good idea...

  10. Re:They must run elephants through every hour on Energy-Generating Floors To Power Subway Displays In Tokyo · · Score: 1
    You're right.

    Sorry for labeling you a loser ;-)

  11. Re:They must run elephants through every hour on Energy-Generating Floors To Power Subway Displays In Tokyo · · Score: 2, Informative

    The article talks about a 25 square meter area producing 1400 kW per day.

    Meep.

    You lose.

    Watts are not an energy unit.

    1. It could be 1.4 MWh per day, which is 5.04 GJ per day, which averages to 58.3 kW constant power.
    2. Or 1.4 MW averaged over a day (now that's ridiculous).
    3. Or 1.4 MJ per day, that averages to 16W constant power, what's ridiculously low.

    My bets are on #1 (58.3 kW averaged).

    To give an idea on how much power this is, it is 530 Amps under 110 V. A typical house has a 100 A circuit. So it's generating about the maximum allowed power usage for a little bit over 5 houses.

    For the computer-savvy^Wobsessed /. crowd, that's about 200 medium size servers.

  12. Re:What if we just got rid of paging? on How Big Should My Swap Partition Be? · · Score: 2, Informative
    You are confusing swapping and virtual memory.

    Swapping requires virtual memory. The converse is false.

    All this scary PDE, PTE and other TLB stuff is what happens when a virtual address is converted to a physical address. That has nothing to do with swapping or paging.

    Now, you cannot seriously consider abandoning virtual memory and all that comes with it (inter-process protection, kernel protection from user-space errors amongst others), can you?

  13. Re:the truth is on Plane Simple Truth · · Score: 1

    2 out of 4 people you meet on the street are likely to have below average intelligence.

    Bzzzzzt - WRONG!
    2 out of 4 people you meet on the street are likely to have below median intelligence.

    Which cohort you belong to is left as an exercise for the reader...

  14. Re:Hypocricy on The War Against Virtual Beer Pong · · Score: 4, Funny

    Who's god?

    The almighty dollar!

  15. Re:Local routers defend agaist DOS attack on Comcast Blocks Web Browsing · · Score: 1, Informative
    No. That's complete bullshit. The only things allowed by any router are:
    • Pass the packet, decreasing its TTL,
    • or drop the packet.
    If there's congestion, the router is allowed to:
    • Set the Congestion experienced ECN flag (if ECN is supported on the connection)
    • and/or send an ICMP source-quench (although this seems to be deprecated).
    Forging a RST is definitely in no RFC. It's bad.
  16. Re:The enemy of my enemy... on Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here's an honest question I've been wondering about for a while. Why don't we use GigE or 10GigE to communicate with storage? I imagine there's more overhead than with the currently used protocols, but how much are we talking about here? I'm more of a software than hardware guy, though I know a little about the different layers in the ISO model. *waves hands*. Build in a router on the motherboard, have a port for talking to the outside world and a few ports for talking to storage. Economy of scale and the hardware would be dirt cheap... right? Since it seems like an obvious idea, I'm sure I'm missing something. Would someone who knows these things care to elaborate? Tnx!

    Because the hard drives (and SSDs) throughput is already dwarfed by current wire speeds. The best hard drive you can get can push 1 Gbps (that's bits per second) while SATA and SAS can deliver 3 Gbps. Parallel SCSI can deliver 3.6 Gbps. And when you really need a SAN, there are already iSCSI and fibre channel.
  17. Re:Why not SNMP? on Smart Monitoring PC Hardware Launched By NVIDIA · · Score: 1
    Ahem.

    Maybe because SNMP is IP-based. Now you do not want to assign IP addresses for all the components inside your computer, do you?

    And no, rendez-vous or mDNS (or whatever the name-du-jour is for IP autoconfiguration is at Apple today) is not an answer...

  18. Don't use -B 255, use -B 254 instead on Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive · · Score: 5, Informative
    Since this story hit the front-page I've been monitoring hard drives on three laptops that I can remotely access from work (hi boss).
    • Disk 1:
      • Seagate ST96023A (Seagate Momentus 7200.1 series)
      • Power_On_Hours 1438
      • Load_Cycle_Count 187925
      • 130 load/unload per hour (roughly 2 per minute)
    • Disk 2:
      • Hitachi HTS721010G9SA00
      • Power_On_Hours 818
      • Load_Cycle_Count 90539
      • 110 load/unload per hour (roughly 2 per minute)
    • Disk 3:
      • TOSHIBA MK6006GAH
      • Power_On_Hours 2896
      • Load_Cycle_Count 199757
      • 68 load/unload per hour (roughly 1 per minute)
    Then I've been monitoring the hard drive with this one-liner.

    lcc() { smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep 'Load_Cycle_Count' | awk '{print $10}'; }; n=$(lcc); while :; do nn=$(lcc); echo "$(date) $((nn-n))"; n=$nn; sleep 60; done
    Before you ask, it is only one line, as you only press enter once :-). And that's a short one-liner for me.

    This shows on all three laptops that the load counts increases by 1 to 4 every minute.

    Now I issued:

    hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
    This has stopped load cycles on two drives.
    The third one (the TOSHIBA MK6006GAH) still continues loading and unloading like hdparm did not help at all.

    However, setting the power-management level to "lowest power savings mode" with:

    hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda
    did prevent any more load/unload cycles from happening.

    So in summary:

    1. Use hdparm -B 254 at boot.
    2. Re-issue it after every suspend/wake-up cycle as this setting seems to be lost on suspends.
  19. Ahem, wrong cache type... on Seagate Releases Hybrid Hard Drive · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What you are describing is a write-back cache.
    Brain fart? Or I misconstrued you?

  20. It's true on Seagate Firmware Performance Differences · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have been setting up a couple of 8-drive RAID-5 arrays with these drives for some customers, and I also found out that 3.AAE drives performed much better that 3.AAK. No idea why. Seagate was unresponsive to queries about flashing the firmware and I had to replace all the 3.AAK drives by 3.AAEs.

    The manufacturing country had nothing to do with it. I had some chinese 3.AAE and 3.AAK as well as taiwanese (or was that thai?) 3.AAE and 3.AAK. 3.AAE would always perform better.

    The kind of testing I performed was:

    • hdparm -t /dev/sdN (AAK: 50 MB/s vs AAE: 72 MB/s)
    • time dd if=/dev/sdN of=/dev/null bs=1M (AAK was 10-15% slower)
    • iozone over ext3 showed slighly worse results with AAK than with AAE, but it was probably within the sampling/error margin (< 5%).

    Also, if you buy a retail kit (which I found cheaper than OEM at Fry's), there is no way to find out the firmware level on the box. You had to open the retail boxes to check the firmware revision on the drive itself.

    One theory I have is that these drives can supposedly be configured for server or workstation workloads. It could be that AAK drives are configured for server workloads by default (unless overridden) while the AAE are configured for workstation workloads by default. I have no idea how to toggle this under Linux.

  21. Re:I recently had the opportunity to do so. on Pimping Out a New House · · Score: 1

    Instead of using cat3 for the telephones, I just put the phones on the unused pair of the cat5.
    Bye-bye Gigabit ethernet then. 1000-base-T requires all four pairs to achieve a full-duplex GigE connection.
    100-Base-T and 10-Base-T will work though.
  22. Mod DOWN:Actually, i prefer this mapping software: on Google Maps vs the Rest · · Score: 1

    Idiotic javascript alert() loop above.
    Moderate down.

  23. GFS? on Building a Massive Single Volume Storage Solution? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you checked out GFS from RedHat (formerly Sistina)?

  24. I, for one, call bullshit on that one... on Upgrade Your G4 Cube to a Pentium M Processor · · Score: 5, Insightful
    An unknown korean company does a board plus an OF to BIOS translation layer for the huuuge untapped market of PC users who admire the G4 Cube's design but don't want to run PowerPC software.

    And that's old news, look at the post date: Monday, February 28 2005 @ 10:27 AM EST.

    Bullshit...

  25. Re:Hybrids not the answer on Hybrid Drivers Provide Real-World Mileage Data · · Score: 1
    As long as the electricity you use to recharge your Leo is generated from coal you might end up polluting more. And factor in the electricity lossage during distribution and transportation.

    coal-fired plants accounted for 53% of generation (source: US. DOE.)