Slashdot Mirror


User: afidel

afidel's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
11,418
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 11,418

  1. Re:Stone Age diet ? he wants to live all 20 years? on How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years · · Score: 1

    Life expectancy didn't exceed much above 30 until the upper paleolithic, around 30,000 years ago there was a steep rise in the number of teeth from individuals older than 30. There were of course those who managed to make it to what we would in modern times consider old age, but from all the evidence we have they were extreme outliers until around that period.

  2. Re:black DNS? on Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS · · Score: 1

    Uh, with a court injunction you can force ISPs to route a given IP or IP block anywhere you wish.

  3. Re:The US Internet Shutdown Switch on Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS · · Score: 3, Informative

    The I,K, and M root servers are outside the US and are controlled by entities which the US can't directly bully into doing their bidding.

  4. Re: 11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed to Water R on 11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed To End California Drought · · Score: 1

    That's too high, most estimates are ~80-100 gallons per person per day, average houshold size is 2.6 so that puts you closer to 100,000 gallons per household per year. I also question how those estimates are so high, my family of 4 averages closer to 50 gallons per day at home based on our water bill and we don't do anything extreme, we take regular baths, wash our clothes by machine wash, run the dishwasher every other day on average, brush our teeth twice a day, etc. The only "conservation" effort we put into water is not watering our lawn, in fact I drilled out the restrictor in my shower head because I HATE low flow showers and I believe I've got an old school high GPF toilet since my house is from 1963 and most things have not been updated in it.

  5. Re:Question doesn't match on Is Enterprise IT More Difficult To Manage Now Than Ever? · · Score: 1

    I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.

    Then your IT department needs to become a business partner and enabler. That's the tact we've taken, the vast majority of our costs are in projects, and we let the business drive those with us helping to steer them, if someone complains about IT spending we ask them which of their projects they want us to defund. We recently completed an acquisition equal to about 40% of the size of the company, without adding any significant headcount, all because our IT systems have gotten to the point where the business can absorb that many extra units without adding significantly to their workload and the work around the new assets is mostly loading the data into the system which we do for them. Since we've taken this approach our budget issues have become almost non-existent and our interaction with the business have become much less adversarial.

  6. Re:Power failure to the computer on Computer Error Grounds Flights In the UK · · Score: 2

    So stupid, it's not hard to achieve damn near 100% uptime on power, get feeds from two substations A and B, put each one through two UPS's and use two different sets of generators with different fuel sources as backup so you have A, A', B, and B', use a transfer switch to feed your equipment's A side supply from A with A' in reserve, and the B side supply from B' and have B in reserve (that way one of your power sources stays up without a transfer switchover even if you have a fuel problem). If you want to further reduce the chances of an outage at the cost of some increased complexity use different UPS vendors and different transfer switch vendors so you don't have a possible common design flaw in both paths. The whole setup would probably cost as much as shutting down Heathrow for around 10 minutes. I've got this setup minus the redundant generators and I'm just running a midsized enterprise, not a freaking critical piece of national (and international) infrastructure.

  7. Re:The trend in servers seems to be "lousy cooling on Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data · · Score: 2

    but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term.

    I'm not buying it, my VMWare hosts are pretty large boxes and they've used 630kWhrs since June when they were installed, that comes out to $128/year or so, and that's for primary usage, DX CRAC units have a PUE of ~1.28 which means it costs around $36/year to cool. Even with really cheap servers you'd have to have a LOT of them and have very little effect on AFR to justify it. I'm sure at some scale it makes sense or everyone wouldn't be researching it so hard and doing so many pilot datacenters, but if you don't have thousands and thousands of identical servers (99.999+% of installations) it's just not worth it.

  8. Re:End of flight as we know it on US Navy Authorizes Use of Laser In Combat · · Score: 2

    Huh? There's no way a missile can outmaneuver the optical targeting system on these things, the biggest threat will be surface skimming that will reduce the targeting systems reaction time, but the newest class of ships have pretty good synthetic aperture radar and the computer aided target discrimination is getting better all the time.

  9. Re:End of flight as we know it on US Navy Authorizes Use of Laser In Combat · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not perfectly, and the energy absorbed from a 30kw laser will quickly darken the surface accelerating the rate of energy absorption. Here's a video of a 500W laser cutting into a mirrored surface.

  10. Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit on Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables · · Score: 1

    One can either massively over produce in summer or rely on grid power in the winter. If one is relying on winter grid power then the equipment generating that power will only be used a fraction of the year.
    My average power draw during the summer is ~4x my winter draw since I use natural gas heat but air conditioning, and I'm fairly typical. So you design your solar system to produce ~75% of summer demand and your grid demand remains relatively constant yet significantly lower than today which should actually reduce the utilities costs significantly since they will need fewer plants and less grid infrastructure and fewer grid upgrades.

  11. Re: Reduced revenues != lost profit on Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables · · Score: 2

    Do you watch use your computer after dark? There is 400 watts.
    LOL, on slashdot that's funny. My VMWare hosts which are dual 10 core Xeon's with 384GB of ram, multiple network cards and fiber channel HBA's peak just over 300W:
    Last Week-
    average 183 W | 625 BTU/hr
    peak 301 W | 1027 BTU/hr

    Unless you're running dual GPU with a 60" display there's no way you're using 400W.

  12. Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit on Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables · · Score: 1

    The problem is off-grid systems are a LOT more than 2x wholesale grid prices, and storage tech isn't moving anywhere near the pace of panel production (it turns out storing electricity chemically in an efficient and reversible process is really, really tough to do economically)

  13. Re:It depends on your field. on Ask Slashdot: Are Any Certifications Worth Going For? · · Score: 1

    The VCP isn't very valuable, but the VCDX certainly is.

  14. Re:practical-based certs hold their value on Ask Slashdot: Are Any Certifications Worth Going For? · · Score: 1

    CCIE is God level

    Not really, as of 3/2013 there were 38,005 worldwide, a little more than one in 200,000 people worldwide holds the cert. That IS roughly the same density as neurosurgeons though, and those guys do tend to think they're gods too.

  15. Re: There is a reason for this! on Ask Slashdot: Are Any Certifications Worth Going For? · · Score: 2

    You're misreading, the QuantumFlow Processor IS the ASIC
    Further, each PPE can access hardware feature acceleration of network address and prefix lookups, hash lookups, WRED, Traffic Policers, range lookups, and TCAM for advanced classification and access-control-list (ACL) acceleration as it processes packets

    If you turn off dCEF and force all packets through the RP CPU you'd quickly bring an ASR to it's knees. By comparison the Cisco 7200 did everything in CPU, but it had much lower bounds to its capabilities.

  16. Re:SDxC is cheap up to 64GB, expensive above on Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested · · Score: 1

    Google SDXC nGB and you'll find plenty of ads for cheap memory, the PNY one seems to be the only reasonable one at 256GB, but there are quite a few of the usual second tier players at 128GB.

  17. Re:Very cool. on Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested · · Score: 1

    And since SDXC cards are available at ~ $.40/GB (up to 256GB) addon storage is competitive with 2.5" SSD's in price if not performance. It would be nice if the internal SSD was about 4x that size though so you could have more programs than the base installed, but that would add ~$40 to the price which would make it too expensive to compete with Chromebooks.

  18. Re:HDD endurance? on Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes · · Score: 1

    Not really, for streaming writes a HDD is only about 1/3rd the speed of these drives (WD Caviar Black 1TB, 150MB/s sustained streaming write vs Intel 335 at 450MB/s streaming writes).

  19. Re:But that isn't possible on You're Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South · · Score: 1

    At least here in Ohio they'd get their transmission charge, which is roughly half of the cost of residential power, not bad for doing nothing but line maintenance =)

  20. Re:But that isn't possible on You're Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South · · Score: 1

    Residential installations also require fewer transmission system upgrades which can be a significant factor in overall costs. It's one of the reasons my mind boggles when utilities complain about net metering, the power is going to be produced and consumed on the local portion of the grid which is unlikely to require any new capital improvements to accommodate the solar generation until solar reaches stupid high concentrations whereas adding the same amount of total capacity at a remote location is going to cost them megabucks to build new transmission and distribution capacity.

  21. Re:screw demand on You're Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South · · Score: 1

    If you're a utility you have your panels set up so that they rotate to face the sun

    Nope, it's more economical to just stagger your layout if you want multiple inclinations, the cells are less expensive than installation in the western world, let alone expensive helio-tracking systems that are capital and maintenance intensive. The only solar tracking systems done at scale that I'm aware of are solar thermal plants, and even there the newer plants are single axis.

  22. Re: Federal Funding is not contingent on speed lim on Montana Lawmakers Propose 85 Mph Speed Limit On Interstates · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, I've heard advice that, if you're unavoidably going to hit an elk at highway speeds, you should slam on the accelerator to improve the odds that they'll bounce over the car rather than come in through the windshield. Not sure I buy it, but...

    Myth busted

  23. Re: Nuclear is Clean on Renewables Are Now Scotland's Biggest Energy Source · · Score: 1

    China, they're making as many AP1000 reactors as the rest of the world combined.

  24. Re: Value for money on Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out? · · Score: 1

    Now backup that dataset weekly for two months, tape wins easily. Even without the need for archives a minimal useful backup strategy favors tape.

  25. Re:wont last on Customers Creating Fake Amazon Pages To Get Cheap Electronics At Walmart · · Score: 1

    Small claims court, no way does a PS4 level claim make it to a jury.