The used cars don't get crushed as soon as the first owner is done with them, they go onto the used market and hopefully allow less enviro-trendy people, who just want a new car, to replace the old gas-guzzler they'd been driving. The new green-mobile will be sipping less gas throughout its entire lifespan, no matter who's at the wheel.
The trouble is when people buy new cars that are NOT environmentally friendly, those cars also continue to guzzle for as long as they're on the road. If the average vehicle coming off the assembly line were more efficient, then we'd be pushing out the older crap with newer, better stuff. But the average fuel economy of ALL manufactured vehicles has actually DROPPED since the 1990s:
... availability of four-wheel drive. The increasing market share of these vehicles, combined with their lower average fuel economy, has contributed to a lowering in overall average fuel economy since the mid-1980s.
"Primitive" cultures are not dumb when they attribute personalities to objects. Our brains are wired to use personality to predict complex behaviour.
THANK YOU! I've been searching for words to explain why I anthropomorphize machines. Some people seem to understand, others think I'm being patronizing. Predicting complex behavior is an excellent way to phrase it.
And a pox on the editor that approved this trash. Sure, it's neat that you can use a Pringles can as a lens mount. I've used them as coil winding cores, waveguides, insect traps, drums, cookie cutters, and even food storage containers before. Doesn't make it news!
Of course, if I wrote up the cookie-cutter application as "Pringles can provides limitless food supply", it'd probably make the front page.
Ahh, you beat me to it! The Scout was my first thought when I saw the story. It's a shame those aren't available for just anyone to purchase. I'd love to play with a few. I guess my only option is to go to UMN and get into that research program. Hmm.
Any well-equipped police department or stalker should have a wall-climbing robot or two in their arsenal as well.
Reminds me of the time in high school that my friend and I had his computer torn apart, I don't remember the reason. After a few boots, we both realized that it was beeping a few seconds after power was applied, despite the PC speaker being unplugged. Turns out, his hard drive did a rapid seek before coming ready, and it made a pretty loud noise in doing so. Had us really puzzled for a minute there!
I'm told there was also software that would drive the head stepper motor in the Commodore 1541 with varying-width pulses, to play music. I've never tracked down a copy though. (Given the fact that the drive had its own 6502 processor, it could probably be unplugged from the C64 and continue playing.)
Oooh, do they have that on computers now?
on
Hard Drive Window
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· Score: 1
The only drive I ever put a clear cover on was a 10-meg RLL unit. Worked like a charm for months afterward. Of course, it always claimed to be 20-meg anyway, so I guess it was just a little weird. (Attempts to access past the middle cylinder failed.)
After the never-been-done-before "linux on USB mass storage" article, look for one entitled "Finnish hacker writes his own kernel!", coming soon!
"Eclipsed", ha! Seriously though, I read the book before I outgrew my C64, so I didn't know what happened to the Nova until years later. When I started learning about the Vax era, and found Data General an unfortunate little footnote, my heart just sank. I felt like I knew those guys. I felt like I knew those machines!
Makes you wonder which of today's software companies will be remembered in 20 years...
If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It documents and humanizes the effort at Data General, with one team working to soup up the existing architecture, and another team working to redefine the market with a revolutionary new design.
Yeah, you weren't the only one thinking the radio suggestion was deleriously misinformed. Any networking here should be done over shielded twisted pair, honestly I'd suggest token ring. Fiber transceivers might make just as much EMI as anything else. If a 33.6k data rate is acceptable, modems will happily work over cabling with serious chokes on it. (And remember: Only ground one end of the shield.)
Another poster mentioned CRTs as the major EM noise source. Seconded! Video cables are nasty too. If you want to build the whole PC into a metal box, I've seen shielded windows available. Probably expensive for larger sizes though.
Depending on what form your data acquisition takes (Hint: USB!), a laptop might be the most appropriate form factor here. I own a ruggedized laptop with a metal case, and adding internal wireless cards is nearly impossible, because the RF has a hard time leaking out! Also, laptops are fed with DC, which you can filter more easily than the AC input of a desktop. Find one where the case is the heatsink, so there's no fan, for reliability and noise reasons.
An earlier poster mentioned mechanical noise. A solid state disk might be a good way to eliminate mechanical rattling and clattering in the computer itself. A number of outfits offer adapters that'll let you mount CF cards in place of laptop or desktop hard drives, and CF in the gigabyte range is surprisingly affordable now.
Don't forget about software like rdesktop and VNC, if you need to control the DAQ software from afar without making footsteps in the lab. You could actually run a headless computer for acquisition, and do all the control remotely.
If you could provide some more detail about the experiments, the data acquisition hardware, and the problems that others in the field have run into, I'm sure we could suggest more ideas. Ask Slashdot can be a full-duplex conversation.:)
All those chargers represent "phantom loads", since they draw a little power and warm themselves up just a little, even when there's nothing connected to the output.
Make yourself a charging shelf, somewhere in the house. Near the front door is a fine place, since you'll want to grab the phone and PDA on your way out. Put all the chargers there, on a switched power strip. When you're not home, turn it off.
I saw a shredder yesterday decorated with a homemade "[Enron logo] Document Storage Facility [Enron logo]" sticker.
My WinCE-based portable is "designed for Windows 95 and NT 4.0", and that sheet of "tritium contaminated" stickers I picked up at Hamvention has been handy for decorating all sorts of things. My laptop is a chiquita banana.
You should look into SmartPAR, and the PAR file concept in general. You're generating FEC blocks for archives before dispatching them to [transmission | storage], so if one block is unreadable, you can recover it.
Slyck seems to have a good explanation of how this works. They're geared towards filesharing, but the concepts are useful for backups too.
You'll need a lot of temp space. If you're filling 4.7-gig DVDs and doing 1 parity disk for each 5 data disks, you're talking about archiving a ~20-gig batch of photos and needing ~25 gig of temporary storage to build the files before burning.
Iview MediaPro has been recommended to me. It's smart about offline files, supports all sorts of tagging and searching, and isn't scared of terabyte-scale archives.
That being said, Gallery 2 has most of the same capabilities. It's a web photo sharing package, but you don't need to give the whole internet access to it. Gallery 2 is quite a powerful database, and if you're smart about tagging things as you add them, the search functions are impressive.
I particularly like the Fairshare proposal floated by Ian Goldberg, in which you could "invest" in promising new artists. It gives incentive to get in on the ground floor with a little-known artist, rather than to ride the coattails of a megastar.
Any alternative would be better than the current system.
Just search for "archival gold" media. A few companies make it. Most of the degradation comes from the aluminum reflective layer oxidizing, and using a gold layer prevents that. Simple, effective, and not that much more expensive.
Personally, I prefer magneto-optical for the important stuff. Disappearance of the SCSI interface will make the drives unusable long before the media degrades.
Most of the "new breed" CLECs run AC power and air conditioning below, DC power and signal above. So the data folk get what they're used to, the telco folk get what they're used to. If you'll pardon the inconvenience of bolting racks to a raised floor. And you know the last idiot didn't file the burrs off the ends of his Unistrut.
I know of one MCI/WCOM facility that ran DC power overhead, signal and air conditioning below. (No AC in the switchroom.) Talk about a mess. The DSX aisle had so much cable piled up under it, the airflow to the rest of the room was heavily constricted. This was with an 18" floor height, too. The overhead power looked great, though, with its alternating paired colors. You could tell it was a WCOM facility though, -48 was red, not blue. (Old MCI installations do it right: Blue helps snap you out of the "ground is negative" convention that so many of us get into.)
All the Bell COs are solid floor, so everything's overhead. Depending on the vintage, you might be dealing with 14'6", 14', 9'6", 7'6", or 7' frames. As circuit density has gone up, it no longer makes sense to fill a 14' frame with equipment. Hell, even a 7' frame has so much cable entering it now, you have to put spacers between the frames or just not fill them completely.
Doing everything overhead works fine, except you have to note, AC is only in a CO for convenience receptacles. There are only a few circuits, for lights, tools, and the occasional printer. If you had to put up enough conduit or wiring gutter to support servers, it'd get ugly in a hurry.
As much as I despise working in raised-floor environments, I have to admit, the hybrid over/under layout that the young CLECs use is pretty slick. It accomodates gear from both telco and data mindsets.
I just have one thing to urge you: If you're putting signal cable under-floor, put it in writing that when someone removes equipment, they must remove associated cabling, using appropriate practices to avoid damaging the other cables. Otherwise after a few generations, your floor's full of old cable, packed too tight to safely remove any of it. That can happen with overhead racks, too. It just takes a lot more neglect and a lot more years. (Repeat after me: Cable mining is not fun.)
They limited you on the AC power because it comes through their inverter, which is pretty small. The inverter only has to power a few desktop PCs and maybe a printer or two. Everything else in the office is DC. They might've added a beefier inverter since they opened up colocation, but it's still not the vast mega-amperage available straight from the DC plant.
You should sneer and/or spit at any colo place without similar DC capability. For five bucks a month under a friend's desk at work, I can handle some downtime when the UPS conks out. But if you're paying real money for real colocation, accept nothing less than real power backup.
The industry will get there. In the meantime, you can check how serious a vendor is by checking the availability of DC supplies. Even if you're buying for an AC environment, stick with vendors who "get it".
Just because *you* can't figure out how to run overhead power cable, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If you're not running your power cables on their own rack, separate from signal cables anyway, you shouldn't even be in this discussion.
That being said, I'm very interested in seeing any datacomm setup that fills a 24-inch power cable rack. You're in the vicinity of a thousand amps there, without stacking things very deep.
You're also obviously unfamiliar with "superflex" cable. It's similar to welding cable, having a rope-lay configuration of hundreds or thousands of strands. Plenty of telco equipment is powered over four runs of 1/0 or 4/0 superflex. (That's a supply and return for A-side, and a supply and return for B-side. Welcome to the right way to do things.)
Again, please don't flame the entire article just because your experience is limited.
I was referring to the central office grounding procedures, which are partly to deal with conducted strikes coming in from outside, but mostly to deal with RFI, leakage current, and safety ground should some power converter fail horrifically.
Considering that many offices don't even have copper phone lines leaving the building anymore, and the grounding practices remain in effect, I think it's mostly for the latter. I wish Nortel weren't so tight about their installation manuals, you could spend a few days reading their switch power and grounding practice. The SBC documents I linked to should provide plenty of detail anyway.
Point is, it has little to do with pole-strung wire.
A "switching" power supply refers to its internal mode of operation, as opposed to a "linear" power supply. Switching converters are more efficient, but more noisy, than linear regulators.
A universal-input power supply, to which you apparently refer above, is an entirely different animal.
First, your DC suply is divided into two buses, the A-side and the B-side. Any place that's serious enough about reliability to have a DC infrastructure is serious enough to do it telco-style, with dual buses. Either is capable of running the whole place. If both are operating, so much the better, you get longer runtime on battery.:)
If you lose a rectifier, no big deal. You had n+1 on those, at a minimum. When AC input to the battery room fails, you're running on battery, and you have a few hours to start the generator, repair the failed transfer switch, etc. The handy thing about DC is that you can have multiple generators, multiple transfer switches, multiple rectifiers, feeding as few or as many battery banks as you'd like. There's never a phase problem like in AC.
And batteries don't discharge at the uniform and well-regulatted voltage that your DC distribution wants. They need regulators, and switchmode regulators (typically DC->AC->DC) are the most efficient choice.
Not usually! Every telco setup I've ever seen connects the distribution buses straight to the batteries. The loads themselves are given the responsibility of dealing with whatever the batteries put out. Most 48v-nominal power supplies are specced for 36-72v input, to cope with everything from equalizing charges to deep discharges.
That's the way it should be. The DC-DC in each server will take in whatever the batteries put out, and supply the 12, 5, and 3.3 as the components require. (Larger systems will run the cooling fans from unregulated 48, and not sweat the minor speed variations. It beats having to regulate power just for the fans.)
A quick search for "waxed lacing cord" will find several sources. Track down an old installer's manual for diagrams of how to make a Kansas City stitch, which is the basic building block of most lacing. Other stitches include Chicago (in both original and modified variants), running, box, and bundle. You'll find yourself doing a lot of bundle stitches.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is when people buy new cars that are NOT environmentally friendly, those cars also continue to guzzle for as long as they're on the road. If the average vehicle coming off the assembly line were more efficient, then we'd be pushing out the older crap with newer, better stuff. But the average fuel economy of ALL manufactured vehicles has actually DROPPED since the 1990s: from Automobile and Light Truck Fuel Economy
And a pox on the editor that approved this trash. Sure, it's neat that you can use a Pringles can as a lens mount. I've used them as coil winding cores, waveguides, insect traps, drums, cookie cutters, and even food storage containers before. Doesn't make it news!
Of course, if I wrote up the cookie-cutter application as "Pringles can provides limitless food supply", it'd probably make the front page.
Ahh, you beat me to it! The Scout was my first thought when I saw the story. It's a shame those aren't available for just anyone to purchase. I'd love to play with a few. I guess my only option is to go to UMN and get into that research program. Hmm.
Any well-equipped police department or stalker should have a wall-climbing robot or two in their arsenal as well.
Reminds me of the time in high school that my friend and I had his computer torn apart, I don't remember the reason. After a few boots, we both realized that it was beeping a few seconds after power was applied, despite the PC speaker being unplugged. Turns out, his hard drive did a rapid seek before coming ready, and it made a pretty loud noise in doing so. Had us really puzzled for a minute there!
I'm told there was also software that would drive the head stepper motor in the Commodore 1541 with varying-width pulses, to play music. I've never tracked down a copy though. (Given the fact that the drive had its own 6502 processor, it could probably be unplugged from the C64 and continue playing.)
The only drive I ever put a clear cover on was a 10-meg RLL unit. Worked like a charm for months afterward. Of course, it always claimed to be 20-meg anyway, so I guess it was just a little weird. (Attempts to access past the middle cylinder failed.)
After the never-been-done-before "linux on USB mass storage" article, look for one entitled "Finnish hacker writes his own kernel!", coming soon!
I take a similar stance on "Y'all", because English doesn't otherwise have a third-person plural pronoun.
"Youse", on the other hand, drives me nuts. It's y'all or nothing.
"Eclipsed", ha! Seriously though, I read the book before I outgrew my C64, so I didn't know what happened to the Nova until years later. When I started learning about the Vax era, and found Data General an unfortunate little footnote, my heart just sank. I felt like I knew those guys. I felt like I knew those machines!
Makes you wonder which of today's software companies will be remembered in 20 years...
If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It documents and humanizes the effort at Data General, with one team working to soup up the existing architecture, and another team working to redefine the market with a revolutionary new design.
Yeah, you weren't the only one thinking the radio suggestion was deleriously misinformed. Any networking here should be done over shielded twisted pair, honestly I'd suggest token ring. Fiber transceivers might make just as much EMI as anything else. If a 33.6k data rate is acceptable, modems will happily work over cabling with serious chokes on it. (And remember: Only ground one end of the shield.)
:)
Another poster mentioned CRTs as the major EM noise source. Seconded! Video cables are nasty too. If you want to build the whole PC into a metal box, I've seen shielded windows available. Probably expensive for larger sizes though.
Depending on what form your data acquisition takes (Hint: USB!), a laptop might be the most appropriate form factor here. I own a ruggedized laptop with a metal case, and adding internal wireless cards is nearly impossible, because the RF has a hard time leaking out! Also, laptops are fed with DC, which you can filter more easily than the AC input of a desktop. Find one where the case is the heatsink, so there's no fan, for reliability and noise reasons.
An earlier poster mentioned mechanical noise. A solid state disk might be a good way to eliminate mechanical rattling and clattering in the computer itself. A number of outfits offer adapters that'll let you mount CF cards in place of laptop or desktop hard drives, and CF in the gigabyte range is surprisingly affordable now.
Don't forget about software like rdesktop and VNC, if you need to control the DAQ software from afar without making footsteps in the lab. You could actually run a headless computer for acquisition, and do all the control remotely.
If you could provide some more detail about the experiments, the data acquisition hardware, and the problems that others in the field have run into, I'm sure we could suggest more ideas. Ask Slashdot can be a full-duplex conversation.
All those chargers represent "phantom loads", since they draw a little power and warm themselves up just a little, even when there's nothing connected to the output.
Make yourself a charging shelf, somewhere in the house. Near the front door is a fine place, since you'll want to grab the phone and PDA on your way out. Put all the chargers there, on a switched power strip. When you're not home, turn it off.
I saw a shredder yesterday decorated with a homemade "[Enron logo] Document Storage Facility [Enron logo]" sticker.
My WinCE-based portable is "designed for Windows 95 and NT 4.0", and that sheet of "tritium contaminated" stickers I picked up at Hamvention has been handy for decorating all sorts of things. My laptop is a chiquita banana.
You should look into SmartPAR, and the PAR file concept in general. You're generating FEC blocks for archives before dispatching them to [transmission | storage], so if one block is unreadable, you can recover it.
Slyck seems to have a good explanation of how this works. They're geared towards filesharing, but the concepts are useful for backups too.
You'll need a lot of temp space. If you're filling 4.7-gig DVDs and doing 1 parity disk for each 5 data disks, you're talking about archiving a ~20-gig batch of photos and needing ~25 gig of temporary storage to build the files before burning.
Aww, and here I thought we'd managed to find the only Slashdot story in the last 5 years that had absolutely nothing to do with Google.
Iview MediaPro has been recommended to me. It's smart about offline files, supports all sorts of tagging and searching, and isn't scared of terabyte-scale archives.
That being said, Gallery 2 has most of the same capabilities. It's a web photo sharing package, but you don't need to give the whole internet access to it. Gallery 2 is quite a powerful database, and if you're smart about tagging things as you add them, the search functions are impressive.
I particularly like the Fairshare proposal floated by Ian Goldberg, in which you could "invest" in promising new artists. It gives incentive to get in on the ground floor with a little-known artist, rather than to ride the coattails of a megastar.
Any alternative would be better than the current system.
Just search for "archival gold" media. A few companies make it. Most of the degradation comes from the aluminum reflective layer oxidizing, and using a gold layer prevents that. Simple, effective, and not that much more expensive.
Personally, I prefer magneto-optical for the important stuff. Disappearance of the SCSI interface will make the drives unusable long before the media degrades.
Most of the "new breed" CLECs run AC power and air conditioning below, DC power and signal above. So the data folk get what they're used to, the telco folk get what they're used to. If you'll pardon the inconvenience of bolting racks to a raised floor. And you know the last idiot didn't file the burrs off the ends of his Unistrut.
I know of one MCI/WCOM facility that ran DC power overhead, signal and air conditioning below. (No AC in the switchroom.) Talk about a mess. The DSX aisle had so much cable piled up under it, the airflow to the rest of the room was heavily constricted. This was with an 18" floor height, too. The overhead power looked great, though, with its alternating paired colors. You could tell it was a WCOM facility though, -48 was red, not blue. (Old MCI installations do it right: Blue helps snap you out of the "ground is negative" convention that so many of us get into.)
All the Bell COs are solid floor, so everything's overhead. Depending on the vintage, you might be dealing with 14'6", 14', 9'6", 7'6", or 7' frames. As circuit density has gone up, it no longer makes sense to fill a 14' frame with equipment. Hell, even a 7' frame has so much cable entering it now, you have to put spacers between the frames or just not fill them completely.
Doing everything overhead works fine, except you have to note, AC is only in a CO for convenience receptacles. There are only a few circuits, for lights, tools, and the occasional printer. If you had to put up enough conduit or wiring gutter to support servers, it'd get ugly in a hurry.
As much as I despise working in raised-floor environments, I have to admit, the hybrid over/under layout that the young CLECs use is pretty slick. It accomodates gear from both telco and data mindsets.
I just have one thing to urge you: If you're putting signal cable under-floor, put it in writing that when someone removes equipment, they must remove associated cabling, using appropriate practices to avoid damaging the other cables. Otherwise after a few generations, your floor's full of old cable, packed too tight to safely remove any of it. That can happen with overhead racks, too. It just takes a lot more neglect and a lot more years. (Repeat after me: Cable mining is not fun.)
They limited you on the AC power because it comes through their inverter, which is pretty small. The inverter only has to power a few desktop PCs and maybe a printer or two. Everything else in the office is DC. They might've added a beefier inverter since they opened up colocation, but it's still not the vast mega-amperage available straight from the DC plant.
You should sneer and/or spit at any colo place without similar DC capability. For five bucks a month under a friend's desk at work, I can handle some downtime when the UPS conks out. But if you're paying real money for real colocation, accept nothing less than real power backup.
The industry will get there. In the meantime, you can check how serious a vendor is by checking the availability of DC supplies. Even if you're buying for an AC environment, stick with vendors who "get it".
Bad troll! No cookie!
Just because *you* can't figure out how to run overhead power cable, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If you're not running your power cables on their own rack, separate from signal cables anyway, you shouldn't even be in this discussion.
That being said, I'm very interested in seeing any datacomm setup that fills a 24-inch power cable rack. You're in the vicinity of a thousand amps there, without stacking things very deep.
You're also obviously unfamiliar with "superflex" cable. It's similar to welding cable, having a rope-lay configuration of hundreds or thousands of strands. Plenty of telco equipment is powered over four runs of 1/0 or 4/0 superflex. (That's a supply and return for A-side, and a supply and return for B-side. Welcome to the right way to do things.)
Again, please don't flame the entire article just because your experience is limited.
I was referring to the central office grounding procedures, which are partly to deal with conducted strikes coming in from outside, but mostly to deal with RFI, leakage current, and safety ground should some power converter fail horrifically.
Considering that many offices don't even have copper phone lines leaving the building anymore, and the grounding practices remain in effect, I think it's mostly for the latter. I wish Nortel weren't so tight about their installation manuals, you could spend a few days reading their switch power and grounding practice. The SBC documents I linked to should provide plenty of detail anyway.
Point is, it has little to do with pole-strung wire.
what it means...
A "switching" power supply refers to its internal mode of operation, as opposed to a "linear" power supply. Switching converters are more efficient, but more noisy, than linear regulators.
A universal-input power supply, to which you apparently refer above, is an entirely different animal.
First, your DC suply is divided into two buses, the A-side and the B-side. Any place that's serious enough about reliability to have a DC infrastructure is serious enough to do it telco-style, with dual buses. Either is capable of running the whole place. If both are operating, so much the better, you get longer runtime on battery. :)
If you lose a rectifier, no big deal. You had n+1 on those, at a minimum. When AC input to the battery room fails, you're running on battery, and you have a few hours to start the generator, repair the failed transfer switch, etc. The handy thing about DC is that you can have multiple generators, multiple transfer switches, multiple rectifiers, feeding as few or as many battery banks as you'd like. There's never a phase problem like in AC.
That's the way it should be. The DC-DC in each server will take in whatever the batteries put out, and supply the 12, 5, and 3.3 as the components require. (Larger systems will run the cooling fans from unregulated 48, and not sweat the minor speed variations. It beats having to regulate power just for the fans.)
A quick search for "waxed lacing cord" will find several sources. Track down an old installer's manual for diagrams of how to make a Kansas City stitch, which is the basic building block of most lacing. Other stitches include Chicago (in both original and modified variants), running, box, and bundle. You'll find yourself doing a lot of bundle stitches.