Or good old gravity power: Charge by pumping water uphill, Discharge by releasing it downhill, this probably wouldnt be that great on a less than reservior scale, you'd have to reinforce your attic and make it into a huge tank, and do the same for the basement.
It puts out a couple of kilowatts, and is available in large DIY shops.
These things put out such a pathetic amount of power it seems hardly worth bothering at present cost. 13 amps in the UK equates to about 1.5kW power, so these small wind turbines can just about power a kettle - and that is at full capacity. I seem to remember that there is a minimum wind speed required, and a maximum speed they are rated to - and it's highly dependent on where you live as to how much use you will make of it.
At say 12pence/kWh cost of mains electricity, and assuming you have a constant output of 1kW from the turbine (which you probably won't), and that you used it all in powering your home server farm (ie. none sold back), then it would take 5 years to pay fr itself. Of course, if you don't use the full generated power, then you can sell it back and it pays slightly quicker, though not sure that's really a job for the DIY enthusiast in setting that up so there's labour costs in the initiall installation. This is probably at least 50% of the cost of the turbine if not more. In reality, I think the actual payback could be more like 15 or 20 years (depending on location).
Plus, I believe it may require planning permission if you want to mount it on a roof.
I used to work for an arm of a large multinational corporation, where I was working on a large project worth £Millions+ . Two things from that:
1. We tried to get board approval for the installation of a Biztalk server to perform everything we needed for the project we had, and this was quoted at $50k. This was duly refused, so we then hired 2 consultants to bodge around with the existing "temporary fix" system that had been in place for 3 years and probably blew more than that on wages. It was a nightmare to test, as there were about 18 different stages to the data flow through the system on 3 different OS requiring user intervention at pretty much every stage.
2. For the same project, we needed a dedicated liink to another (much, much, much! larger) company. This was something like a 512kbps pipe that transferred the grand sum of 3MB per day. Anyhow, our lot (the firewall experts) had to reconfigure the company firewall to allow the connections (using some odd piece of encryption software - scp apparently to easy) to go between us and them. After four months of trying to configure the rather nice shiny red Check Point firewalls, costing about £16k (after I jokingly said it could be done with a £50 linux box), and nearing the go live date, the project leader asked if I could actually do it.
One old desktop PC, and 2 hours later, we had a working setup. That old desktop PC remained in the main firewall rack humming away for a good 4 months until (finally) someone who knew what they were doing stepped in and opened the one port for the one IP address needed to make it work.
I still reckon that box was the most secure perimeter firewall in the company (and not sure anyone outside of our group knew about it as they would have gone mad).
The last time I was made redundant (here in the UK), I had to work my 4 weeks notice (even though others were sent straight onto gardening leave). I was even then offered a permanent position DURING my notice period (I was actually 8 months into 1 yr (rolling) contract) and after I turned it down (another person resigned and they were obviously 1 short on headcount - make up your minds!) they asked me to stay 2 weeks to finish the project off (which I did as I had nothing better to do and it was money in pocket before Xmas).
As it was, the final project rollout the last WEEKEND I was there (yes, I even went in on Saturday morning that day) failed because of some cock-up with the Citrix farm it was going onto which prevented the package rollout. I assume it did go out eventually, but I was well out of the door by then.
Life in other countries is very inconvenient (yes, I know, an American comment) and the people are generally much more orderly and nicer in the US. This may seem like a shock to people in the US (and a shock to people outside the US too) but I truly believe that is how it is. Simple things like standing in a line to wait for services or having a quick meal do not exist here. I know that for some people that is a charm, but for me it's an annoyance.
You have obviously never been to a busy British Post Office - I recommend a large overloaded main post office like the one in Oxford.
On a related note, Mars is going to be closer in August than any time for thousands of years past/future. Maybe the natives of Mars will flee their dry rocky planet and swarm over here. Welcome Red Men!
Yeah, and I bet it was "discovered" by a bunch of white guys of European descent. Why can't we just name new discoveries like this what the natives actually call them?
They'd do well to "discover" it - it normally shines at mag 12.5 ish (which is about 100 times fainter than the dimmest star visible in dark areas to people with average/good eyesight). During eruption, it shines at about mag 5 (which is only 2 and a half times brighter than the dimmest naked eye star) - there are quite a few hundred of these magnitude stars, and whilst the "natives" may have seen it (unwittingly perhaps), I doubt they would have named it had they had even realised that something was up...
I find it interesting that they would know what accounts have weak passwords... does that mean that they are storing them in clear-text somewhere? If not, then how do they know?
The sites we build and administer only store hashes of the password, or something similarly obsfucated.
But yeah, the public-key ssh2 access previously mentioned seems like the only "proper" method for their access.
You run something like John the Ripper and have a go at trying to crack the password file yourself as a sysadmin using a simple dictionary attack and the variations it offers. There is even a cron job that can be run to periodically look for the weak p/ws on the system.
Having key based authentication is a good increase in security (prevents brute force attacks), but it relies on the user keeping their key safe, having strong key passwords, etc..
Still, they should be ashamed of themselves for helping China - England claims to value freedom as well IIRC.
So the security researchers should not have reported the potential for the abuse of the Great Chinese Firewall in forming DOS attacks, just because it is China? I know many Western companies operate in China - the potential for damage to Chinese AND foreign (at least, to the Chinese) companies is there. Does your company have Chinese clients?
Unfortunately, the security of one host/network can adversely affect all of us. Yes, of course, freedom of speech is important, but can just justifiably leave a known security issue because of your personal moral beliefs?
Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money for a tape backup and tapes, if you lose any data due to a drive failure you have no one to blame but yourself. If it's important, build a RAID. If its critical, build a RAID with some kind of tape or other backup.
Personally, I would not want to be doing tape backups of a 750GB drive that is even a quarter full (unless I/company have serious wads of cash to spend). A tape drive with enough capacity to handle the entire drive in one go will cost about 20 times the price of the hd (Seagate is ~400USD from TFA). If you go for smaller tapes, you're probably still talking multiple times the cost of the Seagate for the tape drive itself + media costs. And there's the time for doing the backup, swapping discs, etc.
If you're serious about backing up your files/music/pr0n, then you are probably better off buying multiple drives and sticking them in a mirrored RAID array of some sort (RAID 1,5,51,etc) and hoping they don't all kark it at once if you're protecting yourself against failure.
If you want to protect against stupidity and the bad luck of having multiple drives die at once, then having another removable drive as a mirror that won't get blown away if you do a "rm -rf/" is helpful...
Of course, as you say, if it is critical, it's likely the data belongs to someone else and they'll pay for the kit to back it all up;)
A lot of "amateurs" actually do work that is too much of a hassle for current science. E.g. mineralogy is mainly done by amateurs these days.
In astronomy, main areas of "amateur" research work are: supernova hunting, comet hunting, variable star monitoring (probably the biggest I reckon), minor planet (asteroid) hunting and tracking including occulation timing and rotation rate determination and now work on exoplanet discovery, and even trying to find afterglows for gamma ray bursters.
In many ways, the term "amateur" almost undermines the level and quality of the work performed - in lots of cases, the data is very good indeed (and often have inspirational ways of performing the measurements) - it's just they don't get paid for it and often have a day job as well. The "pros" don't do this grunt work as it costs too much, but they will pick up the work if anything interesting is found.
Having said this, there are now dedicated survey instruments (eg WASP, NEAT to name a couple) that the pros have setup that are starting to beat amateurs to some of the observations, but often use no more advanced technology than a dedicated amateur would.
Protestors against mobile masts always rile me somewhat - they are the first to complain about one being setup in their local area. However, they are the first to by little Jimmy a mobile phone for his birthday and to walk around with the latest Nokia xx00 phone with multimedia video whistles and bells, and then they complain about the fact there is no reception near where they live.
I won't start on their failure to grasp the concept of an inverse square law.
Both have incredible amounts of data. As for clustering, there are a few computational clusters already around campus for traditional math, physics, astrology
Good to see they know what the networks are *really* being used for...
The parent post seems pretty quite knowledgeable... anyone wanna translate it into dumb-ass for the rest of us?
I'll have a go...
[a spectrum] obtained with Gemini-South telescope (+ GMOS) on Feb. 21.024 UT, shows that underlying a power-law continuum are features consistent with a broad-lined type-Ib/c supernova (designated 2006aj) near maximum light, confirming the findings of Masetti et al. (GCN 4803).
A very big telescope in Chile (GMOS) took an image of the object and recorded it's spectrum (light broken down by wavelength and recorded). From the spectrum, there is continuum radiation than has intensity proportional to the wavelength raised to some power. However, there are also features (spectral lines) in the spectrum which suggest it is a Type Ib or Ic supernova (exploding star).
It appears to be a Type Ib/c supernova -- meaning a massive star, which has lost most of its hydrogen envelope, running out of fuel in its core and exploding -- in a relatively nearby galaxy. By "nearby", I mean "at a redshift of z=0.033", which is still much farther away than the Virgo or Coma clusters of galaxies.
Supernovae like these occur due to the collapse of the core of a star as there is not enough fuel to sustain fusion to keep the star from collapsing under it's own gravity. The implosion creates a massive amount of heat which causes the explosion we see. Different to the proposed mechanism for a Ia Supernova.
It's actually pretty close (in universe terms). (Still a damn long way away!) The redshift (z) is defined at wikipedia. The Virgo and Coma clusters are large nearby galaxy clusters.
It is currently around magnitude 18, and may brighten by a magnitude or so, but will still require a pretty big telescope and sensitive camera to detect.
Each decrease in magnitude is 100^1/5 times brighter than the previous one (it's a little confusing). A magnitude 0 star is about 2.5 times brighter than a magnitude 1 which is 2.5times brighter than magnitude 2, and so on. The brightest star in the sky (Sirius - visible tonight) is magnitude -1.6 (negatives are fine). The dimmest star you'll see with unaided eyesight is about 6 in really good dark skies, about 2 or 3 from a city. The Sun is -26.7, the moon about -13. This object is about 60000 times dimmer than a magnitude 6 star. (100^(12/5)).
Amateur telescopes with ccd cameras should be able to record this. It'd be pretty much impossible to actually see with the human eye and a telescope.
In brief, a star went bang; it's the first time we've been able to see it this early in the explosion; it's fairly close (but not too close); Don't bother to try to look for it in binoculars.
His research does involve the study of local group galaxies and the like (eg astro-ph/0511759), so he is more than likely a senior member of this research group.
From TFA:
The Cambridge University team expects to submit the first of its results to a leading astrophysics journal in the next few weeks.
So that's probably why there's no paper yet - keep an eye on the pre-print servers in a few weeks.
As has been said so many times before, it's often the plugins that kill Firefox off (like Flash, Java, etc). Firefox itself (ie the executable from Mozilla), is not necessarily at fault (though it probably shouldn't die on it's backside if a plugin starts playing up).
Slashdot Mirror
Or http://www.ukastroimaging.co.uk/ - run out of the UK, but members worldwide like Ice in Space. And a pretty helpful and knowledgeable bunch too.
Here's how to do it properly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cruachan
Well worth a visit if you're in the Oban area of Scotland.
Not sure it would be worth it at home - a tank in the attic will drain in a few minutes...
These things put out such a pathetic amount of power it seems hardly worth bothering at present cost. 13 amps in the UK equates to about 1.5kW power, so these small wind turbines can just about power a kettle - and that is at full capacity. I seem to remember that there is a minimum wind speed required, and a maximum speed they are rated to - and it's highly dependent on where you live as to how much use you will make of it.
At say 12pence/kWh cost of mains electricity, and assuming you have a constant output of 1kW from the turbine (which you probably won't), and that you used it all in powering your home server farm (ie. none sold back), then it would take 5 years to pay fr itself. Of course, if you don't use the full generated power, then you can sell it back and it pays slightly quicker, though not sure that's really a job for the DIY enthusiast in setting that up so there's labour costs in the initiall installation. This is probably at least 50% of the cost of the turbine if not more. In reality, I think the actual payback could be more like 15 or 20 years (depending on location).
Plus, I believe it may require planning permission if you want to mount it on a roof.
Looks like I'll need a bigger house.
And better glasses.
I used to work for an arm of a large multinational corporation, where I was working on a large project worth £Millions+ . Two things from that:
1. We tried to get board approval for the installation of a Biztalk server to perform everything we needed for the project we had, and this was quoted at $50k. This was duly refused, so we then hired 2 consultants to bodge around with the existing "temporary fix" system that had been in place for 3 years and probably blew more than that on wages. It was a nightmare to test, as there were about 18 different stages to the data flow through the system on 3 different OS requiring user intervention at pretty much every stage.
2. For the same project, we needed a dedicated liink to another (much, much, much! larger) company. This was something like a 512kbps pipe that transferred the grand sum of 3MB per day. Anyhow, our lot (the firewall experts) had to reconfigure the company firewall to allow the connections (using some odd piece of encryption software - scp apparently to easy) to go between us and them. After four months of trying to configure the rather nice shiny red Check Point firewalls, costing about £16k (after I jokingly said it could be done with a £50 linux box), and nearing the go live date, the project leader asked if I could actually do it.
One old desktop PC, and 2 hours later, we had a working setup. That old desktop PC remained in the main firewall rack humming away for a good 4 months until (finally) someone who knew what they were doing stepped in and opened the one port for the one IP address needed to make it work.
I still reckon that box was the most secure perimeter firewall in the company (and not sure anyone outside of our group knew about it as they would have gone mad).
Good idea. But something about horses bolting and barn doors springs to mind.
The last time I was made redundant (here in the UK), I had to work my 4 weeks notice (even though others were sent straight onto gardening leave). I was even then offered a permanent position DURING my notice period (I was actually 8 months into 1 yr (rolling) contract) and after I turned it down (another person resigned and they were obviously 1 short on headcount - make up your minds!) they asked me to stay 2 weeks to finish the project off (which I did as I had nothing better to do and it was money in pocket before Xmas).
As it was, the final project rollout the last WEEKEND I was there (yes, I even went in on Saturday morning that day) failed because of some cock-up with the Citrix farm it was going onto which prevented the package rollout. I assume it did go out eventually, but I was well out of the door by then.
You have obviously never been to a busy British Post Office - I recommend a large overloaded main post office like the one in Oxford.
But you should really check out version 2! Less dependencies (companion-star no longer required), and much more productive!
They'd do well to "discover" it - it normally shines at mag 12.5 ish (which is about 100 times fainter than the dimmest star visible in dark areas to people with average/good eyesight). During eruption, it shines at about mag 5 (which is only 2 and a half times brighter than the dimmest naked eye star) - there are quite a few hundred of these magnitude stars, and whilst the "natives" may have seen it (unwittingly perhaps), I doubt they would have named it had they had even realised that something was up...
You run something like John the Ripper and have a go at trying to crack the password file yourself as a sysadmin using a simple dictionary attack and the variations it offers. There is even a cron job that can be run to periodically look for the weak p/ws on the system.
Having key based authentication is a good increase in security (prevents brute force attacks), but it relies on the user keeping their key safe, having strong key passwords, etc..
So the security researchers should not have reported the potential for the abuse of the Great Chinese Firewall in forming DOS attacks, just because it is China? I know many Western companies operate in China - the potential for damage to Chinese AND foreign (at least, to the Chinese) companies is there. Does your company have Chinese clients?
Unfortunately, the security of one host/network can adversely affect all of us. Yes, of course, freedom of speech is important, but can just justifiably leave a known security issue because of your personal moral beliefs?
Personally, I would not want to be doing tape backups of a 750GB drive that is even a quarter full (unless I/company have serious wads of cash to spend). A tape drive with enough capacity to handle the entire drive in one go will cost about 20 times the price of the hd (Seagate is ~400USD from TFA). If you go for smaller tapes, you're probably still talking multiple times the cost of the Seagate for the tape drive itself + media costs. And there's the time for doing the backup, swapping discs, etc.
If you're serious about backing up your files/music/pr0n, then you are probably better off buying multiple drives and sticking them in a mirrored RAID array of some sort (RAID 1,5,51,etc) and hoping they don't all kark it at once if you're protecting yourself against failure.
If you want to protect against stupidity and the bad luck of having multiple drives die at once, then having another removable drive as a mirror that won't get blown away if you do a "rm -rf /" is helpful...
Of course, as you say, if it is critical, it's likely the data belongs to someone else and they'll pay for the kit to back it all up ;)
In astronomy, main areas of "amateur" research work are: supernova hunting, comet hunting, variable star monitoring (probably the biggest I reckon), minor planet (asteroid) hunting and tracking including occulation timing and rotation rate determination and now work on exoplanet discovery, and even trying to find afterglows for gamma ray bursters.
In many ways, the term "amateur" almost undermines the level and quality of the work performed - in lots of cases, the data is very good indeed (and often have inspirational ways of performing the measurements) - it's just they don't get paid for it and often have a day job as well. The "pros" don't do this grunt work as it costs too much, but they will pick up the work if anything interesting is found.
Having said this, there are now dedicated survey instruments (eg WASP, NEAT to name a couple) that the pros have setup that are starting to beat amateurs to some of the observations, but often use no more advanced technology than a dedicated amateur would.
Now if only we could get the spammers on a tax evasion charge...
In fact - it could well be a chance occurance. A fairly unlikely one at that, but it could be.
To quote (or misquote if my memory is poor) Terry Pratchett (from Mort): "One in a million chances"..."crop up nine times out of ten".
Protestors against mobile masts always rile me somewhat - they are the first to complain about one being setup in their local area. However, they are the first to by little Jimmy a mobile phone for his birthday and to walk around with the latest Nokia xx00 phone with multimedia video whistles and bells, and then they complain about the fact there is no reception near where they live.
I won't start on their failure to grasp the concept of an inverse square law.
It's affected not effected.
Effected means to have actioned. Affected means influenced by.
I'll have a go...
A very big telescope in Chile (GMOS) took an image of the object and recorded it's spectrum (light broken down by wavelength and recorded). From the spectrum, there is continuum radiation than has intensity proportional to the wavelength raised to some power. However, there are also features (spectral lines) in the spectrum which suggest it is a Type Ib or Ic supernova (exploding star).
Supernovae like these occur due to the collapse of the core of a star as there is not enough fuel to sustain fusion to keep the star from collapsing under it's own gravity. The implosion creates a massive amount of heat which causes the explosion we see. Different to the proposed mechanism for a Ia Supernova.
It's actually pretty close (in universe terms). (Still a damn long way away!) The redshift (z) is defined at wikipedia. The Virgo and Coma clusters are large nearby galaxy clusters.
Each decrease in magnitude is 100^1/5 times brighter than the previous one (it's a little confusing). A magnitude 0 star is about 2.5 times brighter than a magnitude 1 which is 2.5times brighter than magnitude 2, and so on. The brightest star in the sky (Sirius - visible tonight) is magnitude -1.6 (negatives are fine). The dimmest star you'll see with unaided eyesight is about 6 in really good dark skies, about 2 or 3 from a city. The Sun is -26.7, the moon about -13. This object is about 60000 times dimmer than a magnitude 6 star. (100^(12/5)).
Amateur telescopes with ccd cameras should be able to record this. It'd be pretty much impossible to actually see with the human eye and a telescope.
In brief, a star went bang; it's the first time we've been able to see it this early in the explosion; it's fairly close (but not too close); Don't bother to try to look for it in binoculars.
As has been said so many times before, it's often the plugins that kill Firefox off (like Flash, Java, etc). Firefox itself (ie the executable from Mozilla), is not necessarily at fault (though it probably shouldn't die on it's backside if a plugin starts playing up).