I had to make my own cable to connect to the 2-pin connection due to Lenovo using a rare sized power jack connection. I simply cut the end off of one of my Lenovo power supplies and soldered it to a 2-line, 2-pin connector I got from Radio Shack for about $2.
I use a fold-able, portable, 6 panel, 3 pound solar solution for my ThinkPad X60s which puts out about 12W in direct sunlight. I have tuned the laptop's power usage to be between 12W and 15.5W when operating.
With this setup I can run on the smallest battery Lenovo offers for the unit, a 4-cell Li-Ion good for about 1.5 hours, for a little over 10 hours. If I simply close the lid, thereby turning off the screen, the usage goes down to about 6W so the laptop can charge while running. Shutting it down for a full charge in direct sunlight takes about 2.75 hours.
However, my desktop unit, like everyone else's, needs much more power. Even excluding the monitor my primary desktop takes about 85W at idle and up to 300W when gaming, burning a disk, etc. I even saw 450W once when I was pushing the system harder than usual.
The PV setup for my laptop is about 1.5x the size of the laptop. Now think about how big an array I would need (at the same efficiency for my desktop. You're talking desk-sized at the smallest, wall-sized at the largest.
1) Cost, and the ability to use gray boxes (AMD + SuperMicro rocks!).
2) Sun's hardware failings. The more they outsourced the less stable the hardware got, to the point that we were replacing a piece of hardware at least every 4 days in a 2-year old block of 1,100 Sun boxes. It was most often failed RAM sticks but we ran the whole gauntlet of failures many times.
3) Linux provides much more modern and complete shells and tools. Trying to use things like BASH (especially the little things like using the up arrow to scroll your console history) and VI (instead of VIM) on Solaris is painful. I often found myself trying to use utilities that weren't present, as well... the kinds of things we SysAdmins use every day in Linux. I know a lot of these things can be added to Solaris, but Linux "just has them" out of the box.
4) Ease of administration. From the openness of everything to the ability to easily identify network interfaces (on Solaris it's always, "Hey - is that bge0 on the board, the quad Ethernet or the fiber?!") to the more logical naming of disk partitions to Webmin to advanced grep'ing and standardized PERL available to the shell, Linux is much faster and easier to navigate, troubleshoot and make changes to (at least for my team and I).
As I mentioned before, much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings, and moving back and forth between the two highlights this in the most unflattering way.
Ian Murdock seems to have forgotten that we all left Solaris behind for a number of good reasons (most of which have not yet been addressed), and most of us did not leave it on amiable terms. I'm in no hurry to even try it again, either, as neither I nor my company have any kind of niche need for it to fill.
Linux supplanted Solaris throughout our enterprise years ago, and we're happy with it.
Do both schools accept public funding from their local government, their State government, and the Federal government?
Check
Was the event held in a venue created with money from those same sources?
Check
Does the U.S. Constitution have a provision for freedom of the press?
Check
And the NCAA thinks they can stop a live blogger on what grounds?
Exactly
The fellow that had the idea to make a "green" PC had his heart in the right place but his actions are way off...
1) Why on earth would you use a case made from non-recyclable plastics rather than recyclable aluminum?
2) Why on earth would you make a PC instead of making/using a laptop?
3) Why on earth would you use the most resource-hungry OS known to man to date (read that as Vista) instead of using Linux along with most/all of its power management controls (i.e. laptop-mode, gnome-power-manager, etc.)?
Allow me to show a counter example:
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X60s. It's an ultra-portable laptop running Ubuntu 6.10. After turning off the damn CPU's second core and forcing the primary core to operate at the slowest possible speed of 1000mHz (lol), along with making some power adjustments in the machine's BIOS as well as using laptop-mode to modify the HDD handling, turning down the LCD brightness, etc., I can run the wifi along with a browser, email and IM clients, an MP3 player, a few SSH connections, a text editor, etc., all for just 12.1W of power. When I close the screen that goes down to 9W.
Take into account the 12W portable, fold-able solar panel I got to accompany it and the whole electrical profile changes... with the exception of watching a movie or compiling a kernel I am consistently (at least during the daylight hours) taking in more power than I'm using.
That's about as green a computer as you can get with today's mainstream technology.
This outage has been labeled the largest ever in the Pacific Rim region (as relayed to us by a Sprint rep).
The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.
There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).
In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."
New information in the thread on the TransGaming forums linked in the original article shows that European Cedega users that play on European WoW servers are affected as well.
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I got it off of eBay: Long URL
I had to make my own cable to connect to the 2-pin connection due to Lenovo using a rare sized power jack connection. I simply cut the end off of one of my Lenovo power supplies and soldered it to a 2-line, 2-pin connector I got from Radio Shack for about $2.
I use a fold-able, portable, 6 panel, 3 pound solar solution for my ThinkPad X60s which puts out about 12W in direct sunlight. I have tuned the laptop's power usage to be between 12W and 15.5W when operating.
With this setup I can run on the smallest battery Lenovo offers for the unit, a 4-cell Li-Ion good for about 1.5 hours, for a little over 10 hours. If I simply close the lid, thereby turning off the screen, the usage goes down to about 6W so the laptop can charge while running. Shutting it down for a full charge in direct sunlight takes about 2.75 hours.
However, my desktop unit, like everyone else's, needs much more power. Even excluding the monitor my primary desktop takes about 85W at idle and up to 300W when gaming, burning a disk, etc. I even saw 450W once when I was pushing the system harder than usual.
The PV setup for my laptop is about 1.5x the size of the laptop. Now think about how big an array I would need (at the same efficiency for my desktop. You're talking desk-sized at the smallest, wall-sized at the largest.
It's really just a few, but important, things:
1) Cost, and the ability to use gray boxes (AMD + SuperMicro rocks!).
2) Sun's hardware failings. The more they outsourced the less stable the hardware got, to the point that we were replacing a piece of hardware at least every 4 days in a 2-year old block of 1,100 Sun boxes. It was most often failed RAM sticks but we ran the whole gauntlet of failures many times.
3) Linux provides much more modern and complete shells and tools. Trying to use things like BASH (especially the little things like using the up arrow to scroll your console history) and VI (instead of VIM) on Solaris is painful. I often found myself trying to use utilities that weren't present, as well... the kinds of things we SysAdmins use every day in Linux. I know a lot of these things can be added to Solaris, but Linux "just has them" out of the box.
4) Ease of administration. From the openness of everything to the ability to easily identify network interfaces (on Solaris it's always, "Hey - is that bge0 on the board, the quad Ethernet or the fiber?!") to the more logical naming of disk partitions to Webmin to advanced grep'ing and standardized PERL available to the shell, Linux is much faster and easier to navigate, troubleshoot and make changes to (at least for my team and I).
As I mentioned before, much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings, and moving back and forth between the two highlights this in the most unflattering way.
Ian Murdock seems to have forgotten that we all left Solaris behind for a number of good reasons (most of which have not yet been addressed), and most of us did not leave it on amiable terms. I'm in no hurry to even try it again, either, as neither I nor my company have any kind of niche need for it to fill.
Linux supplanted Solaris throughout our enterprise years ago, and we're happy with it.
Do both schools accept public funding from their local government, their State government, and the Federal government? Check Was the event held in a venue created with money from those same sources? Check Does the U.S. Constitution have a provision for freedom of the press? Check And the NCAA thinks they can stop a live blogger on what grounds? Exactly
The fellow that had the idea to make a "green" PC had his heart in the right place but his actions are way off... 1) Why on earth would you use a case made from non-recyclable plastics rather than recyclable aluminum? 2) Why on earth would you make a PC instead of making/using a laptop? 3) Why on earth would you use the most resource-hungry OS known to man to date (read that as Vista) instead of using Linux along with most/all of its power management controls (i.e. laptop-mode, gnome-power-manager, etc.)? Allow me to show a counter example: I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X60s. It's an ultra-portable laptop running Ubuntu 6.10. After turning off the damn CPU's second core and forcing the primary core to operate at the slowest possible speed of 1000mHz (lol), along with making some power adjustments in the machine's BIOS as well as using laptop-mode to modify the HDD handling, turning down the LCD brightness, etc., I can run the wifi along with a browser, email and IM clients, an MP3 player, a few SSH connections, a text editor, etc., all for just 12.1W of power. When I close the screen that goes down to 9W. Take into account the 12W portable, fold-able solar panel I got to accompany it and the whole electrical profile changes... with the exception of watching a movie or compiling a kernel I am consistently (at least during the daylight hours) taking in more power than I'm using. That's about as green a computer as you can get with today's mainstream technology.
This outage has been labeled the largest ever in the Pacific Rim region (as relayed to us by a Sprint rep).
The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.
There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).
In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."
You mean people still use Yahoo for anything?!
New information in the thread on the TransGaming forums linked in the original article shows that European Cedega users that play on European WoW servers are affected as well.