Posts by Vath 7 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2015
It's cheaper to make hydrogen.
You could even use excess renewable power to generate it, perhaps not in large quantities yet, but it'd be an interesting way to rebalance the grid. Too much renewable power for the current grid demand: generate some H2. Not enough renewable to meet H2 demand: crank up the nuclear baseline. It could actually all work out quite elegantly.
Two 512 MiB flash disks on a student budget back in the early naughties would have been an indefensible indulgence!
I've also fell foul of the power supply killer, as always my PC was plugged into an extension bar that was lost down the back of the desk, needing to unplug it I reached in as far as I could and tried to pull the plug. The plug got half way out before slipping out of my overreaching grasp, cue some buzzing noise as the contacts arc across the small gap shortly followed by a loud bang from the PC case.
Lesson #2: unplug leads from the PC end first, then reach behind the freaking desk.
Icon for what the disk replacement and redundant backup budget was actually spent on.
Back in my university days I couldn't quite afford to replace a slowly dying drive so every few weeks when Windows ME decided it was too corrupt to boot I'd reinstall it.
Now, being a savvy if inexperienced CompSci student I kept a backup of my work on a USB stick, these frequent formats had taught me the value of such very quickly. I tended to leave my backup USB plugged in at all times when I was working at my desk so I could take very very regular backups of my project code while working on a PC with the inherent stability of a US President.
Back then the first step in installing Windows was to format the disk, this is before it checks to tell you if your disk is going to be big enough or not. So away I go, performing the regular chore of reinstalling secure in the knowledge that I'd done this a dozen or so times already and the C drive is always the first on the list. It'll take half an hour or so to do that so off I wander to fetch a cuppa. On returning to my desk 10 mins later I find drive 1 nicely formatted and integrity checked, ready to install Windows, that was quick but oh well I won't complain. Hit next (was it space key or enter, I can't recall), select the freshly formatted drive 1, next again.... insufficient space!? Hmmm, reach for my trusty calculator and convert the huge number of bytes into something comprehensible. 512 MiB, but my C: is 40 GiB, it's my flash drive that's... OH F$@K!!!
In hindsight I suppose it wasn't the platter that was failing but the controller, and when it finally failed completely the disk wasn't even enumerated by the BIOS. Lesson learned: always check that the backup media is disconnected when not in use.
The need is seconded.
I'd like to point out that although the need is great so too is the task. It is my opinion that measurements of computational exertion can only be divided into the number of operations required or the time required for such operations to complete on a known set of hardware. With this assumption I'd like to make a few suggestions:
* The Moon Mission (estimated total processing power used in the Apollo 11 mission)
* The Colossus (estimated total processing power used by the Colossus machine to break enigma during WWII)
* The BlockChain (estimated total processing power required to mine all 1 million BitCoin)
These are just my suggestions.
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