Bah, just use the chassis as return; the frames might only be steel, but there's a good amount of it. That and I suggest 600V for truly limiting the amount of power lost through cables. ;)

You'd end up with servers welded to the rack.

Power losses increase with the square of the current - going from 5A to 10A means your cable losses quadruple. These are known as IIR losses (or I^2R losses).

Steel (iron) is an OK conductor of electricity - not great, but OK, so you'd have large losses of energy from the chassis itself (if you thought your racks were hot, well, now imagine the rack itself emitting heat!).

And unless the servers are contacted on practically every surface evenly, point-heating will take place that will weld the chassis to the server.

In fact, that's how an electrical welder works - a low-voltage high current source is all you need. Pass that current through a steel rod and it'll heat up and melt. (You want high current - voltage doesn't really matter - IIR remember? Double the current, quadruple the power).

Heck, it's a nifty physics demonstration when you take a step down transformer that takes line voltage of 120V and step it to 1.2V - that can get you 100A easily (with only a 1A draw at the other end) and that's sufficient for a demonstration. Remember, in welding, you're really creating a dead short.

it's why big racks often do get 208V, 240V or more into them - it's much easier to use thinner cables.

Which is nothing but a blight on software development. I mean, why is it that a bunch of supposedly well educated, knowledgeable people are so anti-social enough that they cannot raise their level of communication above an adolescent?

I develop software, and about the most immature it gets is the sparingly placed curse (the f-bomb is even more rare). No one's calling in death threats, or trying to intimidate others. Emails, forums, etc., are all kept at a high level of professionalism, yet are still casual communications with developers sharing ideas, hints, and providing help. Don't know perl? Well, here's a perl script you can use, how it works so you can try implementing it in your favorite language.

Those sort of messages on forums get deleted and banned purely as the entire audience is adult enough to be able to communicate clearly without resorting to childish attacks.

Hell, I would expect it if gamers were mostly teenagers, but the average gamer is in the mid 30s and the age has been rising steadily. Or is there something about video games that can turn an adult into a blubbering 12 year old with maturity to match?

Soviet doctrine (and the broader Marxist doctrine) distinguishes between "personal property" and "private property". Things like furniture or car would be considered personal property, and hence okay. Land, means of (large-scale) production like workshops and factories etc, would be considered private property if owned, and that was banned. Houses and other things that straddled the line could be treated differently depending on the country and the era.

After the first revolution in February, 1917 (the one that saw the tsar abdicate), Russia became a capitalist republic. That lasted for 8 months.

After the second revolution in October, 1917, the power was in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, most of which were under Bolshevik control already.

In 1918, the power was very briefly (and largely nominally) exercised by the Constituent Assembly. It lasted for 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

By the end of 1918, Bolsheviks have purged the only remaining minority party that shared the power with them in the soviets, the left esers.

So, where do the "few years after the Russian revolution" come from?

They didn't call themselves communist. They had communist parties, which were ostensibly dedicated to the goal of achieving communism - eventually, sometime in the future.

As Soviet joke went, a party lecturer holding a class on dialectic materialism in a remote village said to the audience: "Cheer up, comrades! Communism is on the horizon!"

One of the peasants in the audience raises his hand and asks a question, "Comrade, what is a horizon?"

The lecturer answered, "A horizon is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth seems to meet, which always remains the same distance from us as we walk towards it."

None of those countries actually called themselves "communist", they were all "socialist". Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example. Communism, just as you say, was a label for a hypothetical future society that was just around the corner, kinda like fusion.

The one place where you'd see actual communist countries mentioned was in Soviet sci-fi. E.g. in Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, its early stages see an economic and scientific competition before the remainder of the Western world, headed by the USA, and the USCR - Union of Soviet Communist Republics - a result of the merger of all socialist states, with USSR and China as two cores, once communism was achieved in them.

Yup. The supreme irony is that capitalism did create the conditions for its own demise, as Marx predicted. Where he was wrong is the conditions themselves - he thought that communism would come first, and post-scarcity would only become feasible later. Turned out it's the other way around. Wait and see.

These guys don't need smallpox, because they're doing just fine with plain old JDAMs and Tomahawks.

OTOH, when you're equally insane but don't have billions of dollars to piss off on making things go boom, you might start considering extreme but cheap options.

The company's H1B quota in 2009 was significantly affected by the layoffs. It will likely happen again next year.

It will also affect the ability to sponsor green cards.

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics. Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

I've re-read the article, and I couldn't find the part where she's talking about anything like that. Can you cite the relevant part?

Except it requires more wires. 220/240V split phase requires 3 wires.

3-phase generally requires 4.

And unless you really need 3-phase, split phase is easier to deal with - with 3-phase you need to monitor all three phases to ensure they are working (failure of one phase is a common failure mode that requires immediate shutdown of the other two phases lest any dangerous currents develop).

Though, one thing I don't get about this challenge - they're using they want 2kVA output, but then demanding 50W/in^3 with a max size of 40in^3, meaning you have to provide 2000W.

And 2000W can mean providing way more than 2000VA. (The reason we use VA for inverters instead of watts is VA captures virtual power. 2000VA requires just as much power handling components (transformers, transistors, etc) as supplying 2000W at a 1.0PF (i.e., all resistive). Even if you have a really bad power factor and your real power draw is only 1000W - the hardware has to be able to instanteously supply the current and voltage for 2000W at periods in the cycle. The virtual power is virtual, because it's "given back" during another part of the cycle, but that means all the equipment has to handle it.

A lot of electric companies will have a power factor surcharge because of it - if your power factor can't be corrected to within limits, they charge more because they have to install bigger equipment.

The only real saving grace is that the input voltage is 450VDC, so you're really just doing a buck converter.

Not what this guy is saying is wrong, but there are other unaddressed issues. They cover issues like "power savings", but not the much more important issue of buying an unknown piece of hardware from an unknown vendor, without a warranty. Aside from that, sometimes there are issues of physical constraints-- like I have limited space, limited ventilation, and one UPS to supply power. Do I want to buy 5 servers, or one powerful one? ...

And sometimes, buying "new" is more about getting a known quantity with support, rather than wagering on a crap-shoot.

And that is the main reason why people buy new. To get the support contract because they know if the equipment goes down, they can start losing money fast. Sure they can do redundancy and stuff, and they often do, but they generally want both units to be under service contracts so when one fails and the other one is handling the load, the failed one is getting prompt service to minimize the likelihood of complete stoppage should the other fail.

I've seen perfectly functional equipment force-upgraded because the company making them stopped supporting it. Essential equipment like filers and such? They actually see end of complete support 6 months ahead and plan on migration way before the contract expires for good so they can revert to hardware still under support.

Running old servers is perfectly fine, especially for home use where the user can benefit from the low cost of what was very expensive equipment a few years ago. But until those companies are willing to provide support in case of failure that's better than "here's a spare, fix it yourself", well, there are very valid reasons to go with new. Even if new is barely an upgrade from the old.

hi mr thinly-sliced, thank you this is awesome advice, really really appreciated.

Maybe it should. Providing an API and saying "it kinda work like this, most of the time, your mileage may vary" doesn't sound very good.

That already exists already - many formats specify practically subpixel accurate designs. E.g., PDF.

The thing is, HTML was never designed that way - it's a content-plus-format standard that says the content is marked up, and to provide some hints as to how to display it as the creator intended. But the user is free to override such choices as they see fit in case they don't have certain fonts, have display limitations, etc.

It's why ebooks generally use a limited form of HTML internally, and why most ebook readers display PDFs crappily. The reader wants to reformat the text to fit its screen better, but PDF isn't designed for that - it's design so one document can be displayed identically wherever you view it regardless of if the use has a font, has a 300/600/900/100 dpi printer, prints on A4 or Letter, etc.