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Comment Re:UPS (Score 1) 236

You have to be careful about what you buy in the cheap end of uninterruptable power supplies. In the really cheap ones you're only getting an offline/standby UPS, which offers you protection no better than a surge protector. In an offline/standby UPS your PC is still taking the over/undervoltage hit inside the transfer window because a standby UPS delivers mains electricity until it switches to battery. When the mains supply drops bellow a certain threshold the UPS switches the device side over to the DC-AC converter and you lose 25ms power while that happens.

If you want to protect from small over/undervoltage you need at least a line interactive UPS, that type buffers the mains power through an auto transformer.
If you have really dirty power or need actual mains isolation you need an (expensive) online/double conversion UPS where your device side power is always running off the inverter.

A lot of cheap UPS will simply fail under consistently dirty power. I used to do IT at an industrial facility (steel processing plant) we had building wide power conditioners and still had problems. The basic standby UPSs that the previous IT guy bought would eat their batteries in 6months from all of the over/under voltage events. I ended up switching all of the servers to a nice double conversion UPS and putting line interactive UPSs on the workstations.

I believe most if not all of the current APC gear is line interactive

Also a lot of people think they can simply plug their UPS into a home depot gasoline generator and weather out a big power failure. This is not necessarily a good idea as the sine wave of the generator output probably isn't that clean and your UPS may not even transfer power to it.

I have also seen two catastrophic power surges so far, both were substation failures that resulted in massive power surges. The first took out all of the pro grade UPS (I think they were triplite), slagged the batteries, spark gapped across the protection and fried the entire datacenter, halon system activated fire crews dispatched, UPS vendor payed out on the protection policy that came with the gear and the ISP owner took the money and promptly went out of business (2001ish). The second was at a carrier facility, the protection circuit made the sacrifice saving the gear and batteries but took the transfer system with it, primary power went out, the FM200 system activated, 2 hours for the utility to reroute power, and another 4 hours for the carrier to bypass the failed UPS.

I run an APC line interactive UPS at home, I have daily power sags but it never misses a beat.

Power

Japan Plans $21B Space Power Plant 550

Mike writes "Japan has announced plans to send a $21 billion solar power generator into space that will be capable of producing one gigawatt of energy, or enough to power 294,000 homes. The project recently received support from Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp, who are now teaming up in the race to develop new technology within four years that can beam electricity back to Earth without the use of cables. Japan hopes to test a small solar satellite decked out with solar panels by the year 2015."
Security

Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec 685

An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"

Comment Re:Nokia n810 (Score 1) 426

Agreed, I just bought an N810 a few weeks ago. I wanted a wifi device to bring with me when I travel through France this May for twitter, email, photo uploads, and possibly a skype/SIP call or two. It ships with an app for the Boingo wireless service installed, it's US$7.95/mo and gives you access to Starbucks/McDonalds wifi in the states and bunch more in Europe. I got my N810 for US$250 with tax, shipped. I like the keys on my Blackberry better, but the touch screen is great, handwriting recognition seems good but I haven't taken the time to train it. The screen/picture looks great. It says it will only support an 8GB SDHC MiniSD card so thats what I picked up, recognized it right away. It runs linux and uses apt for package management.

Bottom line, the touch screen works great for basic browsing and bookmarked browsing. It uses the MicroB browser (mozilla) and has Adobe Flash support. The slide out keyboard is really nice, but doesn't have a number row. It seems to have better wifi reception than my first gen MacBookPro. The N810 is a little on the heavy side and is thick/heavy compared to the current generation iPhone.

Australia's Technological World Cup Advantage 343

hotsauce writes "The BBC has a piece about how Australia is using software to gain an advantage in the World Cup. The Socceroos are running software that looks for patterns in attacks of the opposing team. It also shows the effectiveness of different response strategies by recording where attacks fail when countered. This is the first time Australia has reached the World Cup in 30 years, but a real test of the technology will come today when Australia must take on five-time and current world champions Brasil. The Socceroos talk about specific strategies for that game, also."

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