* Posts by Pallas Athena

15 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2013

Worldpay outs self as provider of easy-to-crack payment services

Pallas Athena

If you think that upgrading or replacing those devices is costly, just wait until someone empties your bank-account through this vulnerability.

Did you bet the farm on Amazon's cloud? Time to wean yourself off

Pallas Athena
FAIL

Dual-provider for failover?

If you have, like the author suggests in this article, your compute nodes on AWS and your storage on Google, there is a BIG chance - in fact, almost a certainty - that such setup will not guard you against any failure. In fact, it's even worse: you will experience a outage whenever _one of the two_ has problems.

Oil & gas? Pah. We’ve got a MASSIVE 3D printer, beams Dubai

Pallas Athena

First??

Can someone explain to me how Dubai could print "the world’s first fully functional 3D printed building" if tens of buildings around the world are printed or are printing right now? Unless they pretend the world ends at their borders, of course.

Tesla's battery put in the shade by current and cheaper kit

Pallas Athena
FAIL

Re: Back of an envelope calculations

One Powerwall weighs about 100 kg. The solar panels on my roof produce during summer on average 14 kWh a day, with best days bringing in over 22 kWh. Meaning at least 3 Powerwalls of 7.5 kWh, or 300 kg _hanging on the wall_. A house where that kind of weight on a wall is not a problem, will quite likely not risk structural integrity because of a couple of lead batteries reasonably placed on the floor.

Pallas Athena

50 load cycles a year??? Forget about price, forget about the 2kW max output. If this battery is supposed to store solar-energy during the day, and provide off-the-grid power at night (that's the way it was announced), then 365 load cycles a year would be required. Even an on-the-grid scenario where you only want to smooth out the peaks, in a location with lots of dark winter days, easily could require 200 load cycles a year - meaning you'd have to buy four times the capacity!

Linux clockpocalypse in 2038 is looming and there's no 'serious plan'

Pallas Athena

Re: Too late!

You make a critical error - you're talking about things that you own, personally. And indeed, very few people will own in 2038 something that has already been manufactured today. Cars have been mentioned - but very few passenger cars live to their 23th birthday (trucks, buses, ... that's another story). However, control systems in pipelines, chemical plants, power plants, ... - stuff that you or me will never own - do have livespans in the decades.

Is cloud the answer to all your storage problems?

Pallas Athena
Holmes

"is X the answer to all Y problems" - for all X and all Y, the answer is no.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Pallas Athena
Devil

Hardware

"Microsoft obviously reckons PCs running Windows 7 and Windows 8.x have already got what they need to make Windows 10 work."

Could it be just the opposite? Hey, look, a free upgrade, let's install it. Oh - there is no roll back possible. Oh - now my computer is sssslllllloooowwww, guess I'll have to buy a new one - with a new paid OEM license...

Fix capitalism with floating cities on Venus says Charles Stross

Pallas Athena

Solution for what?

This guy seems to think that spending a lot of money on high-tech space exploration would somehow trickle down money from the very rich to the middle classes and the poor. Sorry to break it to you - but such big risky projects are ALWAYS government projects, as no sane investor wants to invest in something that might eventually turn in a profit long after he is dead. So it's not the very rich, but the tax-paying middle class whose money is spent. And the money is going to top-grade engineers and high-tech companies. How is this achieving any of the stated goals?

HELLO LENOVO. Do you really, really want to make smartphones?

Pallas Athena

Stock android from Lenovo? Could be. On the other hand - I recently bought a Lenovo android tablet. And while customization doesn't go quite as deep as with Samsung tablets, it is not stock Android. Will they do differently for their phones?

My other supercomputer is a Lenovo: What IBM System x sale means for HPC

Pallas Athena

Fiction

That's of course assuming that Lenovo would have won all the contracts that IBM won. My guess is, the next time the US DoD is in the market for a new supercomputer, they will not buy a 'chinese' Lenovo supercomputer, but they might buy a home-brew combination created by systems integrator IBM from IBM blue gene systems and Lenovo x86 systems - and that computer will still be listed as an IBM supercomputer.

We can't go on like this for much longer, boffins cry to data centre designers

Pallas Athena

Haven't we seen that?

A large, rack-size computer with lots of processing power, lots of memory and lots of networking capacity all build in - kind of like ... a mainframe?

Psst.. Wanna Android all-in-one PC? We have the chip tech, says Intel

Pallas Athena

From the viewpoint of the manufacturers, the problem is that consumers don't buy quickly enough new displays, so adding some fast-aging technology is a great idea - for them.

NSA to world+dog: We're only watching 1.6% of internet, honest

Pallas Athena

Only terrorists???

Nice to know they select 'foreign entities which might be of interest'. With of course terrorists as example. And so it goes on - NSA is fighting the terrorists, for your safety, what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong. It has already been revealed that the European Community, and especially it's trade policy, is very high on the NSA watch list. Yes, their trade policies could harm "US interests" - their economic interests, that is. Whatever bad you can say about the EC, terrorists they aren't. And that is only one example that has been revealed - who knows who else is on the watch list?

Wow! British Gas bungs a million remote-controlled sales-droids in UK homes

Pallas Athena
Go

Re: Costs hidden...

Truth is, it is perfectly possible to see which appliances cost you the most money - a simple device of a couple of euro's will tell you exactly how much your dryer has cost you the past few days/weeks. And of course, you can write down daily or weekly your meter readings. No smart meter needed, and no need to wait for the bill. More important - your smart meter will NOT help you identify which appliance cost you. It may -will- tell you your daily consumption, but it doesn't tell you why you consumed 2 kWh more yesterday than the day before. Correlating that consumption to particular devices boils down to guesswork, nothing more.