   Stealing your megahurts and UPS trouble
  I have 2 unrelated things on my mind. So now you just got 2 clicks for the price of one!!1I've been thinking about those flash ads that somtimes max out your CPU. It rarely happens to me nowadays but on my old pc it would happen a lot. I don't know quite how flash files work, but I know its vector graphics for the most part and thus quite math intensive (and I suppose that is why it uses a lot of CPU power). I also know that it is able to send data back to a central server (eg high score in a flash game). So what if someone made a flash banners whose purpose was not advertising but a form of distributed computing? They would effectively leech the CPU power of anyone that ran the flash file to do whatever computing they wanted and report the result back to their computer. And since most people are used to flash banners using some CPU they wount take notice. You could even buy advertising space on some popular site for this purpose (at a higher risk of being noticed though).But I'm thinking if this was possible I would have heard about it by now, so there must be some technical detail that prevents it. Any thoughts?Allright. The other thing I had on my mind was regarding uninterruptable power supplies. The place where I live has frequent blackouts so I'm using MGE Protection Center 500. My problem is only that it sucks. In the specs they say run time (up to) 30 mins, which in reality means 4 minutes when your computer is idle and about 3-4 seconds when you're playing a game which uses the graphics card. 4 minutes is ok, it gives me time to safely turn off the PC. But 3-4 seconds is ridiculous. Does anyone have experience with UPS that is not extremely expensive and actually is capable of doing what they are supposed to?   
Quote:Original post by Jesper TDoes anyone have experience with UPS that is not extremely expensive and actually is capable of doing what they are supposed to?After my last (6 hour!) power outage, I figured out the best course of action is to switch over to a laptop and use the UPS for internet powering only.  That said, I think it lasted a good 20 minutes or so with my desktop idling?  (Not only idling but...)  It was a "Tripp Lite", one that looked like this.   ;  Sounds like your UPS battery is shot. Did you buy it new? How old is it?   ;  Bought it brand new. Back in may if I remember correctly. However, when you read the specs they dont actually promise 30 minutes battery, they just say "up to". So I figure they might gambling that most people that buy UPS dont actually need it, or very rarely need it, so most people will never notice any problem with it (or might notice it months or years after they bought it). And if/when they do they cant really complain because of the wording in the specs.Edit: When I think about it, an UPS should not be extremely hard to build. A heavy duty car battery should be able to run a computer for at least an hour. Has anyone tried that?   ;  The biggest reason to use a UPS is the additional system protection it offers. Rarely is the power you get on your down line anything like what the specs says it is, and this random voltage level can cause some serious damage to a system. Under voltages can be just as harmful to your system as over voltages, and a common surge protector doesn't do squat against under voltage.Building your own isn't really feasible if you want any real protection for your system. A secondary battery source to run your system when the power goes out is more than easy enough, but you better have an engineering degree if you expect to build something that compares to a high end APC model for any less than they're selling them to you.I have one of the lower end models from APC, which on the box gives about 30 minutes backup, but I'm lucky if I get 5 minutes. It does however protect me from minor bumps that before would have rebooted my system.Of course, if you really want to do things 'right', then you should take your hardware off the grid completely, and always have it running on redundant generation systems.   ;  3s is totally useless. If your PC doesn't exceed some conditions they placed, you can demand a refund or replacement surely? If they say "it's only games" you could do some tests - kill the mains power while doing a big C++ compile or some 3D rendering.;Quote:Original post by Jesper TI've been thinking about those flash ads that somtimes max out your CPU. It rarely happens to me nowadays but on my old pc it would happen a lot. I don't know quite how flash files work, but I know its vector graphics for the most part and thus quite math intensive (and I suppose that is why it uses a lot of CPU power). I also know that it is able to send data back to a central server (eg high score in a flash game). So what if someone made a flash banners whose purpose was not advertising but a form of distributed computing? They would effectively leech the CPU power of anyone that ran the flash file to do whatever computing they wanted and report the result back to their computer. And since most people are used to flash banners using some CPU they wount take notice. You could even buy advertising space on some popular site for this purpose (at a higher risk of being noticed though).But I'm thinking if this was possible I would have heard about it by now, so there must be some technical detail that prevents it. Any thoughts?completely possible. I'm actually working on a framework between AS3 and C# for games. Depending on what you want to process it would work very well. So yeah having all the flash clients connect to a server and process data is very possible.;Quote:Original post by SirisianQuote:Original post by Jesper TI've been thinking about those flash ads that somtimes max out your CPU. It rarely happens to me nowadays but on my old pc it would happen a lot. I don't know quite how flash files work, but I know its vector graphics for the most part and thus quite math intensive (and I suppose that is why it uses a lot of CPU power). I also know that it is able to send data back to a central server (eg high score in a flash game). So what if someone made a flash banners whose purpose was not advertising but a form of distributed computing? They would effectively leech the CPU power of anyone that ran the flash file to do whatever computing they wanted and report the result back to their computer. And since most people are used to flash banners using some CPU they wount take notice. You could even buy advertising space on some popular site for this purpose (at a higher risk of being noticed though).But I'm thinking if this was possible I would have heard about it by now, so there must be some technical detail that prevents it. Any thoughts?completely possible. I'm actually working on a framework between AS3 and C# for games. Depending on what you want to process it would work very well. So yeah having all the flash clients connect to a server and process data is very possible.But in reality it's probably not great for distributed computing. Typically that would require the app to download some data to work on, and it would send back the results on each unit. But a Flash banner ad doesn't stay on your screen very long... distributed computing that works by stealing the odd few seconds at a time could struggle to be productive. Plus, AS3 isn't an amazingly quick language for pure computation. Taking both factors into consideration, one fast PC running the analyser in C++/Java might end up more productive than you'd ever get.;Quote:Original post by Sirisiancompletely possible. I'm actually working on a framework between AS3 and C# for games. Depending on what you want to process it would work very well. So yeah having all the flash clients connect to a server and process data is very possible.Interesting. It raises the question: What is more expensive, ad space or computing power? And of course you wouldn't need more than a 1 pixel2 embedded flash app to do this, so basically it would be unnoticable except for its CPU usage.Edit: Some valid points by d000hg. I wonder if it has been tried though. For example by spam bots trying to recognize obfuscated characters to make bogus accounts.   ;Quote:Original post by Jesper TDoes anyone have experience with UPS that is not extremely expensive and actually is capable of doing what they are supposed to?I have this one at home (the European 1000VA version, which is not on that list). It works very well. Since I live in the middle of nowhere, and the powerlines are around 5000 years old, the UPS gets stressed a lot by short outages, spikes and whatnot. Works exactly as expected. I also monitors itself, and you can check the battery status and run various self-diagnosis procedures from your PC.   