Well there has been some Military implementations of lasers to planes etc. where attempts have been made to target missiles etc. however none very spectacular or portable. Today however I read about something really cool, a somewhat portable laser that was capable of;
1. Cutting a matal pole at 1 km distance
2. Tracking and shooting down several drones at 2 km distance (flying at more than 50 meters per second)
3. Detecting tracking and shooting down a “Falling solid object” 82mm in diameter (mimicing a motar round)
It would appear that “Fire Phasers” will not be restricted to Sci-Fi movies in the future, I am looking forward to owning my own ray-gun 😀
For more information refer to the link below to the press release regarding the Rheinmetall’s HEL weapon.
http://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/media/editor_media/rm_defence/publicrelations/pressemitteilungen/2012_1/2012-12-18_50kw_Laser-Demo_e.pdf
In the good old days you could install SUS on your “home” server and have your own Windows update repository, however after WSUS version “whatnot” the requirements for WSUS has by far outgrown what I wish to allocate on my home/test rig.. Hell I only have 3 machines and a few servers anyhow….
Never the less, when installing new test VM’s etc it would be nice to avoid all the patching since SP1 :-/ well, now you can 🙂
Martin over at Ghacks.net has reviewed an excellent utility that will do JUST that 🙂
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/01/03/windows-offline-update-8-0-released/
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/25/wsus-windows-offline-update-updated/
Further uses is as he describe that you can download all patches for an OS (pt. Win 7 = 1.8GB since SP1) and put it on a stick so you can patch your friends and family’s machines with minimal Internet impact.
For now I have installed the thing and tried downloading patches for Windows 7, it seemed to work flawlessly – but I will try to do some install testing and see how this works out. Looks solid enough though.
Project web site;
If you are working as a sysadmin and are working with Hyper-V you may be eligible for the Altaro’s great Christmas giveaway of 50 free licenses for Altaro’s Oops!Backup.
http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/50-free-pc-backup-licenses-for-all-hyper-v-admins/
All you need to do is to fill out the form (name, email and a screenshot of your Hyper-V manager), you sadly need to use a “company” email but other than that it worked without a glitch and I got my 50 licenses within 1 hour.
Oops!Backup is a basic though fairly full featured backup software solution, it’s aim seem to be end users so it’s very simple to use and setup, but with a bit of tweaking you can configure it somewhat for advanced use also.
I’ll see about creating a small walk through video if I can get myself into gear 😐
A few screenshots;
