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A news story about a potato-powered server sounded so credible it fooled the experts.
A remarkable story featured by many prominent news sources including the
German arm of ZDNet, Ananova and our very own BBC, was found to be a hoax yesterday.
The clever tricksters who called themselves 'The Temple ov thee Lemur'
now
reckon that they built the system as a bet. Pages written about the
potato-powered server were located here. The
technical specs of the system consisted of around 12 potatoes (changed
every
couple of days), a cannibalised 386 processor with very low power
consumption, 2MB of memory, 2MB of ROM with the Web pages and server
software (customised by the group) burned in, and ROM on a network card
for
booting. This system was claimed to be running the pages that you can
view
here. As there are no moving parts in the
machine
power consumption was thought to be very low.
It seems that because everyone knows that you can create a bit of
current
from organic sources, many writers thought that the story was credible.
It just goes to show how powerful the Web is as a marketing tool. One of
the
members of The Temple ov thee Lemur, Steve Harris, was quoted as saying
"We
considered using hamster wheels but we think that would probably be
cruel to
hamsters. They are probably unreliable, too ? you would need loads of
hamsters to make sure you always had power." Someone should have seen
that
this was a hoax, with a comment like this.
26th May 2000
Tony Browne
Features Writer, PC Plus
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