Energy extraction is, certainly, a dirty business at the best of times; but BP has among the worst records in the industry(at least by the standards of outfits that have operations in US jurisdictions).
Given that they've been at the "warmer, fuzzier, more baby-seal-loving, oil company" PR game for something like a decade now(I'm guessing that they might be doing a little less advertising in National Geographic in the near future; but they were all over the place with their "Beyond Petroleum" spin) I'd assume that they have an entrenched internal culture that is convinced of exactly that.
Given the public's relatively short attention span, and the fervor of the ostensibly-libertarian-but-basically-authoritarian-corporatist wing, which blithely asserts that any state interference in the sovereign right of corporations to do whatever the fuck they want, or even say mean things when the inevitable consequences occur, is socialist fascism; they may well be correct.
Be aware, though, that(contrary to expectations developed in using PCs, including the OSX-running ones), iPad VGA out doesn't just automatically mirror the internal screen. Support is per-application, and at the application developer's sole discretion. Oh the sob stories from people planning to use the netflix app on a large screen...
I also use UNR on a netbook; but I don't think I'd use it on a tablet.
Essentially, UNR is largely identical to desktop Ubuntu's take on Gnome(theme, default programs, etc.); but with a launcher and windowing defaults that make more sense on fairly low resolution screens. In my opinion, it does that reasonably well. However, the moment you actually hit any of the application buttons, you are right back in a (full screen) version of a standard desktop application.
Experience has generally shown that desktop applications are fairly unpleasant for tablet use. Not impossible; but unpleasant. They tend to assume input at mouse-resolution, rather than capacitive-fingerpaint resolution, they tend to assume that keystrokes are highly efficient shortcuts, rather than necessary evils, and so forth. There are certain places where touch inputs make very useful adjuncts to the mouse and keyboard for desktop use. Most notably, your Wacom style touch devices, with their sensitivity to fine gradations in pressure, are quite good, even essential, for drawing. The low-end touchscreen stuff, often IR edge sensor based, available in a fair number of all-in-one desktops(HP seems to have started the fad, though others are doing it as well) isn't vital to much of anything; but you don't pay much extra for it, and being able to click on something by poking the screen isn't a bad thing, and can be useful for casual demoing purposes.
For the purposes of smallish, keyboardless tablets, though, my money would be on Android, with its cellphone history, rather than UNR, which is basically a nice way of launching and window-managing desktop apps on small screens. For anything with a keyboard and a reasonably conventional pointing device, though, Android would seem more like a stunt than like a serious choice(with the possible exception of further development of the interesting demos that have been done of running Android applications as widgets on desktop Linux OSes).
It's a terrible plan; but putting the heavy stuff in the basement makes life easier(unless your building was purpose-built, or you have serious renovation funds, putting thousands of pounds of UPSes on one of the upper floors isn't always one of your choices). And, more generally, there seems to be this perverse part of human nature that clings to the atavistic belief that stuff you don't have to look at isn't an issue. We put the ugly, heavy, parts of the system in the basement, we bury dangerous chemical wastes(where it is virtually impossible to inspect them for leakage, and all leakage goes directly to the water table) rather than putting them on the second floor(where discovering leaks is as easy as walking through the first floor)...
In principle? Sure. In practice, it would be unlikely to be economic. Your basic copper displayport connection is only specced for a 15 meter run, less if you need full bandwidth. Fiber is supported, for longer runs; but the price sheet for that is, as they say, Not In Kansas Anymore... Combine this with the fact that displayport monitors tend to command a modest premium over your basic VGA/DVI jobbies, and you end up in a situation where you would actually save money by buying 12 all-in-one PCs(or, if you don't mind small screens, a batch of the upcoming android tablets, or some higher-end digiframe that somebody has hacked linux onto), and just having them grab the pictures over a wireless network.
Unless you have a rather small house, and don't mind running wires, you'll definitely spend more on displayport cable extenders than you will on all that redundant computing power. Economies of scale...
Not usefully. Since Displayport is designed as a video interconnect, it is largely uni-directional(not entirely, but the bi-directional aux channel is 1Mb/s in 1.1 and 720Mb/s in 1.2, while the uni-directional graphics channels are up to 8.64 Gb/s or 17.28Gb/s respectively).
Displayport framegrabbers, which would allow a PC to receive the displayport signal(so you could implement a full duplex interconnect by having 1 video card and 1 grabber in each PC, and running two cables), do exist; but they are very pricey specialty hardware, mostly designed for testing purposes.
You might be able to do something with just the aux channel; but GigE would be both faster and cheaper.
Apparently, the really classy setups(in addition to just having decently rigid mounting hardware) will allow the images to overlap slightly, and then, using feedback provided by one or more cameras, tweak the brightness and color balance of each output until the whole image looks good.
In terms of number of outputs, Matrox has indeed been doing it for years. The difference is that their gear tends to be fairly expensive(particularly when you consider its brutally tepid performance) niche stuff. According to their price sheet, their 8-head will run you $2K. Their cheapest quad-head is $330. And these are for display controllers that are basically suited for 2D applications.
By contrast, the ATI stuff, with vastly superior GPU peformance, and typically more RAM, is cheaper. 5-heads will run you $220. 6 will run about $500; because you can't seem to get 6 without a 5870, which isn't a cheap chip.
This 12-head monster, since it is probably a relatively short-run enthusiast catcher, may well land in the ~$1000-~$1500 zone; but that will still make it cheaper, faster, and with more heads and RAM than the Matrox equivalent.
Not really arbitrary: Historically, with analog outputs, you needed one RAMDAC, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. For cost reasons, one or two RAMDACs got folded pretty quickly into common display controller chipsets, just to save on the number of packages on the card. This area was where the massive economies of scale lived. If you didn't mind paying more, people like Matrox have always been willing to sell you cards with more heads.
With the newer digital interconnects, you need a TMDS out, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. Again, deviating from the mass-market-friendly 1 or 2 outs configuration has always been possible; but pricey.
The only really novel aspect of this ATI "Eyefinity" stuff is that ATI decided to crank up the number of outputs supported, by default, right in their silicon, so sharply and thus brought lots and lots of heads into the realm of "commodity gamer cards" rather than "underperforming, yet strikingly expensive, niche cards".
As you note, the logic behind some sort of networked control for power stuff is more or less impeccable.
On the other hand, given that any part of the power grid is part of the power grid because somebody laid big fat power cables between it and something else, one suspects that a matching data network could be added(at least whenever a line is replaced/upgraded/added) for relatively low cost. My understanding is that, already, a nontrivial amount of "power line" actually includes a strand or strands of fiber, which is sensible enough, given that the additional cost of including a few fiber strands is pretty low, if you are already running a big, fat, weatherproof cable.
It wouldn't surprise me if a number of the links between SCADA systems and the public internet are for basically stupid reasons(No, you don't actually need to be able to check your email and access your GridAdmin(tm) console on the same computer... It won't kill you to deal with having two, on physically distinct networks).
The convenient thing about "cyberwar" as a slogan is how it allows you to extend the notions of "wartime" into virtually every nook and cranny of life and infrastructure.
The term "cyberwar" quietly implies that virtually any net-connected system is a potential or actual combatant. From here, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to applying military/wartime standards for such niceties as atttacking systems, or requisitioning access. Even better, since "cyberwar" is, for suitably nebulous definitions, something that occurs pretty much constantly, among a wide variety of state and nonestate actors, with various levels of covertness, the mandate covers basically everybody, everywhere, and is of unlimited duration(See also: "Global war on terror").
Who needs bullshit like "warrants" or "due process" when any computer system can simply be declared to be an "enemy combatant" or "materially supporting an enemy combatant"? If you think the notion of charging an object in order to avoid procedural restrictions is absurd, be aware that it is already standard practice in the context of "asset forfeiture". (which makes for some rather ridiculous case names...)
For just $10,000 in unmarked and nonsequential bills, Vinnie "the kneecap" is willing to venture a prediction as to when any particular team is going to drop out.
"When yous got a problem, pick Vinnie. We don't predict; we Promise."
Perhaps I am underestimating the public's perverse acceptance of broad criminalization of all kinds of stuff; but I find it hard to believe that any scheme where Joe Public could find himself paying serious fines or doing serious time just for plugging in a commercially available computer and running normal software would possibly be adopted.
I'd be delighted if there were something that caused people to wipe their flyblown zombie-boxes more often than they do now; but essentially criminalizing getting compromised seems cruel and ineffective when it is so easy to do and sometimes so hard to detect. You don't have to be "negligent", in any useful sense of the term, to get hit.
The basic problem with DDoSes is that anyone who isn't a moron(ie. the teenage punks who get caught), is generally working from behind multiple layers of indirection and usually across a number of jurisdictions. What they are doing is probably illegal in all of them; but the degree to which the authorities care, or are on the ball enough to do anything about it can be pretty limited.
It doesn't help that a lot of the DDoS victims are either clueless and irrelevant(Yup, the feds don't really care about dialup users getting ping-flooded on IRC), widely considered to be a little shady themselves(*Call to the FBI* "Hi guys, I run this offshore gambling site in Antigua, and I've been having some problems with DDoS attacks that are really cutting in to my ability to serve American customers during peak sporting-event times...." *click*), or are parties in some sort of nationalist pissing match, of the sort where many "patriotic excesses" have a tendency to be overlooked(Yeah, I'm sure the Russian authorities are working night and day to bring to justice anybody involved in atttacks against Estonia...)
While, as a matter of law, DDoSing is hard to do legally, even in fairly shady areas(if nothing else, your botnet likely implies a fair number of computer-intrusion crimes in jurisdictions where that is an offense, and it is unlikely at best that you are properly reporting and paying taxes on the "protection" money that you are collecting). However, with the complexity of cross-jurisdiction investigation and prosecution, and without the massive public antipathy that something like kiddie porn has, the odds of actually getting brought to justice are fairly low, unless you are basically just a petty vandal, hitting some high-profile target in the same country as you.
As does its feature set. In your standard corporate/institutional environment, you don't need stealthy install techniques, since IT already has mechanisms in place for rolling out whatever software is needed; and you don't need any sophisticated AV-dodging techniques, since AV is typically centrally managed, and IT can whitelist whatever they want.
At best, this stuff is being used in interpersonally-touchy-but-legal ways(ugly roommate situations, spying on the kiddies, spousal paranoia, etc.), and I'm guessing that the sliminess of the customer base just increases from there.
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While we are talking about putting that value in perspective, 1.5 trillion is just over 10% of the US GDP in 2008.
The idea that Limewire somehow owes damages equivalent to 1/10th of an entire year's output of the economy of the United States boggles the mind.
Energy extraction is, certainly, a dirty business at the best of times; but BP has among the worst records in the industry(at least by the standards of outfits that have operations in US jurisdictions).
Hey, be fair! They didn't leave their pumps unattended. 11 of the attendees died.
Given that they've been at the "warmer, fuzzier, more baby-seal-loving, oil company" PR game for something like a decade now(I'm guessing that they might be doing a little less advertising in National Geographic in the near future; but they were all over the place with their "Beyond Petroleum" spin) I'd assume that they have an entrenched internal culture that is convinced of exactly that.
Given the public's relatively short attention span, and the fervor of the ostensibly-libertarian-but-basically-authoritarian-corporatist wing, which blithely asserts that any state interference in the sovereign right of corporations to do whatever the fuck they want, or even say mean things when the inevitable consequences occur, is socialist fascism; they may well be correct.
You know what would be the perfect "abuse of authority/prison-industrial complex" scandal story?
Using inmates at an internet-addiction boot camp as slave labor for your WoW gold-farming business...
Achievement Unlocked: "Prison Break"!
Be aware, though, that(contrary to expectations developed in using PCs, including the OSX-running ones), iPad VGA out doesn't just automatically mirror the internal screen. Support is per-application, and at the application developer's sole discretion. Oh the sob stories from people planning to use the netflix app on a large screen...
I also use UNR on a netbook; but I don't think I'd use it on a tablet.
Essentially, UNR is largely identical to desktop Ubuntu's take on Gnome(theme, default programs, etc.); but with a launcher and windowing defaults that make more sense on fairly low resolution screens. In my opinion, it does that reasonably well. However, the moment you actually hit any of the application buttons, you are right back in a (full screen) version of a standard desktop application.
Experience has generally shown that desktop applications are fairly unpleasant for tablet use. Not impossible; but unpleasant. They tend to assume input at mouse-resolution, rather than capacitive-fingerpaint resolution, they tend to assume that keystrokes are highly efficient shortcuts, rather than necessary evils, and so forth. There are certain places where touch inputs make very useful adjuncts to the mouse and keyboard for desktop use. Most notably, your Wacom style touch devices, with their sensitivity to fine gradations in pressure, are quite good, even essential, for drawing. The low-end touchscreen stuff, often IR edge sensor based, available in a fair number of all-in-one desktops(HP seems to have started the fad, though others are doing it as well) isn't vital to much of anything; but you don't pay much extra for it, and being able to click on something by poking the screen isn't a bad thing, and can be useful for casual demoing purposes.
For the purposes of smallish, keyboardless tablets, though, my money would be on Android, with its cellphone history, rather than UNR, which is basically a nice way of launching and window-managing desktop apps on small screens. For anything with a keyboard and a reasonably conventional pointing device, though, Android would seem more like a stunt than like a serious choice(with the possible exception of further development of the interesting demos that have been done of running Android applications as widgets on desktop Linux OSes).
Unfortunately "other Texas style vermin" likely includes fire ants. Those bastards are mean, and attracted to electrical hardware...
It's a terrible plan; but putting the heavy stuff in the basement makes life easier(unless your building was purpose-built, or you have serious renovation funds, putting thousands of pounds of UPSes on one of the upper floors isn't always one of your choices). And, more generally, there seems to be this perverse part of human nature that clings to the atavistic belief that stuff you don't have to look at isn't an issue. We put the ugly, heavy, parts of the system in the basement, we bury dangerous chemical wastes(where it is virtually impossible to inspect them for leakage, and all leakage goes directly to the water table) rather than putting them on the second floor(where discovering leaks is as easy as walking through the first floor)...
At least all the veterans of the fax machine spam campaigns will feel relevant again...
Sponsor religious fundamentalist politicians to push the fertility rate up, and make a new hell-hole?
In principle? Sure. In practice, it would be unlikely to be economic. Your basic copper displayport connection is only specced for a 15 meter run, less if you need full bandwidth. Fiber is supported, for longer runs; but the price sheet for that is, as they say, Not In Kansas Anymore... Combine this with the fact that displayport monitors tend to command a modest premium over your basic VGA/DVI jobbies, and you end up in a situation where you would actually save money by buying 12 all-in-one PCs(or, if you don't mind small screens, a batch of the upcoming android tablets, or some higher-end digiframe that somebody has hacked linux onto), and just having them grab the pictures over a wireless network.
Unless you have a rather small house, and don't mind running wires, you'll definitely spend more on displayport cable extenders than you will on all that redundant computing power. Economies of scale...
Not usefully. Since Displayport is designed as a video interconnect, it is largely uni-directional(not entirely, but the bi-directional aux channel is 1Mb/s in 1.1 and 720Mb/s in 1.2, while the uni-directional graphics channels are up to 8.64 Gb/s or 17.28Gb/s respectively).
Displayport framegrabbers, which would allow a PC to receive the displayport signal(so you could implement a full duplex interconnect by having 1 video card and 1 grabber in each PC, and running two cables), do exist; but they are very pricey specialty hardware, mostly designed for testing purposes.
You might be able to do something with just the aux channel; but GigE would be both faster and cheaper.
Apparently, the really classy setups(in addition to just having decently rigid mounting hardware) will allow the images to overlap slightly, and then, using feedback provided by one or more cameras, tweak the brightness and color balance of each output until the whole image looks good.
In terms of number of outputs, Matrox has indeed been doing it for years. The difference is that their gear tends to be fairly expensive(particularly when you consider its brutally tepid performance) niche stuff. According to their price sheet, their 8-head will run you $2K. Their cheapest quad-head is $330. And these are for display controllers that are basically suited for 2D applications.
By contrast, the ATI stuff, with vastly superior GPU peformance, and typically more RAM, is cheaper. 5-heads will run you $220. 6 will run about $500; because you can't seem to get 6 without a 5870, which isn't a cheap chip.
This 12-head monster, since it is probably a relatively short-run enthusiast catcher, may well land in the ~$1000-~$1500 zone; but that will still make it cheaper, faster, and with more heads and RAM than the Matrox equivalent.
Not really arbitrary: Historically, with analog outputs, you needed one RAMDAC, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. For cost reasons, one or two RAMDACs got folded pretty quickly into common display controller chipsets, just to save on the number of packages on the card. This area was where the massive economies of scale lived. If you didn't mind paying more, people like Matrox have always been willing to sell you cards with more heads.
With the newer digital interconnects, you need a TMDS out, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. Again, deviating from the mass-market-friendly 1 or 2 outs configuration has always been possible; but pricey.
The only really novel aspect of this ATI "Eyefinity" stuff is that ATI decided to crank up the number of outputs supported, by default, right in their silicon, so sharply and thus brought lots and lots of heads into the realm of "commodity gamer cards" rather than "underperforming, yet strikingly expensive, niche cards".
As you note, the logic behind some sort of networked control for power stuff is more or less impeccable.
On the other hand, given that any part of the power grid is part of the power grid because somebody laid big fat power cables between it and something else, one suspects that a matching data network could be added(at least whenever a line is replaced/upgraded/added) for relatively low cost. My understanding is that, already, a nontrivial amount of "power line" actually includes a strand or strands of fiber, which is sensible enough, given that the additional cost of including a few fiber strands is pretty low, if you are already running a big, fat, weatherproof cable.
It wouldn't surprise me if a number of the links between SCADA systems and the public internet are for basically stupid reasons(No, you don't actually need to be able to check your email and access your GridAdmin(tm) console on the same computer... It won't kill you to deal with having two, on physically distinct networks).
The convenient thing about "cyberwar" as a slogan is how it allows you to extend the notions of "wartime" into virtually every nook and cranny of life and infrastructure.
The term "cyberwar" quietly implies that virtually any net-connected system is a potential or actual combatant. From here, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to applying military/wartime standards for such niceties as atttacking systems, or requisitioning access. Even better, since "cyberwar" is, for suitably nebulous definitions, something that occurs pretty much constantly, among a wide variety of state and nonestate actors, with various levels of covertness, the mandate covers basically everybody, everywhere, and is of unlimited duration(See also: "Global war on terror").
Who needs bullshit like "warrants" or "due process" when any computer system can simply be declared to be an "enemy combatant" or "materially supporting an enemy combatant"? If you think the notion of charging an object in order to avoid procedural restrictions is absurd, be aware that it is already standard practice in the context of "asset forfeiture". (which makes for some rather ridiculous case names...)
For just $10,000 in unmarked and nonsequential bills, Vinnie "the kneecap" is willing to venture a prediction as to when any particular team is going to drop out.
"When yous got a problem, pick Vinnie. We don't predict; we Promise."
Perhaps I am underestimating the public's perverse acceptance of broad criminalization of all kinds of stuff; but I find it hard to believe that any scheme where Joe Public could find himself paying serious fines or doing serious time just for plugging in a commercially available computer and running normal software would possibly be adopted.
I'd be delighted if there were something that caused people to wipe their flyblown zombie-boxes more often than they do now; but essentially criminalizing getting compromised seems cruel and ineffective when it is so easy to do and sometimes so hard to detect. You don't have to be "negligent", in any useful sense of the term, to get hit.
I, for one, can't imagine any ways in which mission-creep could cause such an organization to bite us in the ass...
The basic problem with DDoSes is that anyone who isn't a moron(ie. the teenage punks who get caught), is generally working from behind multiple layers of indirection and usually across a number of jurisdictions. What they are doing is probably illegal in all of them; but the degree to which the authorities care, or are on the ball enough to do anything about it can be pretty limited.
It doesn't help that a lot of the DDoS victims are either clueless and irrelevant(Yup, the feds don't really care about dialup users getting ping-flooded on IRC), widely considered to be a little shady themselves(*Call to the FBI* "Hi guys, I run this offshore gambling site in Antigua, and I've been having some problems with DDoS attacks that are really cutting in to my ability to serve American customers during peak sporting-event times...." *click*), or are parties in some sort of nationalist pissing match, of the sort where many "patriotic excesses" have a tendency to be overlooked(Yeah, I'm sure the Russian authorities are working night and day to bring to justice anybody involved in atttacks against Estonia...)
While, as a matter of law, DDoSing is hard to do legally, even in fairly shady areas(if nothing else, your botnet likely implies a fair number of computer-intrusion crimes in jurisdictions where that is an offense, and it is unlikely at best that you are properly reporting and paying taxes on the "protection" money that you are collecting). However, with the complexity of cross-jurisdiction investigation and prosecution, and without the massive public antipathy that something like kiddie porn has, the odds of actually getting brought to justice are fairly low, unless you are basically just a petty vandal, hitting some high-profile target in the same country as you.
"I pity the fool who messes with Mr. Steve."
As does its feature set. In your standard corporate/institutional environment, you don't need stealthy install techniques, since IT already has mechanisms in place for rolling out whatever software is needed; and you don't need any sophisticated AV-dodging techniques, since AV is typically centrally managed, and IT can whitelist whatever they want.
At best, this stuff is being used in interpersonally-touchy-but-legal ways(ugly roommate situations, spying on the kiddies, spousal paranoia, etc.), and I'm guessing that the sliminess of the customer base just increases from there.